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Records are made to be broken !! Congrats Ray !!

Posted By: Steve Mellen
Date: Wednesday, 6 July 2011, at 2:10 a.m.

In Response To: Records are made to be broken !! Congrats Ray !! (neilkaz)

I am super-impressed by Ray's achievement, as I was by his win in Novi this weekend. It takes a special kind of mental fortitude to lose the first round (after being one of the unlucky few to fail to receive a bye, no less) and then come roaring back with a zillion wins in a row to win the tournament out of the loser's bracket.

There is nothing wrong with discussing what factors other than a low error rate can contribute to tournament success. In fact, that seems like a rather important discussion to have. Ray himself has written about his tournament strategy: concepts like avoiding gammonish takes and staying away from big swings in general, which may well get you dinged by a bot in specific cases.

That said, I think some of the posts have a tone of "Congratulations, but..." which I find utterly baffling. Folks, we are not talking about my Grandma Ethel winning Monte Carlo. Ray is a very strong player and there's not much doubt about that. The only shock at him winning a large number of events should be the shock at the notion of any single player winning so many events in a game where the competition is so strong.

A couple comments on factors that may contribute to Ray's success. I alluded above to his mental fortitude. It takes a lot of stamina and concentration to consistently perform at a high level throughout the course of a lengthy weekend event. The fact that Player X is great at finding the best move in a quiz situation does not mean he will be equally great at finding the best move towards the end of his 5th match of the day when he just suffered a bad beat on the previous game.

Second, Ray is an exceptionally creative player who is open to considering a wide variety of candidate moves. Sometimes his moves may be an improvement over the bot, sometimes they may not. But it is not a stretch to suggest that such a playstyle may induce more errors in his opponents than a more mechanical approach would.

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