Been kind of quiet on the blog front. Part of that has been some major upheaval in my personal life and part of it has been some uncertainty about what direction I am going in or what I would like to write about.
The biggest news is that I am returning to the US. Hopefully this will mean more in person events for the big three of chess, go, and magic, but also for other types of games. I am also interested in pursuing some kind of career in the games industry. One line is to do a masters with C Thi Nguyen at the University of Utah in the philosophy of games. I have a BA in philosophy and he seems to be doing a style of philosophy of games that I can relate to. I was aware of him before and had a copy of his previous book but my wife passed me a link to a podcast where he was the guest talking about his new book. Here it is! I really like a lot of the things he had to say. I really have no idea how realistic an idea it is to get admitted there for that purpose but it is something I want to investigate.
Following the intuition about chess being important I rejoined the dojo and got into an open classical tournament. This is a tournament where you arrange to meet your opponent at a specific time online and play a slow game. I won my first game but have been on a losing streak since then. Did a couple of reviews for games I had played but then kind of got lazy. I made significant progress rereading Chernev’s Logical Chess but other than that haven’t been doing a whole lot of work on my chess.
Still playing over go games trying to finish the supplemental games in Invincible but the pace has definitely been much slacker than it was a few months ago.
Still playing my daily games of chess and go and have avoided timeouts.
My interest in Magic has been picking up again after a lull. Mostly this has expressed itself in terms of watching Nick Button videos on youtube. Nick plays best of three pioneer which is a format that I feel pretty drawn to now that I have been playing Magic long enough that a lot of my cards have rotated out of standard. But I did try brewing up a mono-blue tempo deck based on a standard deck I had played before and liked but the experiment didn’t work out all that well. Other than that this weekend I played a pre-release event at Growlife. I wasn’t super interested in this set but I kind of just wanted to play one more event there before leaving Taiwan. We played in a new space that the owner has rented a couple of blocks away from the main store. It was quite nice. I had a good conversation with someone who has been a significant part of my experience of Magic here who is also moving back to the US soon. But in terms of the gameplay, time management was a big issue. When I first started playing these sealed prereleases I tended to try to read more of my cards and really try to settle on some kind of strategy. However this often resulted in me rushing to finish my deck at the end of the time limit and sometimes delaying the start of the first match. The result is that I have overcorrected and I finished building my deck this time well before the time limit was up but this was because I didn’t put much thought into it. I looked at the rares I had pulled. Decided I liked the blue and geen ones the best, so I just jammed all the creatures I had in those colors and picked a few spells to round out the deck and just said ok. The result was that I went 1-2. And I feel like the victory was kind of lucky because it was against a really good player and he kind of had trouble with his draws and I got lucky with some of mine. Don’t get me wrong, it felt great to beat him, but I am not reading too much into it. Against the other two players my deck looked quite weak. But I guess that is one thing I am kind of hoping about moving back to the US. It seems the people playing these events in Taiwan are pretty good. Part of me is hoping that when I play in the US there will be more of a range of player skill levels so I am not always at the bottom.
