How to Loose

You will never be able to get better as a coach unless you can lose properly.

Understand loosing ^[1]

Besides the blow to the ego, losing actually hurts; not in an abstract way, but in a very real manner! It makes your stomach churn, changes your blood pressure, constricts thousands of muscles, impairs decision making, elevates stress, reduces testosterone, causes dopamine deprival, and much more. It’s real, we’ve all felt it, and it’s no fun. Your body wants to feel better. Your mind wants to prove its worth. Your ego wants to regain its self-image. These are real and measurable physiological and psychological effects. Losing, quite literally, feels really bad.

The natural response is to rationalize the loss. We make legitimate sounding excuses, most often in the form of blaming our dice or the state of the rules. When we repeatedly fail to win, we lose confidence, and fall into thinking that we just can’t do it because the winner must be more talented. By blaming our dice or our relative lack of talent, we successfully cushion the blow to our egos by making ourselves believe that we are doing the best we can with what we’ve got. But in doing so, we rob ourselves of the learning opportunity presented to us. Losing is a relentless learning opportunity; to figure out what we do poorly, and fix it!

Its all just training

from psyclogist behind the net flix doc looseres

One of the advantages of sport participation is that it speeds up the learning process in life by routinely creating pressure situations that provide opportunities to develop focused, objective thinking that has a positive bent. These are optimum thinking patterns that generalize from sport settings to real-world scenarios, like taking a math test in school or managing an upset co-worker. The intensity of sport also creates opportunities for athletes to develop behavioral skills, such as those required to build strong relationships with teammates. Again, these skills are likely to generalize to real-world settings

Watch your replays...

...of when you win and when you loose. If you learn to analyse your games you will start to spot mistakes that you and your opponent make. Its surprising how many time you will spot yourself forgetting to stand up a player before you role that dice.

watch the replays of great coaches and see what they are doing differently, if you can spot mistakes ask an experienced coach to have a look for you.

TIME is of the essence

1) don't commit to a game unless you can afford to spend 90 mins playing it. You may have an hour and play quickly but both coaches are allowed 4 mins per turn, expect people to take that time. Moaning that people take the 3-4 mins each turn is bad form.

2) Expect people to time you out if you go over 4 mins. Some will some won't but if you expect it then if it happens you are prepared. It is at the individual coaches discretion if they do this, (and yours too) but it doesn't make them evil if they do it.

Know when you need a break

Say goodbye to your players as soon as you get them.

They will die, or have career ending injury's. If they are lucky this will happen in a fight, probably in a crowd push or a foul, commonly on a dodge, almost certainly on a failed go for it. To play the game is to accept this.

If you Say goodbye early and then every game you have with them will seem like a bonus. You won't rage quit when you lose them, you wont moan, you wont get angry when they get broken in a foul, you have already said goodbye, and you are at peace.

lightly armored players will die more quickly, heavily armored players more slowly but they all die or need to be retired at some point. If loosing players isn't something that you think you can cope with you need to rethink if bb is the game for you.

Don't blame the dice...

...and ignore the quality of the dice that you or your opponent are getting. Until you look at the dice stats after the game it will all be perception.

Think of blood bowl like a story that unfurls in front of you. You have some say in the result but ultimately the dice are the unreliable narrators of this book. this is the same of the best player and the worst. the currently top ranked player in blackbox has lost 619 games and drawn 713 out of 3201. Everyone looses, everyone has games that they can't win and that they cant loose.

The thing that keeps blood bowl interesting to the end of the game is the chance that you might roll three 6's on the trot and make that impossible dodge long bomb and catch, skeleton to mummy for the touchdown. If you pull off that play it feels amazing, but it doesn't make you a good coach, if your sat watching it happedn to your immaculate defense it feels soul destroying. But it doesn't make you a bad coach.

when you can genuinely laugh and congratulate your opponent on a play like that then you have learnt how to loose and you will feel free of the constraints of needing to demonstrate how good you are, it is only then that you can begin to learn the game.

adatped for bloodbowl from this best beyond seat time post