I was impressed by this article on marginal advantage by Sean Plott, who among other things is a high-level competitive Starcraft player. It discusses some more general points, suggesting that “a good competitive game should test a player’s skills and minimize the element of chance”, which I agree with, despite my long interest in Magic: The Gathering.

I also agree with his corollary that in a good competitive game, “the probability of a weak player defeating a good player should be as close to zero as possible”. Notions of “weak” and “good” players here should be as diverse as possible.

I’m not sure how this applies to tennis, the game I’m currently most interested in, but the winner of the match is often not the player with superior strokes.

Yes, clearly my progress (or lack thereof) needs quarterly reports. And here’s the first one for this year.
[more...]

Happy New Year!

Once again, my goals for the coming year.
[more...]

I recently started playing the daily Set puzzle again, and was thinking about other ways to play the game without other players.
[more...]

I went to Eudemonia yesterday for the Alara Reborn prerelease. Despite my stated preference for the old-style larger prereleases, in truth I doubt I would have gone yesterday if the prerelease had been a large one, because it would have been in the South Bay and would have been harder to get to and generally eaten up more of the day.
[more...]

I recently came across this article about an AI program winning two Traveller competitions in the early 80s. (This was naval space combat simulation with Traveller rules, “Trillion Credit Squadron”, not roleplaying.)
[more...]

It looks like Wizards of the Coast are going to stop printing tournament packs, the 45-cards-plus-land boxes of MTG cards, and leave only booster packs as the way to buy cards.
[more...]

I played at Eudemonia’s Shards prerelease yesterday. It’s the first of the “new-style” prereleases; Wizards has turned them into small store-based events rather than region-wide ones.
[more...]

Apparently when I considered the announcement regarding MTG changes coming with the release of Shards of Alara, I overlooked a major point: Prereleases as we know them are disappearing.
[more...]

Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro subsidiary who produce Magic: The Gathering, announced on Monday that they’re making some significant changes to the way they publish the game. I’m indifferent to some of these, strongly dislike others, and absolutely despise the way in which the changes were presented.
[more...]

The sfmagic MTG draft group is moving again, after about a year at Milano’s on 9th Avenue.
[more...]

I went to the Shadowmoor prerelease yesterday, and quite enjoyed it. It was a lot more fun than the last prerelease for me. Partly because I went on a Saturday, and because most of the usual crew were there.
[more...]

Brian David-Marshall interviewed Jon Finkel about his recent Pro Tour win, and I found some things Finkel said fairly interesting.
[more...]

Jon Finkel, one of two candidates for the title “best MTG player in the history of the game”, won his third Pro Tour title (in Kuala Lumpur) over the weekend—seven-and-a-half years after his last PT win. He’d been away from high-level play for quite some time, but came back last year after being inducted into the Hall of Fame (Hall-of-Famers get automatic entries into Pro Tours).
[more...]

I went to the Lorwyn Prerelease on Sunday, down in Santa Clara. I don’t think it was as much fun as other Prereleases I’ve been to, but I’m not sure that’s down to the set itself.
[more...]

Earlier this week I decided not to play in the major MTG event Grand Prix “San Francisco”. A Grand Prix is a two-day mixed professional/amateur tournament, open to all attendees (unlike the invitation-only Pro Tour events). I put the location in quotation marks because the GP is actually in San Jose—something that is a factor in my skipping it, and it annoys me quite a lot that Wizards of the Coast wouldn’t either put up the money to host the event in San Francisco or honestly admit that it wasn’t in San Francisco.
[more...]

I attended a release tournament today for the Tenth Edition of MTG’s core set. It was a lot of fun, for a number of unexpected reasons.
[more...]

I played in a Two-Headed Giant Pro Tour Qualifier today, teaming up with my friend Lev. It didn’t go very well, but was nevertheless enjoyable.
[more...]

In the eight months since writing Some Plans for sfmagic.org, I’ve made little progress. This is mainly because of gating factors such as moving it into subversion and getting my database backups into subversion as well. Now that those things are in place, I need to review how it works right now to figure out how to proceed.
[more...]

Last night was the last sfmagic draft at Canvas, which closes on Saturday. We had 23 people, three draft groups, and I took some photos of the occasion.
[more...]

The Prerelease tournaments for the next MTG set, Future Sight, were this weekend.
[more...]

The World Championship deck reprints are some of my favorite MTG decks. They’re printed with different borders and backs, so they’re not tournament legal—but that means that you could get a deck worth about $400 in legal cards for between $10 and $15. I was extremely disappointed when they stopped printing these—2004 was the last World Championship to have four decks immortalized in reprint form.
[more...]

As I mentioned in February, the Canvas Café is closing. It’s open until the end of this month. Apart from all the other sad things about this, it means that the Wednesday night sfmagic draft group will have to find a new home.
[more...]