In my last article, I briefly touched on the topic of losing. I could have written another 6000 words on it, but I feel it warrants its own article. Whenever I played a game with my father as a kid, he would always tell me

“When you win, say nothing. When you lose, say less.”

(Quote attributed to Paul Brown)

This quote has a lot to say about being a graceful winner, and it’s something that’s always going to stick with me. Plenty has been written about the etiquette of winning and losing, when to extend your hand for the post-game handshake, and whether saying “good game” is offensive or not. I’m not going to get into that, because this article isn’t called the Etiquetteworker.

What I would love to talk about in this article is another quote from Paul Brown:

“You can learn a line from a win and a book from a defeat.”

Rather than talking about how we act towards each other in the wake of a win or loss, I’d love to throw some thoughts out there about what we do in the wake of a win or loss, and how it shapes us as players.

Before we get into this, I’d like to make a few things clear – I lose a lot of games in almost every format. I lose in modern playing combo elves. I lose in Frontier playing Jeskai Ascendancy. I lose in limited playing an archetype I shouldn’t be forcing (in fact, I’ve never won a draft). I lose about 3/4 of all the games of Commander I play.

Commander’s kind of unique, though, because a win percentage of 25% is actually about average. All things being equal (decks, skill of pilots, and luck), across a sufficient number of 4-player games, each individual player will end up winning approximately 1/4 of the games. Put another way, each player, on average, loses 3 out of every 4 games they play. They lose 3 times more often than they win.

This week, rather than doing a deck spotlight or a case study, I’d like to go over some of the things I see in games (as well as some of the things I see myself doing in games).

When someone starts winning, the loser’s phone comes out.

I think I see this more than I see any of the other behaviours I’m going to talk about today. The player who’s behind a couple land drops or just had their board wiped asymetrically whips out their smartphone and starts texting their friends or browsing memes. When play comes around to them, they’re totally oblivious to the board state and make hasty, uninformed decisions because they’ve already convinced themselves they’re going to lose.

What should you be doing?