A friend and I entered a local Magic the Gathering tournament. I had just taught him how to play, and he had picked up a few cards of his own and talked me into giving it a shot.

I sat down across from my opponent and watched him peel the plastic off of a deck that he just bought, and pummeled me with a pre built elf synergy deck.

My friend got stuck in a neverending healing token deck. He couldn’t do enough damage to break all the healers, and the healer didn’t have anything strong enough to get past his defenses, they just sat there dealing and healing infinite damage for what felt like forever.

I was pretty much over the game by the end of the day.

Went to a local smash tournament with my friends a while ago now and it became apparent to me that I was really good among my friends, but the worst at a tournament lmao.

I travel to Combo Breaker every year and enter a whole bunch of games. This year I was able to up my travel budget for both CB and Frosty Faustings. Some of them are games I consider myself decent at, some of them are games I just hop in casually for fun. And then there’s the Mystery Bracket, where every round is something you’ve probably never heard of and the goal is to figure out what’s happening before your opponent does - it’s the highlight every year. Back in 2022, I even TO’d and commentated the side tournament for Puyo Puyo Champions, and I got roped into filling in on commentary for Panel de Pon.

In a double elimination bracket, 25% of players will go 0-2. If this is your first time entering, you should expect to be one of them. And you shouldn’t let that stop you from going to have a good time! Majors are basically conventions that happen to have brackets at them, and that bracket will only be a small fraction of your time all weekend. Get as many casual sets in as you can before/after bracket, check out the arcade room, buy some trinkets with your favorite characters on them from the artist alley, watch finals, go out to dinner with rivals you’d only ever spoken to online before and finally get to meet in person. Oh, and come to the mahjong tables where you’ll find me promoting this strangely unexpected venn diagram intersection.

And that’s just what majors are like. If you have any kind of local FGC, go to your locals! Don’t just sit at home playing ranked, get out of the house and meet people!

You don’t have to do massive or big tournaments - go small instead! More fun and way less pressure. I’ve done a few ttrpg tournaments at GenCon and another few at my LFGS. My sister sometimes did small local puzzle tournaments like for KenKen and Sudoku.

I participated in a local Unreal Tournament competition and won $3k. Was $75 buy in and I think I got somewhat lucky in my match placement. Was allowed to do this solo at 14 🤣.

Lots of terrible players in my bracket while I watched the best pick each other off on the other half. Took second honestly by sitting back and picking off kills from others engagements 🤷‍♂️.

I did CAL P on in the CS1.6 era with middling success.

I barely can get high in the mid tier leagues today. Too much specialization, meta, guns, characters, and the playing field is literally thousands of times bigger.

I’ve traveled the world playing tournaments for a little bit. Won a few. Crashed out in some others…

The big conventions feel insanely cool. It’s like you’re in the game but irl. You are walking down the elevator of your hotel and it feels like just being in the game when you are surrounded by people that you with. It’s super cool having people come up and hug you and you go “oh who’s this?” And it often turns out it’s people that you have shared hundreds of hours with.

The actual competition I’ve always felt it’s all about who can play the least bad. As far as I could tell. Everyone plays worse on stage. For a multitude of reasons. At the end I was playing extremely chill and care free and it showed in the results.

Also something less obvious. Tournaments always developed their own meta. Which I always heard comments from people from home “why didn’t you follow this meta thing. Why did you play such weird strategies?”. It’s because truly if there’s a big competition going on. Everyone good is there. And it’s not even worth getting practice on the normal servers. You have to scrim over and over the people there and that develops its own meta.

Is it worth it? Uhhh. I’ll always cherish those memories. They were truly great years. But I would say for me nah. Not worth it. I’ve always wanted my career and life to be about some other things. And as much fun and surprisingly how well it all paid. I don’t think it was worth the many years I spent doing that and nothing else.

Amazing memories though.

I been competing in fighting game tournaments for over a decade. Its a blast, even if you suck. The fighting game community is one of the most welcoming competitive environments I’ve ever been apart of. 10/10, highly recommend.

I used to play WoW 5v5 arena competitively in 2007. This was way before they went hard on e-sports so it’s not really comparable to today. Just to give you some perspective, the winning team at blizzcon got $25k which meant $5k each which (again, only in case of winning the world championship) would’ve just so covered my travel costs.

Honestly it was terrible. At first I used to play for fun and only accidentally ended up in a top team. Then my team got way too ambitious and it became more of a chore. I told them early on that I had no interest in playing like that but they couldn’t find a replacement so I kept playing with them until I was fully burned out. It was nice being good at something but it ruined the fun of it.

For a while I was part of the number one raiding guild on the server with the worst progression in WoW.

Wyrmrest Accord, you were great.

So I got that going for me, I was among the best of the worst for a couple months!

Never did like pro level (and never had aspirations to do so), but way back in the day, the Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL) had an amateur league fittingly called the Cyberathelete Amateur League (CAL), we had a small team for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars that we competed in, didn’t do stellar but it was a blast, met people from other teams we’d often practice with or just do pub games.

It was total beer league type stuff, if you can find a group like that imo it’s worth it, would love to have that type of experience again, end the day stakes were low and we played for fun, people took it serious but not too serious if that makes sense, it’s really easy to kill the enjoyment if someone takes it too far though.

Yes. I have. Thank you for asking.

I joined a rocket league tournament at a comic-con! But the servers went down just as we were about to play, lol, so I never got to try

To answer the question I think you are asking: No, I’ve never done any of the modern game competitions or leagues. I am not nearly good enough to compete against anyone who is remotely good enough to compete in gaming competitions. I’m also a completely different gamer these days and prefer to just play more meditative single player games that have bursts of action.

To answer the question in a very literal way: Yes, back in the 80s I made it to the regional finals of the Nintendo World Championships (at the time when the Fred Savage movie The Wizard had just came out). I was up on stage in the central throne chair with the 100ft TV screen behind me projecting my game to 1000s of people in front of me cheering us on. I was roughly 10?? at the time, so I thought I was fucking amazing. I just barely missed out on making it to the next round in some other state because I screwed up placing a long piece in Tetris. I won a hat out of the thing.

I also played in a Tetris tournament at a bar in LA about 15 years ago. I fucking crushed it and won $100.

2 things come to mind:

The first thing is that at one point many years ago we participated in Rocket League’s RLCS. Participation was completely open. We were actually doing quite well until we randomly ran into pro players and got completely demolished. It’s kinda humbling to know that even though you’re part of the top ~1% of players, pro players are still in a totally different league and absolutely unbeatable. Their speed and game sense is so much better than that of any mere mortal, it’s like we weren’t even there. We were probably low Grand Champion around the time, and we got beaten like we would beat Gold ranked players. Personally I don’t mind losing like this, it’s a good learning experience and shows you how much is possible.

At uni I also participated in plenty of LAN parties that had random game competitions. Usually they were games that a lot of us didn’t ever play before. We’d usually start playing the game a few hours in advance to get a feel for it. There I’ve found that I’m quite decent at this usually, but that there are definitely a few people who can get quite decent at a game in 2 hours to the point that they challenge people with casual experience with the game. It as always good fun though, and because I tended to put some effort into it I regularly managed to get into the top 3.

In the 80s I went to a public event featuring the California Joy Stick; “Joy” referring to the brand of dish soap. There’s probably a more common name for it. It’s a device made of a large fabric loop on a stick with a nut for holding the loop open. You dip it in a solution of water, dish soap, and glycerine, and then open the loop to the breeze or walk with it. You can create bubbles tens of metres long, and wide and tall enough for a person to stand inside. I’m surprised it isn’t still a thing people do, you could easily make one.

There was a bubble making competition. Most of the competitors seemed to be quite casual, but most of them found it fairly easy to be competitive.