PT FF Postmortem
I made this note to myself while in the Vegas testing house this past June.
“Busy busy week. Hard to do both job and PT prep. Had to come at the sacrifice of a bit of work, and a bit of money, and a bit of communication, and a bit of self-care.”
Over the past year and a half of playing on the Pro Tour, I have realized I don’t play Magic for the money. Freerolling feels good, and winning feels good, but it’s the status game - for prestige - that I like succeeding in the most. Relatedly, the social network that comes alongside the PT is very intertwined in this game (sometimes unhealthily, perhaps). This post is a self-reflection about what I am getting and what I want to get out of travel, Magic, and my focus.
I had a moment walking across the floor where I realized more acutely than before that I do not play Magic for the money. Of couse, on some level most of us (pro magic players) know this. But it is a comfortable illusion that I am here to win money. Framing Magic as a money making scheme with a clear fitness objective - maximize EV - gives it a straightforward, autitistically simplistic endpoint that circumvents the more complicated question - if we aren’t playing for money, why are we investing all of this time and effort? It’s easier to stay within the framework we have made for ourselves - how do we maximize money and winning inside Magic - than it is to leave the framework and ask this more daunting, introspective type of question. This is the type of question that can lead one to make drastically different choices with the way one spends one’s time in the future. Or, it can conversely lead one to self-acceptance of what they are actually getting out of the thing.
For myself, Magic serves as a social platform in an arena that meritocratically rewards success with prestige. The allure of top 8ing a pro tour comes from the increased status I will have among my peers, both competitive, casual, or sometimes non-magic people when I can refer to this triumph in my card slinging career. (The recency bias of me consuming [Elephant in the Brain] is strong). Being good at competitive Magic comes with a lot of upkeep costs: learning new cards, learning the metagame, constructing new decks, learning new limited formats, etc. The great thing about these costs is that oftentimes I am more than willing to pay them through enjoyable hours spent playing the game. It’s at the point where I am at now, when tournaments are taken Seriously, that I question the overlap of work and play and the balance begins to shift. Knowing that money comes from somewhere else can be freeing.
Our last testing house for Team Handshake Moxfield was decidedly exhausting. We always treat the testing house very seriously, and we are also very willing to reflect on what we can do better each time. For Vegas 2025 we tried following a bit stricter of a meeting schedule, and had done a lot of prep work in constructed leading up to being in the house. Despite this prep work, it ended up feeling a bit stressful, if not exactly hectic, with a lack of confidence leading up to the event in deck selection in constructed. Adequate breaks and self-care weren’t prioritized enough. Personally, I was also trying to juggle remote work for Monday and Tuesday of the house, which added another angle. Having a small amount of separation I find greatly improves my focus. A separate bed room, time spent exercising, going out to eat, etc. Without going further into the details, the testing house felt more like work than play for much of the time.
(Excepting when Johnny Simon Richer Dawson Liam and I met up at the pool cabana)
Dangerously, and to rail against the self-imposed ignorance of diminishing returns common to all competitive magic players, can I expend less effort for a similar result? What is the optimal amount of work to put in for these large event, personally? As a team? How can we achieve balance? Diminishing returns is the enemy - how do we defeat it? What are my priorities?
Naturally, reflecting on these questions must be contrasted with alternative to Magic. I thrive in competitive environments, albeit if everything becomes competition it’s easier to burn out. Choosing your battles is an important skill, and one that I am not naturally predisposed to. I enjoy maintaining the skills I have, continuing to build up the routines and habits that I use to train my skills. My reasoning for this is simple: you are better at losing than gaining, it’s more efficient to maintain than to lose and gain back. This is a lesson from compounding interest, applied to skills learning. If you let the constant drip go unfettered for several months, getting back to where you were will require more time investment than if you had applied an equal opposite force to the drip, continually. Problematically, I have felt like this makes me less agile, less able to quickly jump on top of new opportunities with full commitment and gusto. The bloat of extra routines takes up mental space - despite this being my primary praise for why we should implement habits in the first place. So why is it that habits still take this space, even after being practiced in some cases for years? As a caveat, maybe I only remember the times on days where it does take active thought and most of the time the habits are working in the background as intended.
Conversely, having many habits can put me into action mode, freezing all active thought (Hannah Arendt). I go go go and work on completing them, finding it harder and harder to actually think deeply when I really should be slowing down. Most of the time, I am aligned with my emphasis on speed (Hammertime). Yet finding that my brain feels deprived of those HIT workout equivalent sessions throughout the day is very bad for long term personal growth.
I realize I should give a more concrete example of what I mean. On a day where I wake up tired, it’s harder than usual to follow habits. I try to write daily, for 5-10 minutes. My most successful habits are stacked on top of one another, or triggered by a particular action like opening my front door or seeing myself in the mirror in the morning. Writing is not currently one of those, and it floats in my workday between 11 and 3, usually. If I have to think about, oh I should do writing, I am distracted from “I am in the zone working on my project for one hour”.
About two and a half weeks before the event, I broke up with my ex-girlfriend. We had been together for two years, since the spring I graduated my master’s program. I also started a new job about 1 month prior and juggling a relationship, job, and magic testing was a lot of work. It was a good decision to break up - being together two years and not feeling optimistic about the future being in a relationship with someone I took as a quality signal that it was time for a change. I had worked to remedy this feeling and we had discussed it, but ultimately the feeling stemmed from an incompatibility that was tied to our identities. While I did my best to get on runs and meditate leading up to travel to Vegas, some amount of processing was definitely delayed until post event. I felt it distinctly on my flight home, crying on the plane ride in the dark early morning hours between (vegas airport code) and Newark seemed in hindsight inevitable. I don’t think that it negatively impacted my event, but just wanted to share here as a place to reflect. Looking back on the relationship (and reviewing some online advice recommended by a friend) it’s clear that our relationship had gotten caught in the anxious-avoidant snare wherein one partner feels their freedom is infringed upon, is reluctant to express or confront, and bottles up insecurity, and the other may cling, focus on interpersonal issue(s) instead of self-improvement, and reflect a feeling of insecurity outwardly. This dynamic can be polarizing, with one partner drawing away causing the other partner to lean and repeat, until the distance is great and returning to the center requires a strong show of commitment, growth, or emotional fortitude. I try to learn from my relationships (and hopefully not always the same thing over and over). This time around, learning about this dynamic has given me tools to build better boundaries, identify earlier on dynamics that could transform in a similarly unhealthy way, and allowed me to feel a bit of what a longer term bond can or cannot provide based on what you put into it. For now, i’m back to the single lifestyle and the dating world with a fresh perspective on being my best self and the best romantic partner I can be. P.S. I’ve created a [dating form], if you’re interested in throwing your hat in the ring. No promises that this will stay active, but I’ll try to check it for now.
If you are instead interested in giving more platonic commentary, whether that come in the form of advice, banter, praise, or criticism, you can put your thoughts [here], anonymously or self-identifyingly.
We’ve gotten far off the specifics of the Vegas trip (and that’s totally okay) and I’d like to finish out this article by recounting some of the other more lightweight, fun memories from the trip.
Party on Saturday post event in the penthouse, the non-master bathroom was bigger than my bedroom at home:
Playing in my first WSOP event, a 500$ freezeout. I had registered for the event alongside Javier Dominguez, Nathan Steur, and Karl Sarap. Somehow, Nathan and I were placed at the same table! Unlucky! Then, after about 30 minutes, Michael Acevedo was sat down at our table coming off a huge win the night before. None of us ended up day 2ing this one, but we lasted a while in a field of thousands, nonetheless.
One of my great joys is finding public pianos. There is a site which is constanlty going out of date, (public pianos .com) that I have tried to use in the past. More often than not I must find the pianos on my own. Consistently, I connect through Newark as a United flier. Right outside the United Club? A Finely tuned piano, for me to play sunny morning atmospheric improvisations, and a bit of Twentysomething jazz scatting at 5:45 AM on my way back home:
Finally, my mom was courteous enough to pick me up to drive me back to my apartment and even brought a breakfast bagel! Even after all these years of attending tournaments, my mom and dad still support me, watching the standings and streams, and debriefing afterwards. Love you guys!