Category: Games

Whiling away the hours by beating friends into submission

Feelings of Inadequacy

I went to Superstars today for their noon Magic draft. Only 4 other people showed up, so one employee played so we could do a 6-person draft.

Ugh, it went astoundingly poorly. I started off drafting white/green/blue in Time Spiral, then got a flood of white in Planar Chaos and abandoned blue, and ended up with a green/white deck. I didn’t really draft any bombs at all (just three Lucent Liminids), didn’t have enough removal, and lost all 6 games I played. A couple of them were close, but my best games involved getting off to a fast part, stalling, losing my creatures to various kinds of removal, and not drawing any answers to my opponent’s stuff. I could have played a little better, but probably not enough to win any of the games.

On the one hand, it was terribly discouraging. On the other hand, the other players told me that they’d all been playing (and drafting) for years, so it was actually a tough field. I might do better sticking to Friday nights, when they have a larger field and probably more people closer to my level. Also, I went through this with poker a year ago, feeling like I was stuck and not getting any better, but I think I have gotten better since then.

My play is getting a little better, but my drafts are decidedly mediocre these days. I need to figure out how to draft better. One guy there suggested trying a site called BrainBurst.com, which it looks like is an alias for TCGPlayer, which appears to have free single-player draft. So maybe I’ll give that a try – it couldn’t hurt (much), right?

Friday Night Magic

Although some of our other friends organized a poker game last night, Subrata is closer to my frame of mind and is more interested in playing Magic, and he suggested that we go last night to play the Friday Night Magic booster draft at Superstars (I found a list of their tournaments, although the URL of that page makes it look pretty temporary). Neither of us had gone before, but it was all pretty easy: We showed up around 5:30, signed up for DCI membership, and at 6:00 they seated everyone (18 players) for two drafts and we began. Subrata and I ended up in separate drafts, but that was fine.

The draft was in the Time Spiral block, which I mostly enjoy, although I find Future Sight somewhat disappointing. I had a mediocre draft, partly due to mixed signals I was getting: My first two picks were from mediocre packs, but I ended up solidly in green through the first pack. Planar Chaos – as it often seems to be – was my strongest pack, although I ended up moving into black and then blue during it. Then in Future Sight I didn’t seem to be getting many interesting cards.

Well, there was a reason for all of this: The player to my right was drafting white/blue, and the player to his right was drafting red/green, and the player to my left was drafting black/white. So I did well when there was a surplus of green and blue coming around, but poorly when there wasn’t. I ended up with green/blue deck more heavy in green. I drafted a few good black cards and one good red card which I therefore didn’t use (which was too bad mainly because I always enjoy playing cards like Enslave).

Tarmogoyf.jpgAfter the draft we play three matches as chosen by the store organizers. My first match was against a green/black deck, and other than my getting smoked in the first game, we were pretty evenly matched. In particular, Frozen Aether totally shuts down combat tricks using Flash, or one-shot creatures like Groundbreaker. Unfortunately, my mind had trouble getting into the mechanics of the game, and I could have won the third game had I played slightly differently, but instead I lost 1 game to 2.

(This opponent did point out that the Tarmogoyf I drafted, which is currently selling for over $20 on the secondhand Magic card market, so in theory I could turn around and sell it ad recoup my entry fee for the tournament. How about that?)

The second match I played against a boy who was there with his father, also their first event at the store. (Subrata ended up playing the father in his draft.) I suggested that they should check out the columns on the Wizards web site for tips on drafting and playing. Anyway, he was playing a black/white deck with a number of tricks, and he got some help from one of the observers at the store (which I tried to be a good sport about). I turned out to have just enough answers for his threats (three Utopia Vows saved my bacon a lot) and won 2-0.

The third match was against a green/blue/red deck, and again we were pretty evenly matched, but he ended up with somewhat better draws then I had, and I went down 0-2. He had a lot of green cards that I had really wanted (I still don’t have a Nacatl War-Pride, sigh), so now I know where many of those went in the draft.

So overall I won one match, and it turns out that players get one free booster pack from one of the blocks in current Standard expansions, so I took a Planar Chaos one. Subrata also won one match in his game. We were both fairly competitive, but not among the top players. But we had fun!

The store is actually quite nice to play in, with plenty of tables, and it’s clean and bright (a lot of specialty stores in the gaming and comics areas can tend to be a little dark and dingy, and it’s always nice to visit a store that’s working hard to be pleasant and welcoming). All the other players were nice, too.

I still need to work on my card evaluation, and also getting better at reading which cards are being filtered out to my right. There’s a lot of randomness in the packs, which makes the latter difficult: One pack might make it look like blue is open, while the next make it look like blue is closed. Obviously I’ve got some work to do there.

Plus, now I know I have another outlet for playing Magic when I have the itch!

But I promise not to relate the details of every draft I do. 🙂

Cheering Up

At the end of the work-week I was feeling decidedly glum. I was getting frustrated with my current project at work (which isn’t my favorite sort of project even when it’s going well), and I’d tried and failed – twice – to organize a Magic draft, but not enough people were interested. So Saturday morning I was feeling lethargic and not enthusiastic about anything we might do that day. (This despite an impromptu trip to the coast to see the sun set Friday night.)

After going out for lunch, though, I motivated myself to go down to Bay 101 to play some low-limit poker. And although it took more than an hour to get seated, I ended up having my best session in many months, and coming away feeling considerably cheered up!

Not only was it a fun and profitable session, but it was also memorable. Some notes:

  • I came in on the big blind when I sat down, and then got dealt crappy hands for the whole first orbit of the table (oddly, I got dealt Q-5 four times in those nine hands). At one point, worried that people would see me as an extremely tight player (and thus not want to play with me), I idly said, “Someday I’ll get some high cards…” The guy on my left commiserated with me and said that he’d learned that Hold ‘Em is a game that requires patience.

    My big blind came back around and he said, “Okay, here’s your high cards. Now you gotta play ’em!” I said, “I will, if no one raises me!” He laughed, and the woman on his left said, “Well I’m going to raise you!” So she raised and four people called. And I looked at my cards… and had two Aces! So I said, “Well I’m going to re-raise you!” Everyone called, and five opponents isn’t a great situation for pocket pairs unless you hit a set (three of a kind), but the board was an innocuous collection of low cards. I bet the flop, and everyone called. I bet the turn, and got two callers. And I bet the river, and only the original raiser called, and then mucked when I showed my Aces. So I won a huge pot!
  • About 15 minutes later I got Aces again in my big blind – the two red Aces, this time. I raised, and got 5 callers again. And the flop, the flop was… A-A-9. Yes, I flopped four Aces. Everyone checked the flop, everyone checked the turn, so on the river I hoped someone had hit something, so I bet, and everyone folded. “You guys are No Fun At All,” I said as I showed my Aces. Everyone groaned, and one person said, “Well at least you got your preflop raise in!” Not a huge pot, but not bad at all.

    Afterwards I said, “I do actually raise with cards other than Aces,” just in case anyone was wondering.
  • An hour into the game our table got broken up. The casino wanted to reclaim one of the low-limit games for a high-stakes game, so they waited until there were enough open seats at other tables and then we got dispersed. I learned that – at Bay 101 at least – if you get moved, then you come in after the dealer button has passed and effectively get to play a round without posting the blind. So that was nice. The new table was a little tougher than the first table, but I also got a little luckier, so it worked out.
  • At the new table, I got dealt Kings twice, and won once and lost once. I lost most of my winnings to the player on my right, who was both playing well and catching a lot of cards, but then I managed to chip up again over the course of several pots.
  • The most memorable hand at this table involved playing a trick on another player. I played Q-Jo from the big blind, and the betting went like this:
    • Five players, including the woman who played the whole hand, limped in. I checked my blind (Q-Jo isn’t a hand I’m thrilled to play for a raise against 6 players, although maybe I should have).
    • The flop was Q-8-3 rainbow. I bet, and the woman calls. Everyone else folds.
    • The turn is another Q. Now I have trip Queens, and I’m thinking, “Hmm, if I bet, she’s going to assume I have a Queen and fold. So maybe I can be sneaky to get one more bet out of her. Better yet, she might bet into me!” I check, and she checks.
    • The river is an 6. No flush possibilities. I bet, and the woman thinks for a bit and calls. I win with my trip Queens (she didn’t show her hand).

    I was a little surprised this trick worked, and actually felt a little bad about it (but only a little). I assume she had middle pair or maybe Jacks, Tens or Nines, or maybe even two pair (she might have been playing 8-6, for instance, though that’s not very likely as she was a moderately tight player). I’m not sure what she put me on, but it’s not she might have thought I had the same sorts of hands.

    Several other players declared they were suspicious of my check on the turn, but who knows what they might have done in her place!

So I left feeling considerably cheered up, and better about my poker playing than I have in a long time. Okay, I know I had a bit of a lucky streak, but it seems like it’s been a long time since I’ve had a lucky streak. It made me happy.

The rest of the weekend was also fun, although not something conducive to deconstruction: Saturday night we joined some friends for bowing at Strike, an upscale bowling alley in a nearby mall. The food and drinks were good (if a bit slow to arrive), and bowling was fun – always kind of entertaining to play a game that I’m not much good at, and don’t have much interest to get better at. My friend Josh cleaned up, but then, I think he’s bowled more than the rest of us.

Sunday morning some other friends came over and we went to the farmer’s market, and then for a bike ride, stopping at the Shoreline Cafe for lunch. It was just about a perfect day for a ride, and we had a good time. Afterwards, Debbi and I went out for coffee, and when we got back I spent some time working on some Magic decks for a constructed game another friend hosts each week.

So all-in-all it was a good weekend with friends and relaxation and some good luck. And maybe it’s recharged me enough to tackle the new week head-on.

Gaming Divergence

So my current dilemma is this: Many of my gaming friends seem to be focusing more on playing poker, whereas I’m more interested in playing Magic, especially doing booster drafts. Both activities require a critical mass of 6 or more people, which means our gaming groups – which overlap considerably between these two – are fragmenting.

Moreover, we’re starting to have unrelated scheduling conflicts: Subrata and I tend to put aside Wednesdays for board gaming and/or comic books, Subrata plays in a constructed-deck Magic group on Mondays, one fellow is busy Tuesday and Thursdays, another has given up Magic entirely, other people are just plain busy at random intervals… which makes it difficult (and therefore frustrating) to organize a game, even with several days’ (or a week’s) notice.

I’m not desperate enough to play Magic to consider Magic Online, especially since MO only supports Windows, and I think my basic aversion to paying for (and even using) Windows will dissuade me from going that route. (Though if they ever came out with a Mac client I would sign up in a minute. No, really.) But I am thinking of investigating the organized draft events at local stores such as Superstars or Game Kastle. I’m a little reluctant since I’m always kind of nervous to jumping into a brand-new social environment like that, and I have no idea what it would be like. Worrying that I’d be a fish among sharks also has something to do with it, but more viscerally I wonder if the people who would attend would be “not my kind of people” for whatever reason (not geeky enough, too geeky about Magic, a lot younger than me, or whatever).

I enjoy poker, but I don’t want to play it to the exclusion of Magic. Whereas I’d consider playing Magic to the exclusion of poker. Of course, board gaming is the most consistently-available gaming venue among my friends, but I’ve been gradually getting burned out on board games.

What to do, what to do?

Minigolf Outing

Saturday we went on a long-planned “fun day out” excursion with Subrata, Susan, Chad and Camille. Our original plan was to play minigolf at the Putting Edge indoor glow-in-the-dark course at the Great Mall, but when we got there it turned out that the course has gone out of business! The web page for this location still exists, but I suspect it’s an oversight that they haven’t removed it; the location was locked up and seemed to be empty when we arrived mid-afternoon.

Remembering that we’ve driven past a golf course off the freeway over there that I’ve never played at, we retargeted ourselves at Golfland in Milpitas, which turned out to be a fine choice: The course is fairly challenging and interesting to play, and was in good repair overall. The only downside is that it was quite hot out and we all got a little bit dehydrated by the end. We had a good round of golf, with several holes in one (Debbi and I both got ones on the same hole). Competitive fellow that I am, I worked to catch up to Subrata, but he beat me by one point. Sigh!

Afterwards we drove back to the Great Mall for drinks and games at Dave and Buster’s. Debbi had some cards for the games which still had a significant number of credits, so we played a bunch of games, won a bunch of credit tickets, and we were all able to end up with some prize toys to take home.

We wrapped up the day with dinner at a Mexican restaurant near home, which was yummy and filling as usual.

It was nice to relax with friends and just have a good time with no worries (especially since I ended up going in to work today to try to finish up a project), and to play some games that are completely different from my usual strategy-oriented games (like Magic, poker, and board games). We ought to do this more often.

Gamed Out

I’m feeling gamed out right now. I’ll probably get over it soon. 🙂 But I’m happy for a break for the rest of the week.

Sunday I went over to Lee’s to play poker. We played our usual low-stakes no-limit cash game, with 5¢/10¢ blinds and a $10 buy-in. Five hours later I was out $20 (I rebought once). It’s not the loss of the $20 I lament, it was my crappy luck and my not-much-better play.

The defining moment of the evening came just half an hour in when, I drew a pair of Kings, and lost almost my whole buy-in to Lee when he slopped a set of Eights. Lee suggested that I should have re-raised him when he raised my initial bet before the flop, which makes sense; it would have been a reasonable pot to take down right there. But I didn’t, and I ended up pushing on the turn, and obviously didn’t river a miracle.

Anyway, I rebought, but things kept going downhill. I won a few small pots shortly after rebuying, and at one point I did flop a set of Kings. But those were small consolation.

Adam suggests that I should play more aggressively, and also loosen my standards of what cards I play, since he points out that when I open a pot, he knows I tend to have high cards, and he can play low cards against me profitably. So that’s something to think about. It’s awfully hard to look at Q-7 and play it, though; what sort of a flop am I hoping to hit?

Monday a bunch of us gathered at Subrata’s to play Magic. We did a Ravnica draft (one person arrived late and assembled a Ravnica sealed deck to play with us on roughly even footing). I ended up with what I usually seem to end up with in Ravnica: A blue-green deck with a splash of a third color. I ran out of energy around 11 pm, so I only played against Adam and Subrata, winning against Adam and narrowly losing against Subrata (who always seems to end up drafting the most powerful guildmages in the block – I don’t think I’ve ever had the opportunity to grab one).

So that was fun. I’d like to do a 7- or 8-person Time Spiral draft sometime soon.

But maybe not this week.

Mixed Blessing

I’m enjoying my return engagement with Magic: The Gathering lately, but it is sometimes a drag to have to organize draft sessions, and although I could conceivably go play at a nearby store, I doubt Debbi would want me vanishing for, say, every other Friday evening to do so.

So then, there’s Magic Online, which supports drafts and constructed and all that good stuff. So I could conceivably play while sitting around watching baseball or having a quiet afternoon.

Except, of course, according to the FAQ it’s not supported on the Mac. So I’d need to run Windows to play it. And besides my fundamental distaste for Windows, I don’t want to lay out money to get Windows just to be able to play Magic.

Besides which, I could probably spend a lot of money and time there, both of which are arguably better spent elsewhere. At least playing Magic with actual cards is a social activity.

Sigh.

On the bright side, Starcraft II is going to be released for both Mac and PC. And it’s probably at least a year out (no release date has been announced), so sinking time into it is not imminent.

Insanity Week

The latest semi-irregular round-up of my life since I haven’t been posting regularly lately.

For most of my co-workers, this is insanity week.1 For me, last week was insanity week, and it had nothing to do with work, which has actually been quite reasonable for me lately (read: I’m not actually presenting anything at WWDC).

Last week was nuts for a lot of little reasons, and most of it revolved around gaming:

Last weekend I had wanted to host a Magic booster draft, but I wasn’t able to get enough interest, so it didn’t happen. That bummed me out. So I made plans to host again this past Saturday, since Debbi was going to be busy from late morning to mid-afternoon. Unfortunately, a couple of people couldn’t make it until mid-afternoon, which made the whole thing questionable.

Meanwhile, my new(ish) friend Lee wanted to host poker on Thursday, which I was also into, but for quite a while it looked like we might not have enough for that either. I eventually recruited my friend James for poker, and we jointly twisted my co-worker Daniel’s arm, so we had 7 people on Thursday, which was nice. We played a mini-tournament and I finished 4th (i.e. “just out of the money, again”), mainly because I took a couple of bad beats when I was the big stack which crippled me. (When I call an all-in bet with my A-9 and my short-stacked opponent turns over A-9 too, and then makes a flush on the river, I think that’s a bad beat.) But I mostly think I played very well, never going all-in until my final hand when I was forced to, and playing with the big stack for quite a while, which was fun. I certainly made some mistakes, but I managed to get away from them. No doubt a close assessment of my play would still make me appear as a newbie, but I was pretty happy.

And then on Saturday we played Magic, specifically the Mirrodin block, which is artifact-based, and which was new to all of us. Again, we had 7 people, and it was a lot of fun. A very interesting block to play. I ended up with a better-than-average deck, I think, with a couple of bombs, but a few weaknesses, too. I got very lucky a couple of times while playing, but then, that’s part of what makes it fun!

Unfortunately, Lee ended up getting sick and wasn’t able to make it, so he still hasn’t been over to see my house and meet the kitties. But we might get together with him and his wife sometime outside of gaming time to make that happen.

So all the gaming turned out well, but it took a lot of time and energy to organize it than it seemed like it ought to have taken. I guess that’s life sometimes. It reminds me why I’m less willing to take on ongoing organizational tasks like the fantasy baseball league these days, though.

Meanwhile, the first weekend we ended up going to a little party thrown by my friend Lucy, whom I haven’t seen in quite a while. It was a party with a Tiki theme and revolving around her writerly friends, but Debbi and I had a great time anyway (by which you can infer that my writing has not been going so well lately). I drank more alcohol at it than I have in quite a while, and was glad Debbi was willing to drive home when we packed it in late in the evening.

And then I had to read the book for last night’s book discussion, Karl Schroeder’s Lady of Mazes, which I kept putting off and then had to frantically finish up Sunday afternoon. Review forthcoming. Okay, this hole I dug myself. But still.

My weekend wrapped up with the discussion itself – which ran about 30 minutes long – and then packing up some stuff I sold on eBay so I could mail it today. And then, whew! My crazy week was over. Fun (mostly), but very tiring.

So anyway, yeah. Now it’s WWDC. I’ll be working in the labs a few days this week, answering questions for folks. Not as easy as it sounds: The questions can be difficult, and there’s a lot of working in-depth with folks to figure out how to do what they need to do. So it’s mentally pretty tiring. But it’s nice to see people out there using the code I’ve written. If you happen to be at the conference, feel free to stop by and say “hi”! (Which would be an interesting change of pace, since I’ve never experienced WWDC as a social event, as I know some people do. I’ve always assumed this is because Mac programming is my vocation, not my hobby, but I don’t really know why. Of course, it takes some effort for me to experience science fiction conventions as social events rather than geeking-out-in-my-own-headspace events, so it’s probably just me.)

(1 It’s not really insanity week, it’s just a very busy week, and many of them enjoy it very much. But it is a very different week from the other 51 weeks in the year.)

PokerWiki

PokerWiki is – you guessed it – a wiki for all things poker. It’s actually an impressive resource. For instance, it has a map of casinos in the Bay Area. Also, it appears that local casinos don’t spread No Limit Hold ‘Em because it’s illegal in Santa Clara County (according to the Bay 101 entry), and maybe in the state (according to the Lucky Chances entry).

I’ll have to dig into this site more deeply.

WMDs

A rundown of our day playing a Worst Magic Deck tournament.

That’s “WMDs” as in “Worst Magic Decks”. This is another geeky MTG post, so if you’re not interested in such things, move along. 🙂

Over the weekend Subrata and I went over to the house of our friends Ziggy and Laurie to participate in a little informal Worst Magic Deck tournament. The idea is to construct a 75-card Magic deck which is worse than all of the others at the tournament. The deck construction rules required a 75-card deck with exactly 30 lands, at least 20 creatures, a total power of all non-defender creatures of at least 40, and at least 10 direct-damage cards, as well as requirements about being able to play all the cards in the deck using basic lands, as well as a few other constraints. This still left a lot of wiggle room, however.

While putting together my deck, I ended up setting certain ground rules for myself: No creatures with evasion (flying, protection, shadow); no creatures with repeatable effects (especially direct-damage effects, but also tap/untap effects); creatures should be expensive, but since I expected games would go on a long time this shouldn’t be a primary requirement; be careful with effects which affect all players, since they might produce a win in certain circumstances, even if they’re generally not useful; and fill out the deck with completely useless cards. (Cards which involved snow-covered lands from Ice Age were particularly amusing.)

Despite applying some similar principles, Subrata and I ended up with rather different decks: His creature power was tied up in a few large-but-restricted creatures (Force of Savagery, Leviathan, Goblin Mutant, Orgg, etc.), filling out the balance of his creatures with walls. I also had a Force of Savagery, but I filled out my remaining creatures with weenies (1/1s, 2/1s, 3/1s) and a Norin the Wary. The more I think about it, the more I feel the two approaches are almost equal: My deck is more likely to get out useful attackers, but Subrata’s deck’s walls are also easy to get out, and are good blockers. I think over the long haul my deck is likely to be slightly worse, but only slightly.

Subrata and I both misunderstood that you only need 30 lands, not 30 basic lands; you only need as many basic lands as are needed to cast all your spells. So we could have downgraded our decks a bit that way.

The structure of the tournament is that each of us played with or against our own decks, only the other peoples’ decks. We would get a point whenever we personally won a game, or whenever our deck lost a game.

My first game lasted about an hour, as I played Ziggy’s deck against Subrata’s, and managed to take out both of the big threats in Subrata’s deck early, and then bided my time until I drew cards I could win with. Laurie, my opponent, eventually ran out of cards, although by that point I had two other tricks in the works that would have finished her off. (Subrata and I also both rigged our decks so they’d be more likely to run out of cards first, which is a losing condition in Magic. He was more aggressive about it then I was, but on the other hand you could choose not to use the spells in his deck which ripped through your library, whereas I took the subtle approach of using creatures with cantrips. I suspect my approach would be slightly more effective in the long run, but the difference is probably too small to be worth arguing about.

The best game I played was against Subrata, playing Laurie’s deck against Ziggy’s. Subrata’s initial draw included an Ankh of Misha, a Winter Orb, and a Sheltered Valley, with a Torture Chamber not far behind. Subrata said it felt like playing a standard control deck. (I had rejected both the Ankh and the Orb from my own deck for exactly this sort of reason.) This shut me down for a while, but eventually I was able to force Subrata to use the Chamber a few times to kill some of my creatures, and then I played a 4/4 flyer (with a significant but not insurmountable drawback) which managed to do just enough damage to finish him off – with me at 3 life. Subrata observed that his initial draw gave him too many options, and he played them all, and they interfered with each other just enough to let me squeak past for the win. But man, it was close!

I think both Subrata and I had weaker decks than either Laurie or Ziggy, although they were all pretty bad. When our decks faced off, my deck beat Subrata’s by one turn, because Laurie drew the right card at the right time to finish off Ziggy. That notwithstanding, I ended up winning the match, since I won 2 games and my deck lost 2 games. People also found my deck especially amusing, as I abused the format to render several cards (such as Extirpate, an otherwise really nifty card) entirely useless.

I thought the WMDs were an interesting novelty, but as I’d predicted, they made for a lot of long games without a lot of variation. I think if I were to run my own such tournament, I’d go with the standard 60 cards rather than 75, just to speed things up a little. I don’t know that I’ll feel the need to play this format again anytime soon, but it was an interesting mental exercise the one time. (And we had a good afternoon hanging out with friends and seeing their cool house.)