The Art of Winning

The Orlando Regional, played on April 4, 2026, was one of those tournaments that moves beyond the results and stays in your memory because of what it reveals about the game.

It was not a weekend remembered only for the meta.
Not only for the decks.
Not only for who won.

It was a weekend remembered for what happened at the table.

In just a few days, the community saw everything: a player celebrating too early, a penalty changing a game, a small mistake turning into a huge discussion, behavior being analyzed frame by frame, and, in the middle of all that, some genuinely strong examples of respect.

That is why this piece is not really about rules in the driest sense of the word.

It is about something that shows up in every real competitive environment, but does not always get the attention it deserves: knowing how to win.

Winning a game is one thing.
Winning well is another.

When the game is not over yet

The moment that drew the most attention was Makani’s.

He had found the winning line. The play was there. But the game was not over yet. There were still actions left to take before the game was actually finished.

And that detail changes everything.

Because celebrating a win is one thing. Acting as if it is already locked up before finishing what still needs to be done is another. That is what made the moment land so badly.

It was not just the headset.
It was not just standing up.
It was not just the reaction.

It was the timing.

It did not feel like someone winning a huge match. It felt like someone crossing a line that exists for a reason in competitive play.

Celebrating is not the problem

The truth is, competitive play needs that. The game needs emotion. It needs reaction. It needs relief. It needs weight. It needs that explosion that only people who have actually played an important tournament really understand.

If you take that away, what is left is a much colder version of the game than what it really is.

The issue was never feeling too much.

The issue is what you do with that emotion.

There are plenty of examples of players celebrating hard and still giving off a completely different impression. Because they finish the game, respect the moment, understand the context of the table, and only then let the emotion come out.

That is where the difference is.

Timing is a skill too

In competitive play, timing is not just about sequencing, resource management, and reading the board.

Timing matters for behavior too.

You can be right in your read of the game and still be completely wrong in the way you react to it. And that matters even more when the other side of the table is hurting.

Some losses hurt in a different way.

Top cut hurts.
Mirrors hurt.
Losing to a friend hurts.
Losing when you felt close hurts even more.

That is why knowing how to win is not just a matter of etiquette. It is a matter of competitive awareness.

What Orlando also showed about discipline

If the Makani case opened the discussion through emotion, other moments from the tournament showed something else that matters just as much: discipline wins tournaments too.

That is where the Cerys case comes in.

She was penalized for repeating behavior she had already been warned about: looking at the deck while shuffling.

People will always debate whether the penalty was too harsh. That will always happen. But there is one point that matters more to me: repeated mistakes stop being just mistakes.

High-level competition demands execution, but it also demands adjustment.

You can make a mistake once.
You can even make it twice.

But once the warning is already there and the behavior continues, the discussion is no longer “was it accidental?” The discussion becomes “why is this still happening?”

Not every mistake is dirty

At the same time, this same tournament also reminded everyone of something important: not every mistake is malicious.

Drawing an extra card, shuffling poorly, executing a sequence out of rhythm, losing your place under pressure. All of that can happen. Anyone who actually plays tournaments knows that.

The camera makes everything harsher.
The replay makes everything bigger.
Online discussion makes everything more absolute.

But the real table is almost never that simple.

That is why I think it matters to separate these things. Some mistakes need to be corrected. Some mistakes need to be punished. Some mistakes just show that no player is immune to the pressure of a major event.

The problem starts when the community stops distinguishing between those layers.

Knowing how to win is different from simply winning

This is the part that hits me the hardest.

Because in the end, the image that stays with a player does not come only from the games they won. It comes from the way they handle the moment when they win.

And I have seen that up close.

At the Curitiba Regional, for example, I watched the Top 8 match between William and Pedro Pertusi. And one of the things that stayed with me most was not the match itself. It was the posture.

Losing in Top 8 is already hard on its own. Losing a mirror like that, especially to someone close to you, hurts even more. And what I saw was a player who understood that perfectly. Pedro won, of course. But the way he handled William’s moment showed real respect.

It was not a dry win.
It was not blind celebration.
It was not “now this is all about me.”

It was the attitude of someone who understood that, on the other side, there was a friend going through a real competitive kind of grief.

And that means a lot to me.

I have been on the other side of that

That is probably why this theme hits me so hard.

In the win-and-in at Nationals in 2015, I played against Renato Christian. Before that tournament, we had already played each other countless times. And I was coming in very confident.

When it finally mattered, I missed two coin flips and lost.

At that moment, I was furious. Really furious.

But over time, what stayed with me most was not even the loss. It was the way he handled it. He knew how much that moment mattered to me. And he did something that sounds small from the outside, but is not small at all: he respected the moment.

He celebrated, the way he should have. But he celebrated without running me over. Without turning my loss into a show. Without letting the table turn into chaos. And that stayed with me.

Because that was when I understood something I still believe now: knowing how to win also means knowing how much the other person is losing.

The respect that almost never shows up in the results

This is probably one of the hardest things to measure in competitive play.

Results show up.
Standings show up.
Decklists show up.
Trophies show up.

But respect almost never shows up on the final sheet.

And even so, it is one of the things that lasts the longest.

Anyone who has lost an important round knows this. Sometimes what stays with you is not even the final play. It is the way the other player acted once it was over.

Some people win and make the loss feel even worse.
Some people win and understand the weight of that moment.

That difference may look small from the outside. To people who actually play, it is not.

This goes beyond the table

This kind of thing does not exist only in Pokémon.

It exists in any competitive environment where the win matters and the loss does too.

There will always be people who win thinking only about their own side of the moment.
And there will always be people who, even while happy, can still understand what just happened on the other side of the table.

To me, knowing how to win starts there.

Not in hiding your emotion.
But in not making the other person’s pain part of your celebration.

The ritual of winning matters too

This might be the main point of the whole piece.

Winning, especially in competitive play, has a ritual to it.

Not in a stiff way. Not in a fake way. Not in a way that turns emotion into protocol.

But there is a way to come out of a big win without turning the other person’s moment into unnecessary damage.

Finish the game.
Breathe.
Understand what just happened.
Respect the table.
Respect your opponent.
And only then let yourself feel the full emotion of it.

That does not make the win smaller.

If anything, it makes it bigger.

What this tournament taught

The Orlando Regional was not remembered only for decks, standings, or conversion.

It was remembered because it exposed a few things that every competitive player, sooner or later, has to learn:

• celebrating too early can cost you

• repeated mistakes stop being just mistakes

• emotion without timing becomes a problem

• respect is part of the game too

• winning well is a skill

Conclusion

In the end, this tournament did not only show who played better.

It showed who was actually prepared to win.

Because in Pokémon TCG, and in any real competition, winning is not just about closing out the game.

It is about who you are when it is over.