About
Pierre Dagen

Age:25
Works as a buisness consultant in the field of public health.

Likes: Magic, Contemporary Arts, Electro Music, Travelling in the Middle East, Tennis, Kick Boxing, Drinking, Poker, Series.

In magic, played in 4 PT, got three GP top 16 and 1 top8
2nd Pro Tour Dublin 2013

More Posts (7)

Part 1- Preparation and Day 1

Hi peeps,
This Food for Thought will be somewhat different from the others. See, I usually enjoy discussing a topic of general strategy, and elaborate (and elaborate, and elaborate, and elaborate a little more) on it, usually deploying walls of numbers to determine what the theory should be. But not this time: this time, practice has to rear its ugly head. So, this will be a report of my trip to Dublin and an attempt at drawing a few lessons from Team Revolution’s success. As I went into a lot of details, it will be a two part report. Here we go.

Part 1 – where the author does not have what it takes:

I have good news for all of you that never even attended a Pro Tour: I was a terrible player when I started. So were you, and so was every Hall of Famer. If you like reading stories about Magic’s greatest players, you might be under the impression that it all comes easy to the lucky few. Even in that Pro Tour, Kamiel Cornelissen made it to the quarterfinals with his “Pre-release Red” deck, not having tested the draft format whatsoever. Yeah, right. How many Planeswalker Points does he have? About 32000. I had some fun (well, I mean, my own kind of fun) computing how many matches that represents, and I got to the conclusion that Mr. Cornelissen played about 4000 official matches in his life. Which means that, even dismissing the time he spent testing, cube-drafting, or playing on magic online or whatever, and assuming that a regular match takes about 35 minutes, he has been playing for about 2350 hours in his life: that is over 3 months at the table. Given that most competitive players spend more time playing in non-official matches, we can easily double that to 6 months straight spent playing Magic. So I think his preparation for the Pro Tour was actually quite decent.
The legends about people having a sick gift that would allow them to crush any tournament with no preparation are exactly that: legends. And unless you have already spent half a year of your life doing nothing else than play Magic, you have no proof that you are less talented than one of the greatest players in our game. Even though you are probably not.
But back to my little self. So, when I started playing, I was quite bad. I got the rules quite fast, but I suffered from at least three major weaknesses:
A. I was unlucky
B. I was creative
C. I was a jerk
You might think that I am kidding, but I am not. Let me explain:
A. I was unlucky: I was not. But I thought I was. And the same is true for everyone. You cannot be unlucky if you play on a regular basis: at some point, variance will be written off by the simple volume of games you play. Yes, you can get lucky in a given tournament (like, say, PT Dublin). But not in the long run. So, when someone tells you “I am too unlucky to make it to the big stage” what he is actually saying is “I do not try to improve my games because I would rather think that it is all out of my control, which is why I never got good enough to earn a spot on the Pro Tour”. And I said that a lot.
B. I was creative: I was not. But I was pretentious. I always came to tournaments playing my own brews, convinced that I had found the perfect deck that no one else had. It is not that it is impossible: but it requires a lot of time, a deep understanding of the format, and great players to discuss your build with. I did not have any of those. Looking back, I think it is pretty cute that I was convinced I could break a format with my tiny little arms when all the pros in the world could not. Yeah, I often use “cute” for “dumb”.
C. I was a jerk: I was. See, the best players I knew back then were the French PTQ grinders. They had one thing in common: they were unpleasant, rude, occasionally dishonest rule-lawyers. So I figured that was the way to get there. But they actually had another thing in common: they were PTQ Grinders. This means that they played a lot of PTQs, but did not win too many. So, I guess I did not pick the right role models when I started. I often hear Pro Tour first-timers say how happy they are coming to the Pro Tour and realizing that most opponents are really nice. Most people assume that this is because they have nothing to prove now that they made it. Actually, I am convinced that it often works the other way around: being a pleasant opponent in the first place helps you build a network of really good players that are eager to help you join them at the top level. Think of it this way: would you rather share a room with that nice guy you beat in the finals of your PTQ, or with that other guy who bad-mouthed you after he mulliganed to five in the semis? Well, the top pros are no different.
In my case, I was lucky enough to meet Jean-Julien Zeil, one of the most popular and active members of the French Community, at my local shop in Paris (Troll2jeux). He offered me a spot in the testing crew he had just created (which was called team AYPPABTU, for “All Your Pro Points Are Belong To Us”). And I finally got to play with better players, who partially got me rid of the three weaknesses I mentioned.
So, five basic takeaways based on my experience as a not-even-decent PTQ grinder:
1. Play a lot, like Kamiel did.
2. Never blame luck, because luck will not listen.
3. Do not be pretentious; give the net decks some credit.
4. Never, ever be a jerk. Not because it is bad, but because it goes against point 5.
5. Find a team. Any team.

Part 2 – where the author joins the Revolution:

Let us move forward. I finally got to play a few Pro Tours, got a GP top 8 in Bochum 2012, and was even awarded a Sponsor’s Exemption for PT: Gatecrash in Montreal. The topic of Sponsor’s Exemptions is a controversial one, so I will just say this: I do not think that Sponsor’s exemption were a great idea, since it was the only spot on the Pro Tour that did not have clear-cut criteria. But I did feel like if five people had to get a spot, I deserved to be one of them based on results. Anyways, I got to meet the core of Team Revolution (which did not have a name yet) in Canada, and even though I did not play to the best of my abilities, I think we did a decent job. More importantly, we got along really well and that week in the snow left me eager to come back into the mix for another Pro Tour.
So, when I won PTQ Lyon, I instantly joined the Facebook Group and started making plans for our testing. I will not bother you with travel arrangements, but I would like to emphasize a few things I learned about teams.
A. Having an identity is more important than it seems. We never bothered with a team name until Melissa suggested that we send our information to Lauren Lee (Her Blog). After we picked a name – and even though they rejected “ Team Bananas”, which still haunts me at night-, we went from being a testing crew to being a team. Maybe it is just me, but I felt like that was a powerful motivational tool to see yourself as an ambassador for your team, especially when your team has big names like Raphael, Melissa or Guillaume in it.
B. Having a team manager is huge. If you ever tried gathering ten magic players to go to a restaurant after a GP, you know what I am talking about. Discussing a match-up, a bad play or how sexy Olivia Wilde is seems much more entertaining than booking a hotel. But at some point, you will need a bed and a roof. So, having some serious guy taking charge goes a long way. For us, we had James Searles (who did not actually play in the PT but came to support the team) who basically made sure we stayed focused and coherent, but I guess having a rock-solid player could do the trick as well. Anyway, make sure someone is in charge.
We decided to meet in Dublin two weeks before the event, even though some of us arrived a bit later due to work obligations, and the testing began. I would love to tell you about our testing process, but we did not have any: we just jammed a lot of games, discussed how we felt about the formats, and played some more games. That is quite disorganized indeed, but I think we still did a good job. First, we did not only play, but also shared our conclusions, which is incredibly important. If you do not do that, you only get some numbers in (deck A won 10 to 8 against deck B), and that is close to useless because a- those are subjects to variance and b-the rest of the team does not learn anything about how the match-up plays out, which cards are important… And that is what testing should be all about. Second, that process let us decide how we wanted to organize our timetable. And this is actually very important: we do not all have the same needs, and it is crucial that everyone can keep a good balance in his life during those two weeks. For example, I really wanted to practice my kickboxing since I tend to get nervous and irritable when I do not do any sports, and I got to do that every day. Poker and Chess champions take the physical preparation into account, so I do not see any reason why we should not do the same.

Part 3 – where the author hesitates to make waves:

In standard, we started with the idea that Esper was the obvious best deck, since it had been so dominant in the block format. With that in mind, we quickly moved away from every non-Esper Sphinx’s Revelation deck, since they flat out lost to Esper.
Before trying the obvious aggro decks, I spent a long time working on a Jund decklist that made use of Sylvan Caryatid to deploy powerful threats like Desecration Demon, Chandra, Pyromaster and Rakdos Return. The idea was to build a stock, midrange, rock-like deck to see how legitimate that approach could be and possibly discard it (which is pretty close to Guillaume’s approach of testing the weaker-looking options first). Obviously, I had some troubles figuring out the correct ratio between threats and removal. But more importantly, I ended up finding out how underwhelming Sylvan Caryatid really was: not only did it make Esper’s Supreme Verdict more efficient, but it also prevented you from playing Anger of Gods, making it really hard to defend the early game against Mono-Red and other swarm decks. All in all, the midrange builds all felt like they were 45/55% against the field. At that point, we decided to move away from those without wasting more time testing their sideboard. In all fairness, that might have been a mistake since most of the teams that ended up playing those decks reported that they sideboarded incredibly well against every match-ups.
Anyway, our testing field soon evolved into a Green Aggro VS Esper contest. And in this game, I really liked Green Aggro’s chances: we had “Danny” Boon Satyr before the rest of the world did, but also Skaarg Guildmage as a potent mana sink for Gruul. Overall, one week into our testing, I was pretty much sold on playing a version of Big Gruul which did not play Sylvan Caryatid but ran Xenagos, the Reveler and Domri Rade as powerhouses against control, while relying on a full set of Polukranos, World Eater (and 0 Mizzium Mortars for consistency) to beat aggro. Basically, the deck beat everything we were throwing at it. On top of that, it was not a deck we liked in the first place (Raphael loved GW, I really wanted Jund to work and Guillaume never seriously considered playing a deck without Sphinx’s Revelation in it). So we were pretty sure that we did not overestimate the results the deck was putting.
At that point of our testing, two important things happened. First, we got the results of the second StarcityGames Open. Basically, it was exactly what we did not want to see: green aggro decks all around, and not a single Esper (our best match-up) in the top 8. That was terrible news for us: if we still wanted to play Big Gruul, we would need a much more mirror-oriented version (Skaarg Guildmage is just embarrassing there), which meant that we would probably not even beat Esper anymore. Even worst, we would need to play the “guess what” game after sideboard. That infamous game is what happens when everyone comes to an event with a sideboard dedicated to beating the creature mirror: there are a lot of sideboard techs available, and it is really hard to predict which one your opponent decides to run. But fighting Unflinching Courage, Mizzium Mortars and Wasteland Viper (yeah, Wasteland Viper) at the same time is pretty hard, so you usually have to make a not-so-educated guess. I do not like that. As much as I loved our Wasteland Viper + Polukranos, World Eater combo out of the sideboard, that metagame shift hurt my confidence in our deck a lot.
On the same day, Jeremy Dezani and Guillaume Mauger joined us to test some more. They brought Antoine Ruel’s UB devotion decklist, an awkward looking deck featuring a lot of cards I did not even like in draft (Omenspeaker, Judge’s Familiar). We had a good laugh about it, until they crushed every green deck from our gauntlet. Once again, I think that me having a hard time respecting the deck is actually one of the reason I ended up playing it: I took my lovely Gruul deck and decided that I was going to prove them wrong. I tried really hard, but I did not. Despite winning a few games, I had to admit that our well-tested list struggled really badly against their prototype of a deck. And it got even worst after they realized that mono-U was just better.
Those two factors combined led us to give the deck a spot in our gauntlet: it worked way better than it looked, and it was obviously very well-positioned in the new metagame. I still did not want to play it at that point, but it was clearly a playable deck. The next day, I decided that since everyone would focus on beating green decks, it was time to join the Esper Control bandwagon. I played the deck against, well, everything, with decent results. But after discussing the games with the team, we came to the agreement that Esper never lost to creatures (well, except against mono-red) but only to non-creature threats. That was why Red-Green did so well against it: playing Domri Rade, Xenagos, the Reveler and Burning Earth made your threats more numerous than their answers. And with that in mind, I went to bed. Meanwhile, some guys on the team kept working on the Mono-U VS Esper match-up, trying various plans (Thoughtseize, Ashiok, Nightmare Weaver, and even Millstone at some point!). So when I woke up the next day, Guillaume pointed out that from Esper’s point of view, the most problematic thing he had faced was Jace, Architect of Thought along with Bident of Thassa. I was kind of surprised, since it did not seem to do much and could not overcome Sphinx’s Revelation in terms of raw card advantage. But at that point of my magic career, there is at least one thing I have learnt: when I disagree with a better player, odds are that I am wrong. So I tested his plan, and sure enough, Jace won every time he resolved. Looking back, I should have understood it right away: playing Thassa, God of the Sea, Jace, Architect of Thought and Bident of Thassa represents as many non-creature threats as what the Big Gruul deck had (in that regard, Thassa, God of the Sea is definitely not a creature since it cannot be killed by most removals). So the sideboarded match-up had to be decent.
From that point, I never considered playing anything else than Mono-U: I felt comfortable playing against Esper and every green decks, and I could not see any reason why a midrange deck would be particularly tough since they flat out lost to Bident of Thassa (which is the main reason why I wanted to run two when most of my team ran only one). At that point, I think having a huge level of confidence in our team members helped a lot: I knew the other guys had tested other plans and discarded them, so I did not even bother checking for myself, and the other guys believed Guillaume and myself (ok, mostly Guillaume!) when we told them that the Esper match-up was actually quite winnable after sideboard. Also, this allowed us to split the hard work efficiently: from that point, some members focused on building the best sideboard possible while others made sure we were not missing anything by giving every archetype we could think of a try. In that regard, Raphael, Miguel and Melissa made a crazy good work of tuning niche decks like mono-green just to make sure we tested against the right versions.
We ended up with almost all the team on Mono-U, with the exception of Louis and Guillaume playing their Esper (which was apparently the best version of the deck; in that regard, them playing only one Detention Sphere when everyone else played four is a huge testament to the power of instant-speed spells). Rob also settled on GW, the deck he had played the most coming into the event. I could not say that I was entirely confident in Mono-U “first picks” as I called it, but for bad reasons: the deck was great, I knew it, but some part of me just could not believe that playing Triton Tactics in a Pro Tour was the right move. I will confess that I was only half-disappointed when I saw that other teams played the same deck: at least, it kind of proved us right.
For reference, here are the 75 cards I ended up registering:

Lands

21 Island
3 Mutavault

Creatures

4 Cloudfin Raptor
4 Frostburn Weird
4 Judge’s Familiar
4 Master of Waves
4 Nightveil Specter
4 Thassa, God of the Sea
4 Tidebinder Mage
2 Omenspeaker

Spells

2 Cyclonic Rift
1 Rapid Hybridization
2 Bident of Thassa
1 Jace, Architect of Thought

Sideboard

1 Mutavault
3 Jace, Architect of Thought
1 Triton Tactics
2 Ratchet Bomb
1 Pithing Needle
3 Negate
1 Jace, Memory Adept
3 Wall of Frost

 

At this point, you probably know the deck as well as I do, so I will just discuss the controversy of Aetherling VS Jace, Memory Adept.Raph’s point is that the game usually goes long, and that when you hit 8 lands, Aetherling wins every time while Jace does not. My opinion is that:
• If you hit 8 lands, you probably lost the game since you should be scrying them away with Thassa, God of the Sea or exposing them to instant-speed removal with Mutavaults
• Resolving Aetherlingrequires a favorable spot, the kind of spot that you will not be into it you hit 8 lands
• You might actually lose after casting Aetherling. Their Aetherling are good at racing just as yours, since they can “Fog-removal” you a lot and gain lots of life.
• Your Jace, Architect of Thought are so good at beating their Elspeth, Sun’s Champion that sideboarding Pithing Needle with the plan of naming Aetherling is a very powerful play.
• Jace, Architect of Thought is huge. Like, really. You should play as many copies as possible, and Jace, Memory Adept is the closest thing, except for Bident of Thassa which you already play.
I guess things could be a little different in the Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx versions since they do not need 8 lands to resolve Aetherling. But for now, I would stick with our original plan.
Speaking of registration, something funny happened when Yann Guthmann, Paul Ferret and I registered for the event as members of Team Revolution: the person in charge asked us if that was a real team, and kept on asking until we told him that was Raph Levy’s team. Hopefully, we will not have to answer that question next time!

Part 4 – where the author loses a lot:

Even though I focused on how we prepared for standard, the biggest success in our preparation was probably how we handled drafting. Looking at the records from previous Pro Tours, it is almost impossible to put up a great finish without scoring 4-2 or better in draft. Since testing the draft is usually harder than testing standard (because you need eight people and actual boosters for a draft), most players are not that well prepared for limited, so this is where separating yourself from the rest of the pack is the easiest. I have a very bad memory of my own performance at PT: Nagoya (Scars of Mirrodin block) where I wasted an awesome 8-2 constructed record with Big Red by posting a 2-4 record in that limited format that I thought I handled well. So you could say I learnt my lessons the hard way.
This time, we had a very good crew, Melissa and Raphael being two world-class drafters. So we drafted a lot, which is obvious. What is probably less obvious is the way we capitalized on those drafts. Unlike constructed, we rarely shared our feelings about the best archetypes or cards right away –even though we obviously discussed the toughest choices. Actually, our first draft focused on what a good plan in the format was about, i.e what you should try to achieve when drafting and more importantly when playing the games. The reasoning behind that was that if someone finds a great archetype and says it, the next draft is going to be heavily influenced by that and will not really resemble a PT Draft where you draft with people you do not really know.
In the last week, all of a sudden we shared a lot of information about how we felt. This is when I understood why most of my aggro decks did not do as well as they should on paper, for example: I tended to overestimate the importance of 2-drops when this format is actually all about having great 3-drops. I will not go too deep into the specifics, but I think that our method led us to have a very good understanding of the format: in other words, we did not only know which cards were actually good, we also knew what a good deck should look like – and that is actually much more important.
Still, I felt the need to do a few drafts on Magic Online in the last days before the tournament. I had two good reasons to do this:
A. I needed to gain some confidence in my drafting skills: I do not usually appear as a guy with low-self-esteem, to say the least. But in that particular case, the process was a bit disheartening for me. Testing with those same great players all the time made me a way better drafter, and I did feel like I was improving a lot. But they wew as well. This means that my progression did not translate into a better win percentage at our tables. Actually, if you test with a crew like Team Revolution’s, you might lose more and more often even though you are progressing really fast: it would just mean that the other players improve faster than you do. I knew all of this, but I still wanted to make sure that I was better than the average Magic Online drafter.
B. You want to know what the regular metagame looks like: just because most people in our group understood that a mediocre common is actually quite strong does not mean that everyone knows about it. For instance, at some point in our testing, I had to consider a 5th pick God’s Willing as a strong incentive to move into white because we all thought of it as one of the very best heroic enablers in the format. But after I was passed five of them by the white drafter at my right on Magic Online, I adjusted my views. I think almost everyone in the team did the same, and it paid off: no one in the team had a record below 3-3, with Jeremy going undefeated and Yann and myself going 5-1 despite pretty tough pods.

Part 5 – where the author finally starts talking about the Pro Tour:

When Friday came, we all felt ready and quite excited. As much as I wanted to go to the church (I am not talking about prayers here: the Church is a famous Irish pub that used to be a church and still looks exactly like it, which I find amusing), James “Manager” Searles convinced us to have a last pre-tournament dinner. Talking with the rest of the team about possible last-minute changes and sideboard plans, I realized how every card made a lot of sense in our list: you could ask any member of the team about any card, and he would give you the reasoning behind its inclusion. That felt good.
After the sittings were posted, I saw that I would be on the featured draft, sitting next to Ben Stark. For those of you that are interested, you can follow the whole draft viewer here:
Draft Viewer
This draft was quite challenging, because the boosters were both really weak and very mono-colored: green was super open but it did not show at all in pack one since I did not see a single decent common, even though I love being green in Theros. Also, every pack contained two good cards in the same color, causing mixed signals all along: Ben first picked a Thassa’s Emissary over a Griptide that I took, and two picks later, he took a Magma Jet over a Lightning Strike that got me well into thinking he wanted me to be red. I had first-picked a Chained to the Rocks over a Voyaging Satyr, which I think was a mistake from my part: in an unknown table, being able to cut green early on is usually very rewarding since the color has 7 top-notch commons that are not usually considered first-pick worthy. Still, I did not fall in love with my first pick and ended up after pack one with a fair mix of white, red and blue cards. I knew the boosters had been weak, but more importantly, I was pretty sure that Ben has only decided on playing Blue at that point, and kept his options opened for the second color on pack two (I had not received anything decent after my second pick Griptide, which is usually a sign that the player passing to you has first picked either Thassa’s Emissary or Sea God’s Revenge and wants to cut blue afterwards). So, I figured I would be able to discourage him from playing white if I cut the color aggressively enough on pack 2, and have a decent pack three, which worked quite well in the end. I finished the draft with a mediocre Red-white aggressive deck relying on a very good curve, many ways to get some damage through, but no heroic creatures and some bad fillers like Wild Celebrants
This is exactly the kind of deck I did not want to end up with in our testing, but in this specific case, I thought most decks at our pod would be quite weak and / or clunky with the exception of one awesome green deck, so 2-1 was still an option event though I was far from thrilled. In the end, things went better than expected. I won the first one against the kind of clunky deck (splashing blue for Thassa’s Bounty) I hoped to face, then beat Ben Stark with a decent but not good UR deck after he mulliganed to four in game three. As I figured, my opponent, a very nice Italian first-timer, had drafted an awesome UG deck featuring about every good card in those colors including Prophet of Kruphix. He crushed me so bad game one that I figured I needed to go for broke and play the high-variance game: I sideboarded a Xenagos, the Reveler that I had gotten late in pack three and two forests. Giving that he played a lot of Sedge Scorpions, Voyaging Satyr and Omenspeaker, I thought the card was likely to steal a game if only I got to cast it. This paid off in game two when I was able to overrun him with 2/2 tokens after he made a bad decision declining to kill my Ephara’s Warden when that was the only thing that could protect my mythic rare from the flyer he had just drawn. In game three, he kept a risky, slow 7 and got punished for it when I cast Xenagos, the Reveler on turn 4 –lucky me. Sitting at 3-0 after a disappointing draft was clearly undeserved, but was also a huge moral boost.

Part 5 – where the author realizes his deck his good:

I played my first round of constructed against an American player piloting his own take on Blue Devotion, a blue-white version that ran Detention Sphere, Sphinx’s Revelation and Supreme Verdict. I guess his draws were pretty bad, since I cannot remember him doing much as I drew millions of cards with Bident of Thassa. Then I was up against Neil Oliver, running a BWR brew that also lost easily to the Bident, and finally I got to play round 6 against the man behind the deck, Antoine Ruel. He had decided to stick to his guns with a blue-black version. There is a lot to say about the mirror, but I will not do it here all I did was god-draw him twice after losing game 1 off a mulligan to five. As I was starting to be tired at that point, I was more than happy to get paired against Ben Friedmann and his Naya deck: this is a great match-up that I knew inside out, and things went exactly as planned with me resolving Master of Waves with sufficient devotion in both games: there is not a whole lot he can do against that, and it showed.
You might be under the impression that I am rushing through those rounds, but there is just not a whole lot to say: my deck was insanely good, I drew well, and I won. That is, until round 8. There, I was up against Sam Black who had beaten my teammate and eventual winner Jeremy Dezani. We both knew this was a mirror match, and both mulliganed accordingly. Basically, the match-up main deck is a very close, a slow race where both players accumulate some dudes for devotion. If one player breaks parity with an unanswered Nightveil Specter of Master of Waves, he wins on the spot. If not (which is statistically more likely), the board usually gets clogged. At that point, only two cards matter: Thassa, God of the Sea and an overloaded Cyclonic Rift. Both cards can win very fast (1 or 2 turns, if not on the spot). That is why having the opportunity to resolve yours first is absolutely crucial.
I won the dice roll, and, well, played my Thassa before he did, so I won game 1. But the interesting stuff happened in game 2: Sam had a mediocre draw, and I was able to play Thassa just one turn before he did, with both of us at twenty with gigantic boards. With one card in hand and only 6 lands, he went in the tank for a very long while, and ended up attacking with almost everything. After I made the obvious blocks (blocking everything I could and stuff), he passed the turn. That left me in a spot where if I attacked with my whole team and his last card wasn’t Cyclonic Rift nore Rapid Hybridation, I just killed him on the spot. But if I attacked and he did have it, I was dead on board.
My other option was to play around those cards, in which case I made sure I killed him on my next attack. The only problem was that if he drew or had a land in his hand, he would be able to kill me first. So I had to determine if him bluffing the Cyclonic Rift was more likely than him drawing a land (which was very likely with Thassa, God of the Sea’s scry). I kind of leveled myself here, and figured that he would never take such a risk when he did not absolutely have to. Also, I gave him a lot of credit so I was convinced that it was not just a misplay. So I figured he had to have the Rift for sure and played around it. He did not, and his bluff worked perfectly when he drew the land he needed and finished me.
Point is, I misread that move completely. My reasoning during the game was that he was not dead on board before his attack and still had some outs to beat me. But that was very wrong of me: yes, he had a few outs, but the likelihood of him topdecking one of those was actually lower than the odds of me buying his bluff. More importantly, he knew for sure I had him dead in two turns. So, me thinking that he was not dead on board was just an abusive definition of “on board” as “next turn”. He was dead “in one turn”, which is really close to dead on board, making it much more likely that he would try what a poker player might call a “desperation bet”, i.e the kind of stupid looking move you do when you are out of smart options.
Anyways, I gave Sam too much credit in this game, he pulled out a very nice bluff in a crucial game, and it is only logical that I mulliganed into oblivion game three, finishing the day at 7-1, just like Jeremy.
That’s it for today, I’ll make sure to post day 2 and top 8 soon enough.
Until next time,
Pierre Dagen