The phrase “top player” and it’s usage in the Pokemon TCG community is toxic and you need to remove it from your vocabulary if you want to become whatever you believe a “top player” is.
Every time you assume the top x spots at a tournament or even now the top x spots for worlds invites are all but guaranteed to go to the “top players”, you separate yourself from these “top players” and intrinsically admit defeat.
Everyone goes into the tournament with equal opportunity to succeed as of round 1. Your outcome is some form of:
(Deck Archetype chosen) x (Deck List) x (In-game decisions / Precision) x (pairings) x (natural variance)
Theoretically, anyone can pick the right deck, put a close to optimal 60 together, hit pairings that don’t grief their tournament, play better than their opponents (or misplay less than their opponents), and circumvent luck to a reasonable extent.
Self Fulfilling Prophecy
A self-fulfilling prophecy is an expectation or belief that can influence your behaviors, thus causing the belief to come true. The idea behind a self-fulfilling prophecy, also known as the Pygmalion effect, is that your belief about what will happen drives the actions that make that outcome ultimately come to pass. If you expect everything to go wrong, you might put in less effort or fail to take steps that could turn things around, which means that expecting the worst brings out the worst.
Self-fulfilling prophecies can significantly impact behaviors, beliefs, attitudes, and motivation.
Examples of Self-fulfilling prophecies:
believing you will do poorly on an exam and then failing the test.
thinking that you won't get the job and then not getting it.
getting paired against a “top player” and assuming you will lose because they have more accomplishments than you
Having a 3-2-1 record in a tournament and assuming you won’t win the next 3 rounds to make day 2 because you’re not good enough
Not trying to get a worlds invite because you think there are 125 people who deserve it more than you
If you keep expecting things to go wrong, you will likely sabotage yourself. However, if you start believing things will turn out well, you'll be more likely to take action and bring about positive change in your life.
Reality is a mirror
As a student, graduate, and enthusiast of the social sciences and studies of pseudoscience, I believe in the power of positive manifestations.
Your reality is a mirror and reflects back to you what you give it. If you say you’re stuck in a dead end job, will never amount to anything, will never have a girlfriend, will never win anything, etc - you will likely confirm these thoughts with actions and behaviors.
I’ll use a personal example:
This past April, I decided that I wanted to win the Orlando regional championships. It had been years since I even top 32’d a regionals, longer since I top 16’d, and my placements so far this season had been top 128, top 64, and top 64.
Leading up to the event when asked what I was going to play, my answer was whatever I though would win the tournament at the time. For a few weeks leading up to EUIC I was going to play Pidgeot Control, but after EUIC I took Tord’s charizard list, changed a couple cards, and grinded that.
Deciding that I wanted to win this event ahead of time influenced my ambition to practice and my organization to be prepared for the event. Side note: most of the tournament happens before the tournament: the matchup concepts, deck choice, deck list, teching, metagaming, etc.
I knew that not winning Orlando regionals would likely mean I didn’t prepare enough or practice enough or play well enough - and in the event I got severely unlucky at least I would know I practiced and prepared enough. Side note: my deck choice and deck list was largely chosen to circumvent variance and allow myself to play myself out of most situations.
Throughout day 1 and day 2 of Orlando regionals, my plan was to just win. Even when my pairings were against names like Diego Cassiraga, William Azevedo, Pedro Pertusi, Josh Frink, Liam Halliburton - I went into every round with the intention to “just win”. When asked about future rounds or how many more wins do I need to be able to ID, my only focus was on the round ahead of me and I said “I will win” because I believed I would win.
Now, I’m not saying that blind belief you will win is going to make you win - its what I call deserved confidence. If you are confident in your practice, your preparation, your deck and deck list, your matchup concepts, your mental fortitude to make in-game decisions, evaluations, and educated guesses, you theoretically deserve that confidence - and I had checked all the boxes for myself.
I ended day 1 at 8-1, and day 2 at 12-1-2 which was 1st seed at the largest regional championships ever. Unfortunately I lost to a favored matchup in top 8, which is still a foggy match for me to remember and I definitely think my mental fortitude and general fatigue cost me this match - even though Jake and I both recall my deck being severely uncooperative with me.
So I did NOT win the event, but I won a heck of a lot of games and placed 5th out of 2400 people, not bad for some positive manifestation. Had I not told myself I would win the event, I could win the event, I deserved to win the event, I had all the necessary skills to win the event… I may not have pushed myself to practice and had the ambition to practice and held myself to the standard of play which I did that weekend.
Conclusion
It doesn’t matter who is a top player or if anyone thinks you are a top player. Go win a tournament and show everyone youve been a “top player” the whole time. I promise once you believe in yourself and manifest success, you won’t even be thinking about who is a top player anymore.
I’ll be writing more here, probably a mix of mental lessons like this one, metagaming, deck lists, etc. Thanks for reading!