Back at the very early onset of the summer holiday, my son (10) and I (41) invited seven of his closest friends to join us for a friendly, high stakes (two unopened boosters for the winner, one for the runner-up! A fortune in the eyes of 10-year-olds), Star Wars Unlimited tournament in our basement.
Yes, I am out there teaching our kids the proper way. Making sure that they understand the value of a handful of hours with your best friends, some snacks, no screens and just being there to have a good time. And yes, as one would imagine, it was an enourmously great day.
But it also got me thinking. As experiences has a tendency to do. For five out of eight, this was their first “real” tournament experience. For the last three, they had some experience from football or badminton tournaments.
It was interesting to see, throughout the three rounds of swiss and a final, that the boys and girl, had clearly different approaches to playing a tournament.
At the beginning, all of them were very focused on the price boosters, and they really wanted to win. Several of them had even almost lost sleep in the week prior to the event, because they had been tinkering with cards and trying to figure out what combination would create the strongest deck, giving them the best chance of winning.
I tried to teach them how the tournament structure of swiss and cut to top-x (in this instance cut to top two) worked, and they seemed to somewhat understand. I was there, of course, as a judge throughout the day, but also to help them have a great time, and understand some of the finer aspects of this kind of tournament. It posed some trouble for several of the players to understand the best-of-three rule and what it exactly meant to play three rounds. Some of them thought that everyone should play against everyone. And of course, most of them had no clue about how much you had to win, to see yourself in the final a couple of hours later.
But one of them (the most competitively trained of them) soon figured it out. After the first round, which he won, he asked if it was even possible to reach the final, if you had lost one best-of-three? It was on purpose that I hadn’t talked about this before, because I didn’t want to discourage them after the first round, but when asked, of course I explained how a tournament structure like this works.
It had different results. Several of the players merely said “OK” and played on, even though they had lost their first round. The one who had asked, was clearly even more determined to win. When he lost his third round, it was very clear that he was done with it all, and just wanted to get it all overwith. Not that he had had a bad day, but the tournament aspect of the day made him just want to finish it. He ended up third and got the random raffle booster I administered between the six players who were not to play the finals.
Besides this there were a couple of players who were just there to have fun with their friends. I had to remind them a couple of times that they were also there to play some Star Wars Unlimited. They ran around, forgot their decks in strange places and were quite focussed on the snacks when they arrived. They had fun and a great time, but I don’t think they would have managed another round, let alone seven rounds…
And then there were a couple of players who were very much there to compete in a tournament setting. It was not necessarily paramount for them to win all their matches, but they had clearly bought in on the premises that this was about playing Star Wars Unlimited – three rounds of best-of-three and when that was done, they were ready to play around with other things. They were focused, they wanted to win (a couple of them even with new brews they just wanted to try out), they wanted to play in a “real” tournament and they were there to enjoy it.
The last type I spotted among the players was a very competitive, almost hyperventilating player, who was so thrilled to play this tournament, that he almost got rude. He had fun, but because he was so hyped, I had to ask him to tone it down a notch a couple of times. He was more or less yelling at the others, when they had trouble comprehending the rules and the cards’ texts (which are in English, which is not something these kids are all that fluent in yet). He was also running around “coaching” other players in their matches (I told him not to…) and being all judgy “now that you have played that card, you cannot unplay it…” and things like that. I was not surprised by this behaviour – I have seen it among grown men and women throughout the years, but I have to admit I was a bit surprised to witness it with this specific kid. I would never have guessed that he was competitive in that manner. And his father later told me that he is never that competitive (and also that he completely collapsed when he got home after the tournament ended and he got back home…).
It is interesting that tournaments sometimes get the best and worst out of people. I found it really funny to witness these small human beings and their interactions in as strange a setting as a card tournament. I learned a lot – both about how we interact generally, about my sons’ friends and about my son.
We all know the Timmy, Johnny and Spike typology set forth by Mark Rosewater some 20 years ago. And even though the above mentioned types of behaviour may seem to fit the typology somewhat, I would argue it is not exactly the same. What I experienced at the small tournament in my basement was specifically tournament behaviour – not necessarily about how to build decks, what they enjoy playing or how they like winning. This was about what they attend a tournament for, and how they view it.
I am mostly a Johnny/Spike most of the time, but when attending tournaments, it does not really matter that much. Other questions are more important than how or how much to win, I am there to have a great time with friends and acquaintances. I am there to play. But playing is more or less an excuse…
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