Players have been making the leap from Magic: The Gathering to poker – at the highest levels – for years. Noah Boeken, for example, back in the early days of the EPT, was a small-a ambassador for Magic before he was an Ambassador for PokerStars. David Williams, Brock Parker, Scott Seiver, Isaac Haxton and Justin Bonomo were also keen players of the complex strategy card game that prepped them for the long hours of analysis and decision making that separate the good tournament poker players from the great.
Current MTG world champ Javier Domínguez aka 'Thalai' has felt the benefit of poker on his Magic play and vice versa over the course of the last two decades, and having spent a few years away from poker, came out of retirement for the EPT Prague €5,300 Main Event.
Spoiler alert: Domínguez failed to make it through to Day 2, but with the equanimity of a professional games player, gave PokerOrg an interview fairly bubbling over with enthusiasm for competitive mind sports of all kinds.
Gathering pace in two competitive worlds
Domínguez’s first live cash dates back to 2007, but his interest in Magic stemmed from an early enjoyment of board games.
“My cousin brought some Magic cards to a family reunion – it’s always family members!” he said of his introduction to the game in 2001. There followed a natural progression to poker in the Magic community of which he became a part.
“First it was travel playing Magic tournaments, and then it became poker tournaments. Eventually, to me, it was the same – travelling to play card games. My interest in Magic dropped a bit when I got to college. It’s not like I stopped playing it to play poker; more like there was a vacant spot, poker showed up and I moved there."
Domínguez has one spade trophy to his name already, from a PLO Estrellas Madrid side event back in 2011, but this launch into the rarefied heights of an EPT Main Event is his first since 2012, when he finished 21st in the EPT Madrid €5,300 Main Event for €13,000. In Prague for a Magic tournament, PokerStars invited him back to the felt, and he admitted that this return to poker was a surprising experience.
“I actually feel like this is more intense to me now than it was back in the day [playing poker regularly] – this is something I did not expect. I now think of tournaments in a different way. When I play Magic, I always have this feeling of ‘play and enjoy this tournament as if it was your last’. It has become like my motto. If I win, it’s great, and if I don’t – make it a good memory.”
Riding the waves of variance with a smile
It’s all very well playing every tournament as a one-off, potentially final, enjoyable affair, but having been part of PokerStars Team Online as well as a world-leading MTG player, Domínguez is clear-eyed about the edges that can realistically be expected in both games.
“Magic has less variance than poker. The best players have like a high 60% win-rate – so it’s not like chess, where Carlsen just wins. When you get to a very high level, big edges just don’t exist. If you’re a 65% player there, you’re just crushing. But here’s the thing – there are more poker events than Magic events.
“So it’s hard to get a bad run because your win rate is way higher but if that happens, it’s pretty bad because the shots are very limited. There are just four a year. In poker you have more events, but the best player is less likely to win a tournament of 1,000 players. In Magic [that player’s] chances are – not high obviously, because there are so many people – but ten times higher than in poker.”
The evolution of Magic: The Gathering
For players of games that sport few rules but huge complexity (chess, go), when MTG first became popular, it seemed complicated, with lots to be learned before the game’s depth could be discovered. Domínguez contests that it has become much more approachable.
“I think nowadays they have worked a lot on making the rules simpler. I have friends who’ve never played Magic [Arena] before, and I showed them the tutorial, and they said, ‘Oh, this is kind of easy to get.’” They’ve worked a lot on the game to make it kind of intuitive now; if you play a format with cards that are 25 years old, there are going to be some complicated rules, but those types of formats and cards are not usually played in tournaments.
“The idea is that you don’t play with the same cards again and again and again. When metagames become very stable and one deck dominates the other decks, they change it. With Magic, the rules are the same, but every year, every season, they print new cards, so it’s like a whole new game in a way.”
One unchanging poker deck vs. the ever-shifting Magic one(s)
Unless you start meddling with jokers or stripping decks, the cards in poker remain the same. Though Domínguez admits that he would be less interested in Magic without the need to adapt regularly to new cards, the old-school 52-red-and black deck doesn’t bore him.
“This is why poker gets so deep,” he mused. “Because in Magic, even the best players in the world don’t really get to go as deep as poker players do because we have a new set of rules or new cards every few months. You play the same deck for two months, and you’re like, ‘Wow, I’m an expert!’ and then it changes, and you have to start over again."
Though being quick to adapt is one of the hallmarks of the top Magic players, Domínguez noted that playing formats that allow the use of older cards brings the game closer to poker.
“If you can play the same deck for years and be truly a master of that (and I like to play those a lot – the tournament last week was one) there are a lot of skills to transfer. If you master a game – and this applies to poker too – if you become consistent, you learn things that you can actually use in other games.”
Transferable skills and the power of information
“Poker concepts apply to Magic, to chess, to Hearthstone. If you get deep enough in one of them, you can learn things that maybe you couldn’t learn otherwise.
“Maybe I’m using a concept in Magic that I’ve learned from poker. For example, in poker, it’s about the power of information. In some situations you can make a play that might not sound like a great play, but it conceals information or does not let your opponent use the information they have.
“Sometimes a player knows something that the other doesn’t. So if you try to block this from the opponent, that’s a huge advantage, especially against good players because they can make good decisions with information, and the less you can give them the better. That’s not very intuitive and that’s, for example, a very poker concept. And that’s something you might never think of that way if you don’t play poker.”
Dominguez gets a second flat alter ego
Domínguez’s first Magic: The Gathering World Championship win saw him get his own card (not a card for him, a card of him). Now alongside Fervent Champion (pictured) his second win has brought another personalised card – but the details of this are still unknown.
“I don’t know [the card] yet. I know what I’d like! I think they will probably accommodate me…”
Despite attempts to learn whether he really does have an inkling what his new paper alter ego will be, he was not to be drawn (as it were).
Everybody Tilts. Sometimes.
A video of ‘Raging MTG Players’ has over 83,000 views on YouTube. If you’ve ever been called something that’s starred-out in a poker chatbox, told that the game is rigged or, dripping with sarcasm, that it’s a “skill game”, there’s something reassuring in knowing that all types of games players, everywhere, lose their cool sometimes.
Domínguez said that Magic is not particularly full of rage in this way, however, especially as the age of players tends to be a little bit older. The reason for the occasional flaps of some pretty unflappable MTG players is the big perceived skill edge.
“I believe that the more skill-based a game is perceived to be,” he summarised, “the more likely someone is going to be frustrated at the luck involved in that game. I think Magic players are less likely to be like that but the ones you find like that [angry] are probably going to be more so because they kind of assume the game’s not going to [have that element]."
There’s still Magic in the air at EPT Prague
PokerStars Ambassador Felix Schneiders is another top MTG player in this year’s EPT Prague Main Event field: along with Kai Budde and Mark Ziegner, he won the Team final for Germany at the 2002 World Championship. He’ll be playing Javier Dominguez and Martin Juza (Czech MTG Hall of Famer with the most Grand Prix top eights in the history of the game) here in Prague on Thursday, December 12 during the dinner break in the Main Event. They might need quite a bit of room on the rail.
Images courtesy of Manuel Kovsca and Danny Maxwell @Rational Holdings Ltd
