Art by Randy Gallegos
I don’t really like how any of my narratives are coming together for this post, so I’ve decided to post it as-is and acknowledge that it’s a poor read. I’ll follow up later in the week with my personal plan for trying to succeed on Arena. My apologies.
I was not spending a lot of time grinding Arena. I put money into the game to avoid collection grinding. When Ranked first came out, I completely ignored the mode in favor of BO1 Constructed Events to try and secure a few extra staples without using wildcards. Yeah, I put money into the game, but I still don’t want to poorly allocate my resources. I think Event matchmaking was also trying to account for rank, so I could circumvent that extra wrinkle by simply not playing Ranked. Then WotC made some economy adjustments and Event ICRs got nerfed significantly. At that point, I decided to just jump into Ranked. Everyone else was doing it, the gold and packs were some nonzero amount, and I would easily get Mythic and be done with it. I blazed through Bronze and Silver, largely off the back of an incredibly strong win percentage in Mono Red Aggro mirrors. And then, shit starting hitting the fan.
I was wrong. Boy, was I so incredibly wrong. And truthfully, I should have seen it coming. The Ranked ladder adds an extra challenge for me, and almost exclusively me: I have always been an absurdly streaky player, but my winning streaks are not going to be long enough to climb the Arena ladder, notably because I almost always end up going on a larger losing streak.
What does the path from the bottom of Gold 4 to Mythic look like if you stick with only playing best of one? Win percentage over the long haul doesn’t mean a damned thing. Since you can’t demote from Gold to Silver, Platinum to Gold, etc, you can lose 500 games in a row to start off each division four and you can still get to Mythic (Time permitting of course, it takes a LOT of time to lose all those games). On top of that, thanks to promotion protection, you can still actually climb with a sub 50% win rate over the long haul, though the number of games required is completely asinine and will probably lead to reconsidering your life choices. In fact, I can’t really give a cookie cutter example of how many more wins than losses you need to have to promote a division at a specific time and place because nonsense like this could happen: you win your first six games in Gold 4 to promote to Gold 3, then lose four in a row to demote to Gold 4, win again to get back to Gold 3, then lose four in a row again, win to get back to Gold 3, lose three in a row again but finally clutch out a win after your promotion protection fades away. You are now Gold 3, 1/6 steps, even though you are now 9-11 in games played.
Time for some personal history.
Admittedly, very few people know much of anything about my Chess past. Almost everyone knows me from during or after college, periods of time where Magic has been my primary game, followed by League of Legends, followed by pretty much nothing else. I spent a lot of time on chess servers in middle school and high school. I don’t really have a good timeline of events. I remember that I could join either US Chess Live (RIP, but not really) or the Internet Chess Club (ICC) and my eleven year old self got cursed out while playing as a guest on ICC, so the family-friendly USCL was where I started out. USCL died a long time ago and I never saved any of my stats. I did migrate over to the Free Internet Chess Server (FICS) to almost exclusively play Bughouse and Crazyhouse; FICS is pretty much also dead now but here’s what my numbers look like (almost all games were played 2004-2006):
I didn’t bother showing any of my other ratings because none of them mattered.
Oh, by the way, this server used the Glicko rating system. You know, the basis for the rating system used on Arena.
In case it wasn’t clear from the picture, which was honestly more about showing people the interface:
Bughouse 2094 5820-6181-32 12033 games 2188 peak (21-Dec-2006)
Crazyhouse 2109 2505-2160-10 4675 games 2297 peak (03-Nov-2006)
(I snipped out the RD numbers, but those are a part of the Glicko rating system and try to measure rating accuracy. I might write a post about it one day.)
One of the things that used to really, REALLY bother me was that I never hit 2200 in Bughouse or 2300 in Crazyhouse. To be fair, since I’m not actually a very strong chess player (USCF rating is 1513), I don’t think I can truly master Crazyhouse. I figured out at the time that Crazyhouse was/is far more chess-like than people would have liked to admit over a decade ago, so my focus was mostly put on Bughouse. Every time I would get a new best rating, I’d go on a losing streak. Then I’d tread water for a month or two and maybe make another push towards a new best, only to start dropping games. After hitting my actual best Bughouse rating, I immediately dropped 100 points. I just couldn’t keep a favorable streak going and then stay close to even at a higher level. Eventually, I got too upset that I couldn’t be as good as I wanted to be and left the game when I went to college.
At least with paper Magic, you throw enough time and money in the game that walking away can look foolish. The largest casualty from online chess was my time. Now would be a great time to mention that I’m going to pick up Bughouse and Crazyhouse again, right?
Below this paragraph, I have posted a graph from a Crazyhouse puzzle solving website I recently discovered. Each dot is my rating after correctly or incorrectly solving a puzzle. You’ll see that there are a lot of streaks and my downward trends are a freefall compared to my upward trends.
