Mmm, crow. Boy do I love to eat crow. Heck, at Thanksgiving, I always carve up some delicious crow instead of a turkey. For those unfamiliar with this idiotic idiom, here's what it means. "Humility due to admitting wrongness, or due to being proven wrong, after taking a strong position." What's that got to do with eating a dirty little black bird?

Well, ask Ruyard Kipling. He wrote a delightful allegory called "The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes". The long and short of it is, some guy is trapped with some other guy in some kind of sand pit and they can't get out. The other guy is catching crows and eating them to stay alive, while our buddy Mr. Jukes proclaims that he will never eat crow. Then he ate crow. Literally and, in that moment so coining the idiom, managed to do so figuratively as well. Ruyard Kipling also wrote The Jungle Book, but it ain't got nothin' on this story. I do suppose singing bears make a better childrens' musical than a few guys eviscerating birds and devouring them.

Alright, so what on Earth have singing bears and eviscerated birds got to do with Magic? Well, aside from a terrible lack of the former, we'll go back to why we're talking about "eating crow". I find that most Magic players, either players, traders, or both, have a really hard time admitting when they're wrong. That's true of most of the population at large. Most of our society's systems are designed to make it expensive, painful, or humiliating to be wrong. What happened when you got a question wrong in school? You got a lower grade. Answer too many questions wrong, and you get a bad grade for the course. Then your mom yells at you and grounds you, which further reinforces your fears of being wrong.

Being Wrong Happens

It will happen. If you don't see any mistakes, you're not looking hard enough. If you claim to be "good" at what you do, yet you find many people who are significantly better at what you do than you are, then you need to re-evaluate the things you believe to be right, or make sure that you haven't got a blind spot that's keeping you from seeing a particularly foolish mistake. Come hell or high water, you'll eventually realize, "Hey! I screwed up!"

Accepting the eventuality of wrongness, especially your own, will make you more sympathetic to the incorrectness found in others. After all, if you're sometimes wrong, then other people must also make mistakes. Thus, why can't we all just forgive each other and just give positive feedback without getting defensive?

This happens so frequently around the beginning of spoiler season that it disgusts me. The cycle goes like this. A card is spoiled. In their rush to be "first", and enshrine their names in Internet History forever, people on Twitter, Facebook, forums, and around the FNM tables make snap judgments and share them with the world. It turns out that the average Magic player has absolutely no idea what he's talking about. I would suggest doing an analysis of forum comments pro-or-con for a card and compare that to its historical prices. I'd suggest that, but I'd also suggest that you just consider that speculation is a profitable business model that is predicated on the fact that most people aren't right about prices. We know speculation profitable, so we can then infer thatmost people aren't too good with prices. Otherwise, I'd be out of a job.

Here's where this gets very heady and philosophical. The higher up you get in your area of expertise, the more you, ostensibly, need to seem like you know what it is you're supposed to be doing. This is something most often seen in academia. While most researchers should be actively seeking theories to disprove, many are fueled by the need to develop marketable drugs and publish papers rather than focusing on asking "how are we wrong, and how wrong are we?"

That's a new concept for many people. Many people think like Magic players. There's the right play, and there's every other play. This works in Magic, theoretically, but not so much in the rest of life. We need to understand both the matter and magnitude of our mistakes. It's often better to let small mistakes go and focus on the big picture, but you must balance that with an attention to detail, so you can tell if your small mistakes are actually bigger than initially believed.

Let's assume that we suspend the common notion that there is one best play and all other plays. We know that might not be true. It's true in theory, because it doesn't address the possibility of a player's information being restricted. If you were a very talented player with perfect information, you could probably do a mathematical proof that would demonstrate the correct play. Most people can't think that fast or derive enough information quickly enough to make a play without getting a slow play penalty. That's because most people are, well...most people. That means it's more than likely that you, the reader, are one of those people. So let's tell the theory to pound sand, and let's talk practical.

One Correction Offsets One Mistake

There's no "points system" in real life. Yes, mistakes can lose money and such, but there are no "hard rules". You don't "foul out". If anything, it's a balancing game. If we focus on the mistakes that can be quantified, mistakes like "I lost a $20 bill", we can then focus on how correction of behavior can be quantized. Let's say that you've been carrying your money in a money clip for 2 years now, and this is the first time you've lost money. By correcting your tool, the money clip, to secure your bills, you're basically making back that $20 you lost.

What?

Think of it this way; let's assume that you lose $10 a year because your money clip was loose. Thus, after 2 years of secure money, you'll have prevented the next loss of $20. If we assume that an uncorrected mistake will reoccur with some frequency in the future, we can either budget for it, or prevent it. Why not just prevent it? Well, let's say that we lose $10 a year because of a loose money clip. What if a new clip or wallet is $20? Why not just take the hit? Sure, it's nice to have a new wallet, but from a sheer "risk management" standpoint, it's pretty much a push until thenext 2 years elapse.

When you realize that mistakes can be quantified and then predicted, a lot changes. Most people don't want to face the truth about their shortcomings, since it's tough to admit you are wrong. But the truth is, being honest with yourself about things means that you'll improve.

There was a man, quite overweight, who wanted to lose weight. Not uncommon. This man knew that in business, what gets measured gets managed, so he began to measure his weight and graph it. He made no other changes to his lifestyle whatsoever. He simply indicated a min/max weight band on his graph to see if that would make him make changes. It did. Without even realizing it, he corrected his behavior automatically. What are you measuring in Magic? Probably not enough. Magic is a game of iteration. You should be measuring your win/loss ratio in relevant situations. I'd suggest PTQ level or higher.

This will show you just how bad your mistakes were. You can evaluate how many times you let a match go 3 games when you should have won in 2. You can also see how your W/L percentage changes when you play more Game 3s or do more 2-0 wins. The list goes on. Once you have this data, you can start figuring out how many games you're losing to misplaying. This is where the honesty comes in. Expect that you will make mistakes. Be honest with yourself about how many you make, and then get excited because for each mistake you fix, you kind of "level-up". Each fixed mistake is a step towards mastering your game. You need to look for reasons you lost, reasons you got beat, and ways you could have won. You may say "I'd never have thought to Boomerang the 9th Mountain in case he's holding Banefire (to my Cancel) and topdecks the land he needs to burn me out. This happened to me yesterday. I was a turn from killing him. Would I ever think to do that? Hell no! But now I will.

Turns out that it's really easy to say "I'd never have thought of that". But that play would have won me the game, on the spot. How can I not ask myself, "How can I remember to consider bouncing a land the next time that I'm up against a deck that might have Fireball?" The trick is, I will never forget that story. Every time I put someone on a Fireball type spell, I'll remember the time that Jordan blew me out with Banefire. And I'll not make that mistake again.

Some Crow? Why, I'd Love Some!

Please sir? May I have some more? I need to admit that I really blew it on my Extended portfolio. I just checked in on the current values of the cards and it wasn't pretty. Most everything's actually down. Nothing is up, many are break-evens. The point is, we'd take a loss cashing out, and that's not something we can do yet. Our best bet is to hold these cards till an event and try to catch someone building a deck at the last second.

This just goes to show you that even though my job is to get this stuff right, I still make spectacular failures. That's why my financial advice is never gospel. The thing is, I always end up profitable over the course of a season. One good bet can really beat a ton of crappy bets, and that's because Magic cards rarely go down in price except in the first month of a set's release.

I totally misjudged the Extended metagame. The cards in my list are just not that good against some of the others. In hindsight, I cannot believe I was so loose with my calls. It's embarrassing. Though I made some good notes in my article about the most important cards in Extended, I didn't specify what my targets on those were, made almost no moves on them, and left a lot of money on the table as a result. Shame on me.

I'm glad I screwed this up, because I know that I can use what I've learned to make a much better portfolio for next season. I'll see the "ROI" on this Portfolio 101 class at the School of Run Bad in a year or so, which is just fine by me. $100 now to make $100 a year later seems good. I'm happy, because this is probably a mistake I've made before (I know it is) and it's a mistake I could make again (and I will). The more I mitigate the chances of screwing it up like this, and as badly, the better. Even if I just lose $50 next time, I'm making money. Considering that this has been a recurring mistake, correcting it is just as good as making $50.

How will I adjust my strategy? Well for starters, I'm going to number crunch more deck lists! The crunching from Worlds got me to the right conclusions, but I ignored it since the algorithm was crude. Turns out that following a rough and crude system is way better than making wild prognostications. Next time this happens, I'll have numbers, and once we have numbers, we can start measuring things. See how nicely this correlates to the concepts of probability that many Magic players have mastered?

This should explain why I love being wrong, and often encourage people to just light me up with criticism. When you're not burdened by a fear of being wrong, you realize why some businesspeople call their problems "opportunities". It's because you're currently as good as you are, and you have an opportunity to get even better. Let's say a salesman is converting 90% of his sales. That's really, extremely good. To say that he has a 10% "problem" is ridiculous and insulting and petty. If he's closing sales at such a phenomenal rate, he won't care much about that 10%. But from a managerial standpoint, 10% is 10%. Yes, he makes a lot of money, but he could be making even more by taking advantage of the opportunity generated by whatever it is that is causing his 10% failure rate. Whenever you hear someone say "it didn't matter" in Magic, consider this the lazy salesman who won't grind out the last 10%. Without getting into diminishing returns and the like, it's clear that one thing is true in Magic as in life.

Sweat the small stuff. Grind out those percentages. 1% adds up way faster than it sounds. Do enough business models and you'll figure that out quickly. Our brains work poorly on large scales. 1% sounds like nothing, but most people don't ask "1% of what?" 1% of 1 million is 10,000. "Only 1%" huh? I'll take a 1% equity share of a million dollar company.

You play about 25 games of Magic in a 10-round tournament, assuming half your matches go to 3 games. You're permitted to lose no more than 1 per match. You get one "free pass" since you can make Top 8 with 1 loss. That means no more than 11 losses in a 10-rounder, no matter what. Since we're estimating half our games go 3 deep, let's say that we can't lose more than 6 games. Each game is worth about 4% of your total performance. So, if we win 19 games to 6 losses, that means our win percentage needs to be around 75%. That's pretty high.

We can all agree that most mistakes can be game-ending at higher levels of play. The ones that aren't are less noticeable and thus, less likely to get fixed, though there are some less-obvious mistakes that are quite insidious. Sometimes your 1st turn play loses you the game 20 turns later, and you're none the wiser. So let's say that every mistake is therefore worth -5% win percentage (since it loses you the game). If your current win percentage is below 75%, I'd say that a 5% increase is significant, especially if it's an easily fixable error. If you're the kind of person who goes X-2 at tournaments, yet seems to pick up the second loss deep in the rounds, you're probably one or two small tweaks away from being the X-1 guy, at the X-1-1 guy at worst. Really, it takes one admission of guilt, one Mea Culpa, to get you to the next level. That's why they're called opportunities.

And that's why you need to stop proving that you're right and start asking why you're wrong.