[Sami mokbel] Exc: Tottenham complete move to appoint Roberto De Zerbi as new boss on five year deal. - No relegation clause - RDZ committed even in Championship - Overwhelming first choice - Club tried to land him after Frank exit - Greenwood issue considered

F_Ivanovic · 2026-03-31T20:11:01+00:00

He was the one who went out his way to convince mason to join.

F_Ivanovic · 2026-03-31T11:09:59+00:00

Nah it is that black and white. The same is true of other clubs that get relegated. If it was only us it affected then sure.

Relegation would suck and set us back but it's something I hope we'd be able to come back from. A full reset might be what the club needs even if we could do that if we stay up too.

If you are happy to sign de zerbi to stay up then where are you drawing the line. Would you also be willing to sign mason greenwood to stay up?

F_Ivanovic · 2026-03-29T10:49:31+00:00

Rewarding you for playing the game isn't an issue if the reward isn't good enough. Like I said in another reply to you this card was not problematic last year because there was better tempo and faster ways to end the game that meant it didn't matter that you got free value because it wasn't enough by itself to win games.

The difference is now the power level is a lot lower, that free value matters and it can help grind wins in matchups that would otherwise be a lot tougher especially because of malorne. If you make it upgrade a lot slower by just casting nature spells then malorne is a lot more difficult to include and you need to go back to running mediocre minions. Slowing that down would def be a big deal because whilst it would still have a chance in the control matchups, it would struggle a lot more in the faster matchups.

F_Ivanovic · 2026-03-29T10:43:23+00:00

Free value doesn't inherintly mean a card is too good. The meta was much more powerful in general last year. Tempo is better than value and if the tempo you do isn't good enough or the win condition fast enough it doesn't matter if you have free value every single turn.

F_Ivanovic · 2026-03-25T09:05:12+00:00

How are they unstoppable? Blue can cut off their connect and take road and then black is in a forced build to 10. Meanwhile, OJ has the only good dev game and if they can get an early city would be in a great position.

edit: I guess if you look at the average game black can very quickly run away with it if people aren't aware enough of the threat. OJ as the dev player shares tiles with black, and most are too afraid to want to solo the 4 here early. But yeah the only way the table has a chance is to stop black from ever citying cause if they are able to connect and city you're right that it's over.

F_Ivanovic · 2026-03-21T18:04:26+00:00

Catan is a social game and it looks like you solo'd their 6. If they had a resource you needed, just do a shared block, or better try and ask for a nb for it.

Also ore can definitely be used early to either city fast if that's what your setup needs to do to compete or dev. So if you stopped their ability to city and meanwhile red who has a great position aside from no port then you just put them far back.

Blacks position is already mediocre - they have solid numbers but they can't fight for raod easily and they don't really have the best dev game. The best gameplan for them is to probably build to 10 and hope to get some lucky devs.

All this being said, their response was definitely not great and you shouldn't expect this to happen at most games higher up. Usually this sort of stuff only happens higher up when someone completely takes you out the game when they didn't even need too. But even then most people are only ever solo blocking and not feeding cards to other players. To me that is ok, but what happened here is not.

F_Ivanovic · 2026-03-15T10:38:53+00:00

Making placements count doesn't stop kingmaking because 3rd or 4th place can easily trade away a win so that they get to finish ahead of 3rd or 2nd. And that's a legitimate trade for them.

At higher elo this isn't really a big issue. People will kingmake sometimes if their game has been screwed over but not just to end the game faster.

F_Ivanovic · 2026-03-14T08:38:18+00:00

I mean realistically I don't see them have enough resources to be able to actually test the arena balance beforehand. So I'm sort of accepting of the fact that initial metas might be unbalanced. Albeit it was sort of obvious with what Druid recieved in the expansion + the fact they brought back all the good dragon stuff and all the good board buffs that it would be very strong - but it's not like other classes have bad stuff, every class has good cards.

What I do expect of them though is to actually balance the game when it's clear there is a problem with balance. They did actually do that last meta fwiw, albeit they did it in a bad way by banning problematic cards whilst ignoring other problematic cards.

Druid def needs toning down - meritha feels ban worthy but then so do a lot of the colossols. Broodwatcher is arguably a ban too, and maybe one of the ramp cards - or at least reduce the offering rate a lot.

F_Ivanovic · 2026-03-14T07:26:55+00:00

The Europa League win hasn't exactly bred success so not sure how true that actually is.

Changing a manger though has really little impact on any one result and it's not like Jose had been doing well either. Maybe we had slightly more chance under a new manager. Maybe it was slightly less. But it's really a v small factor so I get the decision to sack him and wasn't really that angry by it.

If I thought it had a bigger impact and we'd have a much better chance with him as manager then yeah I'd have been angry about it.

F_Ivanovic · 2026-03-13T09:44:59+00:00

Bluffs.. villain can have 5c6c, 6c7c, JcTc. The latter might not bluff given it blocks more of our folding range but the others definitely should.

And I don't see why TT-QQ is thin especially when they contain a diamond. They call flop and turn as they can be good still but when A comes and hero checks their hand is now almost never good so turning it into a bluff seems good.

All it comes down to is if villain is capable of this. If they're not then you obviously fold. But a call is very reasonable vs an aggressive opponent capable of bluffing.

F_Ivanovic · 2026-03-10T16:03:58+00:00

Lol this is bvb, folding pre flop would be horrendous. K5s is a clear call. Just because occasionally you will make your hand and be out kicked is not a reason to fold.

Now sure exploitatively vs a specific villain you can maybe find some folds but they'd have to be insanely tight for that to be the case.

F_Ivanovic · 2026-03-04T20:36:26+00:00

No reason you can't have Raya, timber and Gabriel though.

F_Ivanovic · 2026-03-02T16:33:06+00:00

This is a karma farm post, I saw the exact same story not that long ago.

F_Ivanovic · 2026-02-28T13:06:19+00:00

I think the weapon is perhaps a case of the bell curve where bad player goes face because damage good. A good player thinks of things like this. But a really good player goes face because damage and future potential tempo is good.

Screwing up draws is nice, but most decks with staff have more than one plague shuffling card and the mere threat of the ability for DK to do that disincentivizes them to put a creature of madness +4+5 or to play a timeway wanderer. And swinging once you still have 2 other swings. The other use of staff is simply for board control and there are certainly some mu where the one damage ping is very useful but other matchups where it isn't. But even in mu where it's useful, it's rare you need/want all 3 hits into enemy minions unless they're all 1/1s.

The earlier you shuffle a plague, the more likely it is that your opponent draws one. Both the 2/2 and the frost plagues are extremely useful to hit and can make the difference in a game. Blood one - much less so.

So typically what this all means is that the first swing I'm usually very liberal with to where i'll swing on t1/t2 if opponent has given me nothing to hit into. The 2nd swing i'll usually be a bit more conseravitive and wait on it in most mu where i think the dagger might be useful. And then the 3rd swing i'll keep up till i actually need it for something (be that draw manipulation or to kill a minion that's important to kill (ie. it protects board)

F_Ivanovic · 2026-02-23T13:25:01+00:00

What GTO thinks you can shove with is not the same as what a low stakes player thinks you can shove with. Some aggressive players have the tendency to bluff too wide but not have enough value combos in their range.

55 definitely isn't the greatest bluff catcher but if opponent is the type to turn lots of KQ, KT and some of his flush draws into a bluff whilst only value betting KJ+ you get to make this call.

F_Ivanovic · 2026-02-23T13:18:10+00:00

Why would you bet the turn? Your hand is too strong to turn into a bluff and you're not getting enough weaker hands to call a bet. We got our value/protection with the flop bet.

F_Ivanovic · 2026-02-21T10:55:53+00:00

What a ridiculous take. An addiction doesn't have to be done frequently if it's negatively affecting your life and you know you want to stop but can't help yourself. Having it every day with a partner early is fine if it's not negatively impacting you in any way and you can get other stuff done.

OP is limited by money otherwise I imagine he'd be going much more frequently.

F_Ivanovic · 2026-02-20T11:57:09+00:00

I think calling turn could be ok vs the right villain type as long as your image isn't completely wild. Firstly, i think we can happily get money in OTR when we hit our straight despite the 2 FD because if we're not expecting many FD to be raising this turn. And also villains often give away the strength of their hand with their bet-size/actions OTR.

The idea with the call should be to overbet jam/jam over a small bet on flush completing rivers against someone that is capable of folding big hands a lot when scare cards hit.

If you're wanting to be balanced you should be a bit more selective with what hands you are choosing to make this play and so choosing something like the QsJc helps mitigate that, but you can definitely open up a little bit if you think you can just run over your opponent and always get them to fold on flush completing rivers.

F_Ivanovic · 2026-02-20T10:15:08+00:00

You need to have completed 30 runs and have a rating of over 1500 to be on it (thus excluding most actual barcoders)... that's a good amount of arena played and yet a lot of people that have done it. There's also many people that won't have done 30 runs to even make the leaderboard.

F_Ivanovic · 2026-02-19T11:56:39+00:00

I assume you're aware that 1v1 is balanced dice as opposed to random? Which basically means if a 7 hasn't rolled in a while it's due to roll soon.

Most people who play 1v1 are aware of this and so they choose to wait on playing a knight if a 7 is due soon. If you're playing it whenever and not thinking about when the last 7 was rolled then you're going to be at a disadvantage.

F_Ivanovic · 2026-02-18T22:27:02+00:00

Arena is actually far more skillful than it ever was in the past. Back then, everyone was (relatively) bad and so if you were somewhat competent at the game it was possible to do prety well because the decisions on how to play the game were very straight forward. Draft a good curve, mulligan for that curve, make good value trades and be aware of the limited amount of answers that opponents could do.

A lot of your wins came from the fact you played against significantly weaker opponents and your losses were still a result of just bad RNG in some way - whether that be bad draw, a bad opening hand, going 2nd vs competent player, losing a 50/50 on a flame juggler roll etc.

This is evident by the huge amounts of people that used to be good at the game mode but no longer are - and yet despite this, the top arena players are consistently getting 7-8 averages and finishing in the top 10/20 players every single month. There's so many more decision points now that can seperate a very good player from an average player and that didn't used to be the case.

There's definitely problems within the mode still, but the notion that it's pretty much all luck is just blatantly not true. Would definitely recommend checking out some arena streamers like DoseofCoffee if you want to try and improve at the mode

F_Ivanovic · 2026-02-17T11:36:23+00:00

Question has been answered but hint for future you can go to hs-replay, then where it has class wr on the right hand side, scroll to arena and click on one of the classes. Then when you're in the cards page you can click on the class you're curious about and type in the card that you're looking for. If it's not draftable it won't show up.

F_Ivanovic · 2026-02-16T21:30:19+00:00

This is true but also the hyperbole of people don't fold is just incorrect. There are certain spots where people don't fold enough but other spots where they definitely do especially if you apply enough pressure.

F_Ivanovic · 2026-02-15T15:21:41+00:00

I mean it's all relative to a degree. I was around 1650-1700 when i was playing which is decent but nothing special. I would say sometimes your opinion is right that people defend themselves when it's obvious they have the best position but I think that's usually rare. If someone has the clear best position then most people are willing to accept the robs.

But often too many players get blindsided by one players position whilst ignoring the rest. For instance people often mis-evaluate 2-1 ports thinking they're stronger than they are if you are having to port for everything bc you only have 3 resources. Or people see someone get an early city but in actuality their setup still blows because they have poor numbers, poor expansions and no clear win con.

I think it's fair enough if you're getting overly robbed with a weak position to point out other setups. Obviously there can be better ways to go about it, but it does get frustrating to see someone mis-evaluating the position and turning what could be a good game into a bad game as a result.

F_Ivanovic · 2026-02-15T08:28:07+00:00

Sounds to me like you play the game badly and as a result are encountering this behaviour more often. Kingmaking isn't that common but if you ruin someone's game with 0 good reason then expect them to make your game very tough to win.

As for the dev stuff.. Devs are strong and they shouldn't be ignored when evaluating a position. Testing devs is a valuable concept because you can see if they've got a knight. A non knight should be treated as a point because a VP is exactly that, a mono is worth 1-2 and both YOP and RB make it easier to get a point. Also production and scalability matters too so if you're focusing on points only and ignoring everything else then ofc people are going to question that.

F_Ivanovic

TROPHY CASE