I’ve been thinking a lot about whether I wanted to write this because RQ Los Angeles ended with another Top 8 for me with Ornn and under normal circumstances I would just be extremely happy about that. But the reality is that this was also probably the most difficult weekend I’ve ever had playing competitive card games. There were a lot of things that happened throughout the three days and I don’t think it would be honest to just post the result without talking about the rest of the experience.
I’ve been competing in TCGs for years. I’ve played Pro Tours and travelled all over the world for tournaments. I’ve had difficult opponents and played under a lot of pressure before so I normally think I handle these situations pretty well. This weekend was different though and it affected me much more than I expected.
It started on Friday during the pre-RQ. In Round 3 I sat down against an opponent who did not want to shake my hand and basically from the beginning the interaction felt hostile. There were several accusations or insinuations that I was doing something wrong over things that from my perspective were completely normal. He wanted to roll to decide who started but then argued that odd/even was not fair because of the way the possible results worked. Later he questioned me while I was pile shuffling even though I was obviously going to shuffle properly afterwards. It got to a point where almost anything happening in the game could turn into another argument and the whole match became incredibly uncomfortable.
At one point he had a LeBlanc trigger and I wanted to check his trash. He became very agitated about me doing that and started raising his voice so I called a judge because at that point I just wanted somebody there to make sure we could finish the match normally. Instead the situation became even more uncomfortable. The judge stood extremely close to me for a long period of time. Close enough that while I was sitting down trying to play my elbow was repeatedly making physical contact with him. I asked him to give me a little more space but he continued standing over me while my opponent was still talking to me in a way that I considered completely inappropriate and unsportsmanlike. Nothing was really being done about that so eventually I asked for the situation to be escalated to the Head Judge.
When the judge left the table to get him we were briefly left without a judge there and my opponent started making comments towards me that I understood as threatening. That is when for me it stopped being about a card game. I was in the US and thousands of kilometres away from home sitting across from someone whose behaviour I could no longer predict. I genuinely did not feel safe being there anymore so I got up and told the judges that I needed to get some water and walk around for a few minutes before coming back.
When I returned I explained what had happened and that I did not feel comfortable continuing to play against this person. Despite that I was still expected to continue the match. We eventually had two judges sitting next to the table although they had not been there for everything that had happened before and the interaction with my opponent continued being extremely uncomfortable. He was also putting pressure on the judges about time and trying to force the game forward while I was already completely overwhelmed by everything that had happened. Eventually I decided I did not want to play through the final turn anymore. I conceded and dropped from the event.
I was extremely upset afterwards and I think anyone who saw me there could tell. I was honestly very close to crying at the table. I have played competitive card games for a very long time and I have had plenty of unpleasant matches over the years but I had never felt the way I felt during this one. There were also people around the table who had seen enough of what happened that they independently went to speak with the judges afterwards. I talked to the staff as well because after that interaction I genuinely wanted to know that the situation had been taken seriously.
Later the judges told me that my opponent had behaved reasonably throughout the rest of the event and they communicated that partly because they knew I was worried about what had happened. I appreciated them doing that and I think it is important to mention it. At the same time I still feel very strongly that if a player tells tournament staff that they do not feel personally safe at a table it cannot just become another part of finishing the round. I really hope that something like this is handled differently in the future because I don’t think anybody should have to get to the point I got to on Friday while playing a card game.
Saturday thankfully started much better. I was able to reset a little bit and I was playing really well. I eventually got to 7-0 and after everything from Friday it felt good to just be playing Riftbound again and having the tournament go normally. Then I arrived for my last round of the day and there was already a judge waiting at the table. He told me that my opponent was dealing with something in real life and that I was going to have to wait for however long it took because the situation was beyond the game.
I ended up standing there for around 40 minutes without really knowing what was happening. At the time I had no context for the situation and I was obviously getting frustrated. I had a dinner appointment I was now going to miss and nobody could really tell me when we were going to play. After what had happened the day before I was already mentally tired so being left there with no explanation for that long was not a great experience either.
I later found out more about what my opponent and his wife were going through and obviously that completely changed how I saw the situation. It was something genuinely serious and I feel really sorry for both of them. My problem was never with my opponent or with him taking the time he needed. It was the way the situation was handled towards me while I was waiting without any idea of what was going on.
Eventually I was given the option of playing the round immediately after those 40 minutes or coming back at 9 AM the next morning which was an hour before the tournament was due to start again. At that point I really did not feel like I was in the mental state to immediately sit down and play an important match so my opponent and I agreed to play in the morning. We did and the round was completely fine. He was extremely nice to me and we had a really good match. I have nothing negative to say about him at all and once I knew the context I understood why everything had happened.
Then when I was finally dealing with everything from that round and getting ready to go back to the hotel I opened Twitter and saw posts about what had happened to me on Friday. The story being told online was not what had happened and people were presenting it as fact. One of the things being said was that I had been disqualified from the pre-RQ which is simply false. I was never DQ’d. There were also anonymous accounts making much more serious claims and talking about things like assault. Those things did not happen either.
This was where the weekend really became difficult for me because being disliked online is one thing. People can think I am arrogant or think I got lucky or simply root against me. That comes with being visible and competing publicly. What happened here was different because people were inventing serious things about me and others immediately started repeating them as if they were true. I was getting messages from strangers accusing me of things I had never done less than 24 hours after an incident at the venue where I had already felt threatened and unsafe.
It got to me a lot more than I wish it had. I barely slept that night because I was lying in the hotel reading people talk about me and about a version of Friday that I did not recognise at all. I knew I had to be back at the venue in a few hours for the most important day of the tournament and instead I was completely overwhelmed by all of this. I think it is very easy when you post something on Twitter to forget there is an actual person reading it on the other side and that making a serious accusation about somebody is not the same thing as talking shit about their deck or their tournament result.
I woke up on Sunday with a horrible migraine and almost no sleep. I was mentally in a really bad place and definitely not where I wanted to be going into the last day of an RQ. Thankfully my team was incredibly supportive through all of it. They knew how much everything had affected me and helped me keep my head in the tournament. At that point there was not much else I could do. I could keep looking at everything happening online and make myself feel worse or sit down and try to play the games in front of me. I chose the second option and just tried to get through the day one match at a time.
Somehow I managed to keep going and ended up making Top 8 with Ornn again. I am really proud of that because I came to Los Angeles wanting to win the tournament and normally making Top 8 would not be enough for me to feel completely satisfied. Under the circumstances though it meant a lot. I know how bad I felt on Sunday morning and how hard it was for me to focus so getting through the day and making another deep run is something I am going to remember.
I eventually lost in Top 8 to a topdecked Adaptatron which was a pretty brutal way for the tournament to end. My opponent was super nice though and played really well. He ended up making the finals in his first major event and I am genuinely very happy for him. Obviously losing there hurt but at that point I was also aware of how much it had taken just to get through the weekend.
There is one broader thing I wanted to say because this did not happen completely in isolation. Across several events I and other Spanish players on our team have had situations where we have come away feeling that we were treated differently from American or local players. I am not going to claim that I know what is going through somebody else’s head and I don’t want to attribute motivations I cannot prove. I can only say how these situations have felt from our side and after enough of them it becomes difficult to completely ignore that feeling.
We travel an incredibly long way to attend these events and put a huge amount of time and money into competing because we love the game and want to play it at the highest possible level. We are not asking for special treatment. We just want to feel that when we sit down at a table we are being treated under the same standards as the player sitting across from us.
I also don’t want this post to give the wrong impression about Los Angeles as a whole because most of the people I met were amazing. Throughout the weekend so many people came up to talk to me. Some had read my book or followed my content and others just wanted a picture or a quick conversation about Riftbound. I was genuinely surprised by how many people stopped me just to say something nice and I don’t think most of them realised how much those small interactions mattered to me that weekend.
That is probably what I am taking away from Los Angeles more than anything else. There were moments where the whole weekend felt like too much and I wanted to get away from the tournament and from everything happening online. Then my teammates would be there for me or somebody I had never met would come over and say something kind and it would pull me back into the reason I was there in the first place.
I came to Los Angeles wanting to win and I didn’t. I leave with another Top 8 but more importantly with a much clearer memory of the people who helped me through a weekend that was much harder than it probably looked from the outside.
Thank you to my team and to everyone who came up to me or sent me something kind during the weekend. I really mean it and I won't forget it.