I'd like to tell you we counted cards or played poker or blackjack in a big casino, where we saw fortunes made and lost while coolly sipping our drinks at the bar, waiting our turn, but mostly we sat in event centers at one of hundreds of fold-up tables, elbow to elbow with our neighbors, flicking the card sleeves as we nervously passed the cards from one hand to the other.
I'd like to tell you that I had been serious about playing competitively long before meeting my partner-in-crime and at-the-time boyfriend, Jace, but realistically I had only played casually at best in high school, and I picked up the game as a way to spend a little more time with him.
Mostly, I'd like to tell you we weren't playing Magic The Gathering.
For those of you not dorky enough to know what that is, it's a strategy card game with a base set of rules, and then a large number of cards. The rules of the game more or less continue to change according to what cards are in play. Another way to imagine it would be "what if you could play chess but players could choose to use 4 knights instead of 2 knights and 2 bishops" but with literally many thousands of such options.
Without getting too far into the game, there are three kinds of competitive decks: control, combo, and aggro. Aggro decks start strong but lose in the long game. Combo decks do almost nothing, but then via a carefully engineered combination of things, suddenly blow up and win, generally in the mid game. They're irreparably screwed if you remove enough chunks of the combinations which make them tick. Control decks win by interfering with the other two in the early and mid games, then cleaning up the late game.
Flick. Flick. Flick. Flick. Jace held his cards in the other hand now. Flick. Flick. Flick. Flick, they were in the first hand again, impatient as ever.
He sighed, "Would you pay attention?"
"Why do so many people around here play control?"
"Better players play control."
"No, you play control."
"Not at all of the bigger tournaments."
There was a pause.
"Control decks," he explained, "are full of choices of when to stop your opponent and when to permit their actions and save your energy for a bigger threat. Simpler decks have less choices. Every time you have a choice, you choose what to do and your opponent chooses how to respond. Each of you has many choices. The better player will make good choices more often than the dumber player. This means that if you believe you're the better player, you want to force as many choices into the equation as possible, and wait for the dumber player to mess up. It decreases how much you count on luck, and increases how much you count on skill."
Jace almost always played control. I almost never did. It meant that he almost always did better at the small tournaments, but that at the end of a lot of the big tournaments where we played tiring rounds for 6 hours straight against some really good players, that the final scores were often in my favor.
It took me a long time to realize this lesson applied outside of a card game, but basically it applies to almost any zero-sum game: contract negotiation, trading, haggling: the rules are the same. When I'm the more clever one we lay out huge lists of options, and generally at the end I come out with something that normally would have been rejected if suggested outright. When I'm not, I explain that my hands are tied, that this is all I have been permitted by my peers to offer, or in Hong Kong, I'd fall back on the language barrier and pretending to not understand complicated offers. It doesn't make you instantly win, but it makes you very hard to completely scam.
At the end of the day, you can't force people to make good or bad choices, but you can present them with the right number of choices to benefit you.
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