I’ve traveled the world playing tournaments for a little bit.

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.

The actual competition I’ve always felt it’s all about who can play less 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.