*Originally published on metafy in 2023*
Preparation
The biggest factor of your tournament is preparation, which comes before the tournament even begins. Preparation will look different for everyone based on your experience, goals, and commitment to the game. Preparation results in confidence, and confidence results in better tournament performance. If you are a competitive player attending events with the goal of doing your best, earning points, and winning - you should prepare until you are confident no matter who or what deck you are playing against. I’m going to stress confidence a lot throughout this article.
People talk about the “mental game” or the “mental aspect” of pokemon tcg… but the entire game is the mental game. If you’re not composed, confident, and aware then you will not play well. This is different from an athletic event like soccer or playing an instrument like guitar in which even if your mental is off, you can still try to push through with your physical skills. In Pokemon TCG if your mental is off, your entire game is off. So prioritize your mental health - and for the sake of pokemon tcg: specifically your self-awareness and confidence.
There are some basic things, but I’ve also come up with sort of “mind hacks” that help me prevent stress and nerves from affecting my tournament performance.
The Basics of Beneficial Mental Health Practices for Pokemon TCG
I have such a poor sleep schedule, I often say that my schedule doesn’t exist. However, I make efforts to correct this up to a week in advance prior to major events. There’s nothing worse for me than going from my typical lifestyle of falling asleep whenever, to 4 AM the morning of the event and I haven’t slept yet. Depending on your work, school, and general life structure it might be challenging to correct this, but do your best to get your body’s rhythm in a spot where you’ll get at least 7 hours of sleep before waking up for tournament day.
I personally don’t like to eat in the middle of a large event, so I enjoy tournaments without lunch breaks. Even so, I make sure to stay hydrated and drink beverages with calories and nutrients in them to keep my body going and also the occasional snack. At the bare minimum, stay hydrated and put some sort of vitamins and calories in your body. I really like Mio energy to put in bottled water because it has both caffeine and vitamin B12.
This isn’t a psych class, but I want to make sure my readers are aware of Automatic Thoughts. Automatic thoughts are negative self-talk that happens automatically in response to a task, obstacle, or other thought. A Pokemon-related example of an automatic thought would be “You can’t beat this person” or “you will lose round 1” or “You’re going to misplay”. The most important thing to know about these thoughts is that they are typically irrational. If you’ve ever been in a dream that seemed real, but you noticed something that identified it as being a dream, you can tackle these negative thoughts the same way. Automatic thoughts are anxious, negative, and self-attacking - and most importantly will typically have little to no logical grounds to stand on. Identify that the negative self-talk doesn’t have reasoning or logic as to why you will lose or misplay, and shut it down. It’s easier said than done, but this is the start to shutting down those intrusive anxious thoughts that will affect your game.
My “Mind Hacks” for Pokemon TCG
These are the ways I control my state of mind and circumvent nerves and stress. The way we look at things and perceive things is really everything. Reality is just what we are perceiving, so shifting that perception can make all the difference.
A tournament is nothing but the next X amount of games you will play.
Players will build up a tournament as this huge isolated event and it freaks people out. Think about the last 20 or 30 games you played - the upcoming regional or IC is just like that - just structured differently. Now obviously there are stakes involved, but if we can reach a point where we practice and compete the same way, we can circumvent stress and nerves. In the weeks leading up to your event, log your games - wins and losses are fine but make sure you track how many times you misplay in each game. If you’re not happy with your W/L and/or misplay rates in the last X amount of games, then play X amount of games again and look to improve those rates.
Practice as if you are playing in the tournament, and play in the tournament as if it were practice.
The structure for major events is 9 fifty minute swiss rounds of best ⅔. To the best of your ability, practice in that structure. Even if you and a friend (or you and your coach) can only get 1 or 2 or 3 rounds in, practice as if you are playing in the tournament which you are preparing for. That means set a timer, that means no friendly banter, that means no taking back or discussing plays, no checking your phone and scrolling twitter - simulate the tournament experience as much as possible and desensitize yourself to it until it’s the norm. And most importantly: play with focus, intent, and all of the stress and nerves you would experience in an event. Make decisions like the regional championship depends on it.
I’ll say it again: Practice like its the tournament, and play the tournament like its practice. This means you should practice until you’d be happy with your practice if it was your tournament performance. Then just replicate that in the tournament… like its practice! This is a training method I used for myself to wrap up worlds invites at NAIC 18 and NAIC 19 which were last-chance high-stress events for me. They were made much easier because I practiced with timers and with weight in all of my games and decisions, so I was able to replicate that in the tournament with confidence.
Take it one round 1 at a time. Do your best not to think about rounds 2-9 - put all your focus in round 1, then round 2, then round 3, etc.
Why is Confidence so Important?
What if we were as good as the twitch chat? Funny to think about, but spectators are often quick to jump on misplays and identify the correct lines of play. What makes the spectator so much better than the player? Well, the player is in a high-stress environment. There is spectator bias due to different environments and different stakes.
Without fail, players will finish a round and begin to recollect on mistakes they made. Most of the time, the player hasn’t learned anything new between the time between the round ending and 5 minutes later when they identify their mistakes… So why did they make the mistake? Well the stressful environment of being in a tournament is typically the culprit. But the ability to identify mistakes should give you all the confidence you need to not make those mistakes. Its pretty paradoxical the more you think about it, but essentially you need to enter the state of post-match clarity while still in the match, or another way to think about it is entering the state of someone with spectator bias outside of the match.
Become vulnerable and put all of your preparation on the table. Let go of your reflective self-consciousness and be fully enveloped in the game.
“Reflection is a precondition for self-critical deliberation. If we are to subject our different beliefs and desires to a critical, normative evaluation, it is not sufficient simply to have immediate first-personal access to the states in question” (Edmund Husserl - Austrian-German philosopher).
You can take from this quote what you will, but my interpretation is that immediately using your self reflection in the moment is inefficient and harmful. It is like reading the first piece of evidence in a case without taking an objective and subjective look at the full picture and context. In a game of pokemon cards, you should trust yourself; your preparation. To do this you need confidence, and you need control to push away those second guesses, self-doubt, and automatic thoughts. It all comes back to proper practice and desensitizing yourself to the tournament experience. Begin to practice like you’re at the tournament, and you’ll compete at the tournament like it is simply practice.
How Do I Build Confidence
Of course, one of the answers is practice. But my last piece of advice is matchup conceptualizations, which sound more complicated than it needs to be.
Writing these matchup concepts do two things: 1. If you’re having trouble writing a matchup concept that means you need to play the matchup until you understand it more, and 2. Once you’ve completed a matchup concept for a matchup and you can follow it logically and confirm this information is relevant and accurate, you have this entire plan ready for when you come up against this matchup - therefore you can confidently make decisions from the “playbook” in your head. I suggest keeping these concepts on paper or on a second monitor when you’re testing at home online until you can recall the concepts without looking at them.
Template for Matchup Concepts:
Ideal turn 1 board/plays
Ideal turn 2 board/plays
What is my opponent trying to do on turn 1 and 2?
What is my ideal prize map? What are ways the opponent can play around this?
What is my opponent’s ideal prize map? How can I play around it?
Are there any long-term plans I can set up early in the game and finish later (think damage spread combos)
Important techs for the matchup
Techs the opponent might have that I should watch out for
Specific lines of play that frequently lead to wins
Specific lines of play that are risky and shouldn’t be done unless theres no other option (remember that passing or using a support attack like Cleffa’s grasping draw can often let you “take a turn off” instead of overextending.
I spend most of my productive time developing evidence based systems that work and teaching them. I’ve recently published an all-inclusive masterclass that teaches in-game skills, mental fundamentals, and how to unlock your potential with confidence loops and proven systems for simplifying in-game decisions. This course features over 5 hours of lessons and examples, and you can check it out here: https://metafy.gg/courses/view/the-competitive-pokemon-tcg-masterclass-6RvXauR74sv