Read all of this post at Steve’s Blog
It was the second day of a Grand Prix. I was doing poorly, playing poorly, but I was trying to stay level-headed. During a conversation with a friend in the middle of the day, something they mentioned made me quite uncomfortable. I was a bit perturbed, but not only that, I found myself disappointed-not just in my friend but in myself and the community as a whole.
You see, my friend had been watching a feature match. According to them, “some rando” was playing against a known professional player. My friend proceeded to inform me about how this player had played unbelievable poorly. Not only that, but he continued his tirade about how this player was an “idiot” that couldn’t even sequence his lands and made incorrect plays every turn. My best guess of the point of the story was to explain to me that this person was undeserving, foolish, but yet still somehow won.
What really ignited an unknown anger within me was that this was not the first person to tell me a similar story that day. In retrospect, this was the third time that day that someone I had considered a friend bad mouthed their opponent, or another player to me. Is this commonplace? Certainly I’d been bombarded with bad beat stories before, but how frequently had I stood by as one of my peers belittled another behind their back?
