The genesis of this article goes back to the eve of Worlds in Memphis 2008. Recording interviews with the players during the party at Graceland, home of Elvis, I was approached by a Pro who had an issue or two with some of the things I’d written in this column. As this was someone I consider to be a very interesting human being, I was keen to hear, listen (these two are frequently not interchangeable) and learn from what he had to say. I confess I wasn’t expecting to still be sitting there almost an hour and a half later as my many faults were laid bare.
The thing is, many of his points were valid. Whilst much of that conversation must and should remain private, at the heart of his problem was that I appeared to be highly inconsistent in forming my opinions of players at the Pro level. What system did I use for correctly evaluating a given performance? Was a Top 32 at the Pro Tour comparable to a Top 8 at a Grand Prix? Were first-timers awarded more credit than more experienced campaigners? Did I weight my judgements towards particular Formats? Come to that, did I vary my judgements on a tournament by tournament basis? In other words, did I regard a Grand Prix finish of 23rd out of 853 in Limited in North America to be better or worse than a 9th place out of 1472 in Constructed in Europe, and how was I arriving at those judgements?
As the examples of my eclectic taste mounted up, wider questions began to emerge. You know, the big ones, like:
‘Who is the best player of all time?’
‘Who should be in the Hall of Fame?’
‘Does cheating matter, and what is cheating anyway?’
‘What is the relative strength of Now versus Ago?’
‘How important is consistency over individual appearances?’
‘Do statistics lie, and how badly?’
There were many more, and the fact that it’s taken me almost four months since that conversation before I felt comfortable broaching the subject in print should give you some indication that it’s something I’ve been wrestling with for a significant chunk of time. See, on one level I find it laughable almost to the point of insanity that Pro players would care what I write, or indeed what I think about them as players. As people, I understand they might take more than a passing interest, because nobody wants to be thought of as a bad guy, or accused of being an idiot in print or whatever. But as players? They care what someone with four PTQ wins and two PT appearances thinks about their playskill and ability to win? As I say, I find this head-shakingly odd.
Nonetheless, experience has taught me that the players, or at least many of them, do indeed care how I view their careers, their successes and failures, their topdecks and dodgy sideboarding. Therefore, as I embark upon this review of the early part of the 2009 Player of the Year Race, I’ll attempt to make clear not just what I think, but why I think it. You’re welcome to disagree or disregard as much as you like, as always, but at least if you understand my thought process you can have better reasons for taking or leaving my views.
There’s more to it than that, of course. With each event that I attend, I continue to accumulate data towards an understanding of the Pro game, and in the last three years I’ve been fortunate to witness more Premier event Magic than anyone. Anyone, and that’s a startling thought. With a prevailing wind, some of my observations about the way the Pro world works might just be of benefit to those of you still looking to get your foot in the door, and give you some insight into what it takes to be The Best, whatever that might mean.
With all that said, and there are some lofty goals I’m setting for myself, let’s get stuck in with the prelude to Grand Prix: Los Angeles.
LA was down as the first event of the Pro Season, and for the first time ever there were no diary clashes between the Grand Prix. That meant that a dedicated Pro would never face a choice of where to travel, but could theoretically attend every Premier event on Earth in 2009. For reference, here’s the list:
January 17-18 GP Los Angeles, California Extended
February 21-22 GP Rotterdam, The Netherlands Sealed/Booster Draft
February 27-March 1 PT Kyoto, Japan
March 7-8 GP Chicago, Illinois Legacy
March 14-15 GP Hanover, Germany Extended
March 21-22 GP Singapore Extended
April 18-19 GP Kobe, Japan Extended
May 23-24 GP Barcelona, Spain Standard
May 30-31 GP Seattle, Washington Standard
June 5-7 PT Honolulu, USA
June 13-14 GP Sao Paulo, Brazil Standard
August 1-2 GP Boston, Massachusetts Sealed/Booster Draft
August 8-9 GP Brighton, United Kingdom Sealed/Booster Draft
August 22-23 GP Bangkok, Thailand Sealed/Booster Draft
August 29-30 GP Niigata, Japan Sealed/Booster Draft
September 5-6 GP Prague, Czech Republic Sealed/Booster Draft
October 3-4 GP Kitakyushu, Japan Sealed/Booster Draft
October 10-11 GP Melbourne, Australia Sealed/Booster Draft
October 16-18 PT Austin, USA
October 24-25 GP Tampa, Florida Sealed/Booster Draft
November 7-8 GP Paris, France Sealed/Booster Draft
November 14-15 GP Minneapolis, Minnesota Sealed/Booster Draft
November 19-22 Worlds Rome, Italy
Twenty-three events would decide the title, and to my mind that’s plenty. Any individual tournament can be won, or at least made a decent run at, by almost anyone out of at least 100+ players who are on or around the Tour, and there are always unknowns who make the Top 8 at their first try, or with an outlandish deck and so forth. I’m on record as saying that I don’t believe that The Best and World Champion naturally go hand in hand in Magic, and I’m not sure that many World Champions would disagree. On that weekend, they were fantastic, and the cards fell for them with just the right amount of luck they needed to get over the line. It was their time.
Nobody, I repeat nobody, ever won Player of the Year by ‘accident.’ It is a true test of skill and stickability, covering not only many Formats in terms of Limited versus Constructed, but where each of those Formats shifts multiple times during the course of the Race. Although there are some important caveats, which we’ll come to, I believe that Player of the Year is the ultimate achievement in the game, and to my mind is a handy definition of The Best. The parallels between Magic and Pro tennis are a topic for another time, but let me say here briefly that the analogy of Grand Slams to Pro Tours, regular ATP events to Grand Prix, and the Challenger Series to the PTQ circuit is a good one. Consistency throughout the year is the ultimate measure of a great player.
Although I can’t prove the veracity of this, since I now have the benefit of some measure of hindsight, these are genuinely some of the things that were crowding my mind coming into the 2009 season. Some are obvious and water-cooler conversations around the world, some less so:
How good was/is Luis Scott-Vargas?
Who will be Player of the Year, and can Shuuhei Nakamura repeat?
What is the balance in importance between Grand Prix and Pro Tours?
How important are Byes to Grand Prix success?
Will the very best rise to the actual top, i.e. win events, or will they just be around the top tables?
How many Japanese will continue to travel the world?
How many Pros will have gone to Caribbean islands?
How many Pros will have effectively ‘retired’…?
How many Hall of Famers will we see on the circuit, and will any of them commit to Grand Prix as well as Pro Tours?
What difference is the mixed Formats going to make to the Pro Tours?
What difference will it make that the Pro Tour has been reduced in Rounds?
How can we accurately measure the success or lack thereof of the US?
Ditto the Europeans, ditto the Japanese?
Which countries are emerging as overall forces in the world game?
Which players will emerge as having their life pattern neatly aligned so that they can make an authentic push at the Pro lifestyle this year?
Will I be able to spot the new stars early?
And most pressing of all, will BDM actually make good on his death threats if I continue with my evil collection of jokes?
Plenty of issues then to keep the chattering classes occupied!
Grand Prix: Los Angeles
If ever there was a tournament set up to accommodate an awesome story about LSV, Grand Prix: Los Angeles was it. Already far and away the hottest player in the world game since Pro Tour: Berlin the previous fall, LSV had in many ways managed to upstage the Player of the Year Shuuhei Nakamura, who had a disappointing World Champs and won the POY Race with more of a limp than a swagger. I’ll confess I would have been disappointed if LSV had won POY on the back of a devastating run at the back end of the year, since I believe it’s all round better for the game if a genuine Corinthian of the sport is its public face. I suspect I better explain that, lest anyone thinks I’m digging at LSV, which I’m not.
Off the top of my head, there are three players who comprehensively embody the spirit of Play the Game, See the World. One of them is French (Olivier Ruel) and two are Japanese (Shuuhei Nakamura and Tomaharu Saitou). Although it does no harm that all three are exceptional players, and have done very nicely financially from the game, the fact remains that in one very important respect they are Amateurs rather than Pros, and that Gentleman Amateur status (which is where that rather odd word Corinthian comes in) is basically about a devil-may-care attitude, and treating the whole thing as a glorious adventure. It might end in glorious failure from time to time, but the journey itself and the attached memories are the real prize, not the cash dollars, necessary though those are to continue the lifestyle.
While players like LSV and Paul Cheon, Patrick Chapin and Steve Sadin and so on, have certainly been seen at Grand Prix away from home turf (and it always adds to the excitement when Grand Prix are less parochial and more truly global), there seems to me to be something more straight-forwardly businesslike about their approach. X Pro Points are required for level Y this year, the Format for GP Z is Blah, airfare is $xxx, therefore EV (Expected Value) is Q, therefore I will attend. Quod Erat Demonstrandum, or QED for short. I’ve seen US raiding parties in other games recently, and I’ve seen a similar approach to the global experience, and tentatively I’m going to posit the theory that this is in some way a cultural difference, perhaps in the sense that for supersmart young ambitious US players something more (i.e. more concrete) is required to justify a trip than ‘it’ll be amazing fun, and I might even win’.
Back to the tournament. Having won Berlin, and annihilated the Extended portion of Worlds, albeit fractionally too late to allow a Super Sunday appearance, it’s tempting to say that LSV was the ‘red-hot favourite,’ but of course he wasn’t. Even more so than golf, Magic is a game where the absolute best rarely win. That he did so was eye-opening, suggesting that he really is a cut above much opposition. It isn’t just the win that suggests this. I chatted with Mat Marr at Grand Prix: Hannover, who faced LSV in the semi-finals of LA. Marr, no slouch, said without rancor that he was properly outplayed, and could tell that LSV simply knew more than he did, was thinking about more things than he was, and was further ahead in his understanding of where each game was heading than Marr. As an aside, it bodes well for Marr that he understood that truth, and went away ready to work on his Extended game prior to a potential rematch in Hannover later in the year.
One function of the Byes system is to ensure that for the most part the standings at the end of Day 1 look extremely impressive. With anywhere between four and six rounds to play on the opening day, Pros get to ride their byes to high places in the standings, and it takes a good part of Day 2 before the tiebreaks of the more successful early starters start to catch those with the built-in advantage of ‘100%’ Opponents early in the piece. Effectively, the overall halfway point is rarely halfway for the Pros, and we’d therefore expect a higher concentration at the end of the first day. That said, the Top 16 overnight was truly stacked:
Rank Player Points OMW%
1 Dougherty, Robert R 27 71.11%
2 Stanley, Justin N 27 63.11%
3 Dolbeer, Jed E 25 79.27%
4 Black, Samuel H 25 78.31%
5 Walls, Gabe R 25 66.93%
6 Catterall-Davis, Merlin e 24 81.48%
7 Romão, Carlos E 24 79.55%
8 Hecht, Asher M 24 77.18%
9 Jacob, Michael A 24 74.33% 1
10 Scott-Vargas, Luis D 24 74.07%
11 Herberholz, Mark D 24 71.52%
12 Hague, Matt A 24 71.25% 1
3 Froehlig, Timothy R 24 70.46%
14 Kastner, Donald 24 70.03%
15 Bucher, Manuel 24 69.70%
16 Woods, Jake R 24 69.24%
Hall Of Famer Dougherty had taken time out from a massively busy time professionally — he’s the man at Your Move Games behind the new Trading Card Game ‘Epic’ — to ride All-In Red to the top of the standings. At this point, it’s worth remembering that Path To Exile wasn’t yet available as a rather nasty answer to enormous monsters with horrific card disadvantage built in to the deck design. Four other archetypes were undefeated, featuring Astral Slide, Mind’s Desire, Faeries and Elves. As we’ll discuss when we eventually get as far as Grand Prix: Hannover, I believe that Elves has comprehensively shown itself to be The Best Deck In Extended by any sane measure. Of the five Day 1 undefeateds, Sam Black, recently crowned Team World Champion, had chosen the pointy-eared ones. Former World Champion Carlos Romao would have been in the Top 8 had the tournament been one day, not two, and a 9 10 11 of Jacob, LSV and Herberholz might well have given Messrs. Stanley, Dolbeer and Catterall-Davis sleepless nights.
Just as important as the pace-setters were those not making Day 2, as that would directly impact the POY Race. The three biggest casualties in that regard were the two Japanese Nakamura and Saitou, and Frenchman Guillaume Wafo-Tapa. Whilst the Japanese had lost their historic third wheel to the travelling trio Kenji Tsumura, busy in Japan with studies, the last two Players of the Year had both committed to a full-scale assault at retaining, or retaking, their crown. Wafo-Tapa was more of a surprise to see in the starting line-up.
I was disappointed in his attitude towards the Race in 2007, when he was in position to make a tilt at the title coming down the home stretch, and instead elected to put his feet up and stretch at home, rather than making the commitment to an attempt at history. I accept that history doesn’t swell bank accounts, but still felt his wilful concession to Olivier Ruel at Grand Prix: Krakow reflected poorly on the game as a whole, regardless of the honor of his intentions of helping a friend. After a Pro Tour win in 2007 (Yokohama) and a Top 8 start to the 2008 Race (Pro Tour: Kuala Lumpur), 2008 had been a frustrating campaign, and he came to LA looking to kickstart the year with a decent finish in a Constructed Format. Like Saitou and Nakamura he left empty-handed on 18 Points, with 21 the official cut-off for Day 2. Further down the field, Ben Rubin came as a new-found Hall Of Famer but ended on 16 points. Gadiel Szleifer and Gerard Fabiano were among those with a couple of wins, while Patrick Chapin, David Irvine, Steve Sadin, Josh Ravitz and Ben Lundquist only got a solitary win each, which still outdid US Worlds team alternate Marsh Usary who left winless.
After fifteen rounds, only one of the overnight Top 8 made it to the real thing, Asher Hecht.
Rank Player Points OMW%
1 Jacob, Michael A 39 72.2120%
2 Hendrix, Carl P 39 66.9388%
3 Scott-Vargas, Luis D 38 71.9801%
4 Alvarado, Saul C 38 66.1883%
5 Herberholz, Mark D 37 71.6898%
6 Hecht, Asher M 37 71.2668%
7 Marr, Mat 37 62.8805%
8 Piazza, Brett C 36 71.1966%
This was a decent line-up, with three powerhouse names in Jacob, Herberholz, and of course LSV. Falling just shy of the elimination rounds were Gavin Verhey, Carolos Romao and Manuel Bucher, while a slew of quality populated the Top 32, with Martin Juza 17th, Sam Black 18th, Gabe Walls 19th, Adam Yurchick 20th, Rob Dougherty falling to 22nd and Seth Manfield in 30th. Among those who got to the second day but couldn’t generate Pro Points for the race were Brian Kibler, Rashad Miller, Brian Kowal, Owen Turtenwald, Jamie Parke and Gerry Thompson, who finished in the nasty position of 65th. Tedious.
In the Quarters, Piazza’s Affinity dispatched Jacob’s Loam, Alvarado took Next Level Blue past Herberholz with Faeries, Mat Marr ensured Faeries a place in the Semis by defeating Carl Hendrix with Affinity, and in the all-TEPS matchup LSV couldn’t be beaten by Hecht. As we know, Marr was no match for LSV in the Semis, and the blistering Affinity piloted by Piazza took him past Alvarado, but not past LSV in the Final. Even assuming an edge as huge as 2 to 1 in every matchup (utilising a combination of deck matchup and relative player skill), the odds of a particular player winning a Top 8 are still a little less than a third (2/3 x 2/3 x 2/3), so statistically at least LSV’s win was unusual. As we’ll see when we discuss Pro Tour: Kyoto next time, there was a lot more going on than just stats behind the ‘LSV is the new number three all-time’ bandwagon.
Last year, heading into Pro Tour: Berlin, you needed binoculars to see far enough down the Player of the Year Race to find LSV. The winner of the first event of the 2008 season was Shuuhei Nakamura, and he winded up champion. Although too early to call by at least twenty-one and a half events, LSV’s win had much the same air about it, and a collective raised eyebrows from rivals who knew that 10 Pro Points in the bag were going to be a major obstacle if they wanted the title for themselves.
Until next week, as our journey picks up speed towards the first PT…
As ever, thanks for reading.
R.