Swimming with Sharks: Reflections on Competitive Players

As a player of one-on-one games, I have never been particularly successful in the competitive sphere. In high school, I had vague aspirations of playing Magic competitively enough to go to the occasional Standard event, but even that crashed upon the rocks of needing to maintain academics. I played Warhammer 40,000 through high school and college, and lost most games I played. I had a solid run of success in a Dust Warfare league circa 2012, but that was mostly because I stumbled onto a rather overpowered jet pack Allies list and gatling gunned my way to victory. I’m a fair hand at X-Wing and Armada these days through sheer exposure and the amount of time I’ve spent studying their competitive play, but I wouldn’t expect to win any given event I attended (especially if any of my former coworkers show up).

(As a sidenote, I am pretty good at the Commander format of Magic and other games of a political bent, but those are more about reading the room than head-to-head skills.)

So I have established that I am an outsider to the world of competitive success. However, having attended many gaming conventions, judged numerous top-tier events, and interacted with lots of competitive players formally and informally over the last decade, I have now spent a lot of time with very successful competitive miniatures games players. And I think my being an outsider to these waters gives me some unique perspectives on their denizens.

There are certain stereotypes of successful competitive players in most game circles, whether it’s the would-be poker player hiding beneath a hat, hoodie, and sunglasses, the power-gamer with the net-list exactly like that of half the other players at the tournament, or the player who is sure they have a rule for this somewhere in their codex, but can’t actually find the page in question. While you will meet such people, I have found that the majority of players I’ve encountered at competitive events don’t fit the stereotypes. And perhaps more interestingly, the people who repeatedly end up at the top of minis tournament brackets tend to display a very different set of traits.

Throughout this article, I will be using pictures of sharks to break up the text. These pictures are mostly there because of the title, and also because I like sharks.

Trait One: Flexibility of Perspective

The sawfish looked at teeth and said “Grabbing and tearing? How about I create a slashing meta instead!”

(Also technically it is a ray, but they’re closely related so I’m leaving it)

The players you see time and time again at top table of minis events tend to be folks who work to buck the expectations of their opponents and are hard to catch off-guard themselves. Successfully reading the metagame is difficult, but sticking to the same strategies for too long makes a player predictable. Unless there is a specific game element or list that is just dramatically too efficient, it’s hard for a player to ride a single list to victory time and time again. And in the same way, it’s usually hard to win with the most popular list at the event - after all, everyone is prepared for it. Even in environments when a single element or list is overperforming, the players who actually win usually have some minor tweak to their list not seen in the more widely-used version that gives them an advantage in the mirror match. There are people out there who make single-list mastery work for them, but in my observation, this is the harder path to success. This is also one of the places I struggle personally; as a player, I really like list mastery, the feeling of progress that comes with improvement using a single set of tools, and the even aesthetics of using the same game pieces consistently. But flexibility will often take you further in a competitive environment.

Interestingly, this flexibility of perspective often makes these top-table players more open to new mechanics than the general population, too. Their willingness to try new strategies and adapt how they play the game can also mean that they are not as fixed in seeing what the game “must be.” This is something to keep in mind when working with them as playtesters or soliciting the opinions of highly successful competitors, and why it is important to make sure to populate playtest pools with players of all skill levels. What a highly successful competitive player finds to be a fun challenge can often frustrate a more casual or novice player.

Trait Two: Motivated by Community

Not to be confused with whales, which have a slightly different - but also very significant - impact on games.

A lot of the most successful players are part of a tight-knit circle. This isn’t surprising - for a tabletop game, you need people to play with regularly to build your skills. But being part of a community group that either meets locally or discusses the game online has other advantages. For starters, it is easier to maintain a flexible perspective if you are constantly being exposed to new ideas. Additionally, not all great list-builders are great players - in many competitive board and card games, pairs of a “mechanic” who maintains the “car” and a “driver” who actually “races” are quite common. You might even have whole teams of people putting their heads together to make the best list for a single person to take to victory.

However, I think there is more to the community connection’s role in success than just getting new ideas or getting help from your friends to perfect your list. In-person tournaments are long, draining affairs, and while they are highly rewarding, they are exhausting. Rarely have I ever been more tired than after a day of attending GenCon events, and I usually wasn’t even the one playing! A community cheering you on can dramatically raise a player’s morale in critical moments, preventing a player from becoming distracted or frustrated by a small setback. Being friends with your opponent can have a similar effect, defusing some stress of elevated stakes. I rarely see people discuss the emotional component of tournaments, but I believe it to be at least as important to success as the intellectual. Emotional endurance is far easier to maintain with good friends at your side and across the table.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a lot of top-table players I have met are very socially engaged, very outgoing, and even very friendly to their opponents. When running events, I’ve answered plenty of judge calls at top table, of course, but I’ve also seen a lot of more of these issues resolved amicably without my interference than I would have expected, and I believe this was in part because the players already knew and trusted each other, either directly or by reputation. One would expect that the higher the stakes (such as they are when), the higher the stress would be, but this generally isn’t what I’ve observed. Even in the final game of major events, I’ve seen players wave-off strategically inconsequential but procedurally damaging mistakes by their opponent so that the two can get back to playing the game.

Trait Three: A Desire to Play the Game

Like the people I describe in this section, this picture is really just here for fun.

Just as not everyone plays the game the same way (as I’ve discussed in a past article), players also attend tournaments for a variety of reasons, and playing the game isn’t always the top of the list. Some people go because it’s a group social event - a chance to see their friends from around the world. Some people go because they want to win prizes, or even just receive door rewards. Some people want to be part of an experience bigger than themselves, and see great games played. When I often attended Magic: The Gathering pre-releases, playing the game was something I was willing to do, but I was really excited to see new cards I could add to my decks, interact with artists who attended the event, and spend a day out with my friends. I usually played out my games (because I’d paid to be there), but lots of folks I observed would drop once they had optimized their rewards from the event, and I didn’t have any trouble seeing why.

Any competitive game is likely to have a community conversation about “playing the tournament” versus “playing the game” - such as whether byes provide an unfair advantage (or disadvantage), and whether players in prior to the cut should be required to play a game that cannot change their outcomes of the event (but might affect players at a lower ranking if either player suffers a catastrophic defeat). Card gamers tend to take a very pragmatic attitude toward this. By contrast many minis gamers have more fixed attitudes that each game should be approached as its own undertaking, to be given full attention. However, in my observation, the players who win events do really tend to be there for a love of the game, not just a love of the accolades winning a tournament brings. And I think there’s a reason for this. A player who approaches every game as a chance to enjoy the experience of competition will, in the long run, learn more than a player who is just looking to get through the day. This perhaps goes back to the openness of perspective, and a willingness to see opportunities where others might see only challenges. Further, playing for the love of it can be contagious, and help to strengthen bonds with other players.

Obviously, these observations and experiences aren’t going to be universal - different games are, by their nature, different, and while I’ve met a great many top-tier competitive players across different games, I haven’t spent much time with actual professionals who make their living at it. Professionalized games have a different atmosphere because they have different incentives; like any job, people will figure out how to maximize the benefit they receive from it while minimizing the effort required. Games without list-building also have different considerations. And then there’s the fascinating phenomenon of the competitive mindset as it applies to roleplaying games. But that is truly a topic for its own article.