2025 Review

2025-12-22

When I talk to people they ask me how I’m doing and I give one of two answers, either engrossed in premier MTG event prep or engrossed in prediction markets. In October after PT EOE I tried to play some video games and just could not do it. This isn’t to say that I am that great at time management as I do struggle to avoid getting sucked into social media but really aside from reading and exercising all I do is play MTG and trade PMs.

MTG

I played all three PTs, Worlds, and my second MOCS this year going 39-27-1 in those and 19-8 in Limited. Despite the lack of a top finish I feel pretty happy with those results as well as the preparation that led to them, specifically on the Limited front given my lack of prior experience with drafting. My endeavours outside of Magic helped me become much more comfortable with the stakes in the game and I made some headway on not mulliganing enough.

Unfortunately all of this was somewhat overshadowed by the difficulties I encountered in trying to find people to work with. I went into the year thinking that inside this domain I had a couple of friends and a dozen or so strong working relationships and exited it thinking that I had a couple of working relationships. That was painful but of course the pain stems only from a mismatch between reality and expectations and in a sense it is fortunate that I was stripped of illusions I harbored here sooner rather than later.

At this point I have only one PT invite for the coming year though making day two would grant me another. I am not optimistic about engagement with the game for a number of reasons but will do my best to prepare and we’ll see how the cards land.

Prediction Markets

It’s hard to know what I can say here without leaking too much. What I can say is that I feel pretty lucky to have found a domain I have some heavy comparative advantages in and had a rollercoaster of a year making a lot of mistakes, learning a lot, losing money, and making back more money than that. In August I lost more than my net worth at the start of the year to getting scammed and while that was painful again one can just invoke Gendlin. None of the people I had existing relationships with that I encouraged to work with me in this space did so but I found some great collaborators within the space. I am optimistic about the prospects of making an obscene amount of money next year.

Everything Else

I reran Hammertime, tried and failed to acquire a stable meditation habit, wrote a similar amount of code to the previous year but put less of it on Git, moved, visited Spain, cured my back problems, hiked a lot, and found some great Russian bards I had not encountered previously. Seems about par for the course, go next!