How not to be an ass about donkeys
See, the title's another play on words.
Anyway, I've been meaning to post a link to this brief essay by MMYoung about why, in a very pragmatic sense, you shouldn't deride players who you perceive to be "bad," especially when they've just gotten lucky and taken you down despite their bad play. There are all sorts of reasons why no one should really do this in a legitimate, hurtful way (i.e. not as a fun tease of a friend), starting with basic politeness and moving on through sportsmanship to the fact that you, too, will make a terrible play at some point in the near future. But Mark points out one other fundamental fact:
Here’s the thing: the fact that awful players can win money is a good thing. There are lots of games out there — board games, card games, whatever else — where good players win every time. You know what happens in those cases? The bad players stop playing! Now, if we’re talking about your little brother refusing to play Monopoly because you get him every time, maybe it’s not such a big deal. But if the bad players are risking money to enter an utterly losing proposition, they’ll either go broke or quit. If you consider yourself a non-donkey, the prospect of that money running out should scare the hell out of you.
Certainly, the Pro Tour in Magic is fundamentally a marketing tool, and it has two purposes, as far as I can tell (not having seen the actual market research myself):
1) It generates interest in deck lists and play in certain formats simply by having public, hyped-up events
2) It directly induces people to play by giving them the hope that they can someday be in those events
Certainly, I've played in a number of PTQs and clearly have not yet won one, but I nonetheless like the idea that I could play in the PT at some point. Mind you, I think a PTQ is one of the most enjoyable tournament types around just on its own, but the possibility of winning through to the next level is also exciting, and keeps me engaged. The same is probably true for lots of other players, who are brought to the PTQ by many reasons, in most cases including the hope of making it to the PT itself.
Fun quote from a PTQ a couple seasons back - we happened to have a shorter PTQ for the Bay Area, at seven rather than eight rounds, and a player next to me said this:
"Okay, so five wins and two draws to top eight? Cool. That's a one in thirty-two chance."
To which his friend said, "Dude! It's not random!"
Nonetheless, the idea that we might "get there" drives a lot of players to think we could luck our way through a PTQ, even when our local PTQs include a lot of very, very skilled players. I tend to think the PTQ deck is stacked against me in that sense, but I nonetheless think I have a finite chance of winning, and I play to that.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that even if you don't just want to be a nice person and make a fun play environment for everyone, you still want to avoid driving people away for the very pragmatic reason that the dead money has to come from somewhere.