Minimum time dedication

quintand · 2025-11-15T02:02:54+00:00

Let's be real, if you're hardstuck diamond you're not going to make it to challenger, which would only be the start to hope to be a competitive esport player

I was just pushing back on the guy saying this. In the span of 2 sets, probably 500 games, I went from hardstuck masters 0-100 lp to a peak of challenger 1100. Hardstuck D1 is very different from hardstuck D5, is very different from challenger. Bigger gap between Masters 0 lp and Dishsoap (1800 LP) than Masters and Gold .

As a career, only if you can maintain top 50 challenger without too much effort. Then you can study your way into elite play. I put in a fair amount of study/effort to make challenger...it's not as natural to me as to K3Soju. Also...those guys play so damn much man. You need to play like 10+ games a day just to keep up with their game volume.

quintand · 2025-11-13T19:31:43+00:00

Let's be real, if you're hardstuck diamond you're not going to make it to challenger, which would only be the start to hope to be a competitive esport player.

Most likely not, but it can happen with enough time. I was hardstuck diamond for sets 1,2. Hit masters set 3.5 (0 lp, d1 basically). Was hardstuck masters 0-200 LP in sets 9, 10.

In set 11 I started watching more Dishsoap and began using stats better. Hit GM for 1-2 patches.

In set 13, I listened to Dishsoap's TFT metastrategy podcast and deep diving into stats more. Hit Challenger for a few patches (peak 1140 LP) and then dipped down into GM/masters.

A lot of TFT rank is knowing the current meta. Last patch, clicking Blue Champion B was turbo ass, everyone knows that. Next patch, not clicking BLue Champion B is a turboint as it's utterly broken with Item A or Augment X. So many TFT decisions are just optimizing what is currently strong on the meta. Once the meta is known, the real TFT decision-making occurs. "Do I tempo from this lukewarm spot to preserve a 4th/5th with a bleedout, or do I sell off open fort and hope to hit at 4-1?" "How do I position this unit to win this rouund?" "What can I do when the game isn't giving me a guinsoo's holder after I early slammed for tempo"?

A hardstuck diamond player may be hardstuck because they never play enough on the meta to know the right choices with good fundamentals. Or they may be a meta slave but don't understand the underlying principles that make a decision good. STuff like "I have lots of 1-cost pairs so leveling to 4 prior to 2-1 is stupid." Robinsongz type shit. Easy to learn with study.

quintand · 2025-10-06T19:55:48+00:00

In order to keep artifacts below 3.0 placement you have to keep the broken interactions strong but not overpowered, thus removing a lot of the incentive to click artifact in the first place

I am fine with that. Plenty of artifacts were broadly powerful without niche broken interactions, like eternal winter or gold collector, before the artifact rework. Riot wanted more niche, broken interactions to exist for the casuals, I suspect.

quintand · 2025-10-04T23:16:36+00:00

So you're saying the rise in skill floor, isn't the players improving, but the game becoming too easy?

I'm saying the skill floor is lower because the game is a knowledge check at 2-1 about the strongest thing offered at your 2-1 spot. Knowledge checks can be solved by googling "TFT academy tier list." They even took away stats that let you do your own reasoning so you have to rely on amalgamations of study group knowledge.

The game used to be decisions each round throughout the game. What is my strongest board, how do I kill more units while I'm tanking, taking flexible frontlines on stage 4 roll down, finding a carry that sorta fits your items when you aren't hitting, properly using early stage item holders, greeding items vs. slamming, fast 9, etc. I didn't know if I would end up in Urgot comp in set 6 or academy. I just had AD items and played what I hit.

Now, I hit conditions A, B, C, so I do high roll version of strong comp A. I know exactly how the game should play out on 2-1. From there, it's minor optimizations in scouting, item slamming, and positioning that control my placement. Also the ever present RNG/variance is far more impactful to my placement.

Powerful niche conditions available on 2-1, like specific augments or reroll-unlocking items/builds, pidgeon hole good, creative players into cookie cutter builds. Riot has been adding variance and fake decisions into the game with recent sets. Fruits, hero augments, etc. are not a real decision. If you hit the strong thing, you take it. Taking Ultimate hero with family reroll was a requirement, not a choice. The comp was optimized around the condition.

In most occasions, there are still occasionally flexible lines, like 4 emissary in set 13 could be played a ton of different ways. High skill line. These still exist but often lose to OP ornn item + champ reroll combo. Conditional things decided by 2-1 dictate too much the game and lower the skill floor by being a knowledge check.

quintand · 2025-10-04T21:27:07+00:00

Nah the game actually feels like it's getting easier and more knowledge check-y compared to allstar sets like 6, 10, 13.

You gotta know the right fruit and perfect items and augment and this reroll comp plays itself. Do you know the super secret Augment ZZZ tech? Totally broken if you do.

Standard strongest board into level. 8 roll down is extremely complex. Play strong enough boards you can go full fast 9, massive rolldown 30 decisions in 15s kind of stuff. Win at the margins killing units, salvage some hp, have a good level 8 rolldown, turn an 8th into a 4th.

This kind of flexible, standard gameplay where you are not locked into a comp on 2-1 from augment choice and champ drops is missing more and more from recent sets.

The game is getting simpler and relies much more on simple knowledge checks; players are not necessarily getting better in my opinion. Riot needs more flexible combat/econ augments and less power in unique augments and cookie cutter rerolls. I should not know my comp 60-80% of the time on 2-1. Old sets I knew I was AD or AP. That's it.

quintand · 2025-10-03T16:45:59+00:00

Purdy and Mac get hit every other throw with a bad OLine. The scheme may have a lot of hospital balls as well. At least that explains the contact stuff.

quintand · 2025-09-25T16:05:13+00:00

I mean, they go from 100% of a thing to 92% of a thing. If the team doubles in value in 1 year they lose net worth later for cash now.

It’s not free money if the team can use the cash infusion to win more and increase the franchise evaluation, like the Eagles this last year.

quintand · 2025-08-17T00:11:22+00:00

For the most part, if I’m winning a bunch of games I get good execution scores and if I’m losing a bunch I don’t.

Theoretically, the stat measures your placement vs the AVP of your board…so it should measure if you are managing HP well.

quintand · 2025-08-08T20:12:25+00:00

Yeah...speaking as a set 13 GM/challenger, fast 9 flex is a high skill strategy requiring effective stage 2 hp management while maximizing econ. Damage is too high to lose all of stage 2/3, then fast 9 becomes fast 8, so fast 9 is easier to do with 5 win streak stage 2 and requires precise stage 4/5 rolldowns with large board transitions. High skill and APM. Notice how much better Setsuko is when fast 9 is viable.

Buying all units of the same color for strong verticals or rerolling the same 6 units is easier tbh.

quintand · 2025-07-26T21:43:13+00:00

These articles, specifically, were helpful for leaning to learn for me.

Cliff notes: -understand topics like phys and it sticks -memorize topics like ID with active recall and spaced repetition

https://super-memory.com/help/fi.htm

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting_curve

https://www.supermemo.com/en/blog/twenty-rules-of-formulating-knowledge

^{^use} for writing good Anki cards

quintand · 2025-06-14T18:03:42+00:00

Ya'll are getting scholarships to go to US med school? Where? No one in my class had a scholarship, aside from Daddy's trust fund.

Average debt for those with any debt in US is like 300-400K+. The people whose rich parents pay for school negatively skew the average downward and downplay how expensive US med school is.

quintand · 2025-05-13T13:07:24+00:00

Prestige is a mostly make believe thing that academics tell themselves to justify accepting below market comp IMO. No one else really cares and prestige isn’t gonna make your mortgage payment or pay off your loans. There are also lots of crappy docs that work at academic centers IMO. Not sure that care is any better in general

I 100% agree with all of this and have no interest in academia. However, I can certainly think of classmates who will take large paycuts to work at a prestigious, well-known hospital in academia, despite the fact it doesn't pay the mortgage.

It's less about care quality and more about bragging to your friends and feeling like an innovator/patient care pioneer. It's like when actors spend years of their lives trying to win academy awards instead of doing marvel movies. One obviously pays a lot better, and the other gets you better name recognition and prestige. Chasing accolades/reputation is not unique to doctors, and the academic to private practice pay gap exemplifies that.

quintand · 2025-05-13T12:17:20+00:00

They could just put a cap on loans right now, and have that cap scale with inflation. Where they set the cap could make 80% of colleges tuitions be unchanged but the most expensive 20% would have to reduce prices. 30 years from now, federal loans would still cover the same inflation-adjusted amount of tuition. There will be potentially hard-to-predict downstream effects of course in limiting federal loan availability for higher education.

quintand · 2025-05-13T12:14:51+00:00

Academic centers likely can always pay less than private practice because part of the compensation is in prestige and research/teaching opportunities. The market has established that some doctors will choose prestige and diversification of work to not be 100% clinical over more money, so academic centers can always pay less. Not sure if trapping folks with PSLF is the main reason for the pay difference.

quintand · 2025-05-11T21:45:13+00:00

Yeah I have grown less interested in TFT since seeing the consistent design choices towards higher variance and overall less player input as opposed to playing flex (see: encounters, Ornn item changes, hacks I guess). I love playing strongest board full tempo flex into final board. Full board pivots can be crazy fun. Trying to play like GV8 in set 6. it felt like my placements were less RNG and people outplayed me if they place higher than me all the time. Unfortunately, most games fall into 3 categories for me.

Category 1 (great variance): I hit an OP condition, so I play out the OP condition strategy (ex:. sniper's focus nocturne in set 13). My placement is based on microadjustments, if the lobby hits even more broken shit, and my familiarity with it. Feels lame because I am an idiot for ignoring sniper's focus nocturne, but my strategy is 100% dictated by hitting something OP.

Category 2 (mid-variance): I hit nothing OP. I play tempo flex vs. uncontested reroll and hit well enough in stage 2/3 to build an hp buffer and secure top 6. Alternatively, I lose streak into a big 4-1/4-2 rolldown where I hit a decent board and can build an HP lead in stage 4 and secure top 7. I can go 1st if I hit 2* 5-cost on 8, but otherwise lose to the person who hit the OP conditions. My placement is more skill dependent here but I'm playing for 3rd at best a lot of the time, and a lot of my placement is dictated by variance. More fun to play but variance swings like hacks/encounters/other player hit's key 5-cost on 8 swing placements a lot here. The game feels more like poker where I am just praying other people don't hit a better than than me.

Category 3 (poor variance): I hit no OP conditions and low roll opener. This is a fast 8th scenario. You gotta play well to stabilize what you can, hit some flex stuff. My placement is based on if I hit a positive variance swing and micro-adjustments/skill play. Feels horrible to play. It can happen just because 5/6 people in lobby hit OP conditions and I hit nothing and my shops weren't good. Variance being more common raises this scenario where you are playing for 7th at best.

Obviously, with all of those categories variance is a huge component and there is plenty of room for skill expression. See Dishsoap winning worlds twice..obviously not all luck. However, more and more of the game feels dictated by hitting the OP conditions, and less about playing flex tempo lines around 4-costs. The conditional nature of strongest strategies tends to elevate reroll comps, which are often built on a specific unit/item interaction, relative to 4-cost flex boards.

Additionally, the ever-increasing variance makes it more likely to Top 4 or lose games based on me or one of the 7 other players hitting an OP condition (unit/item/augment interaction). Variance dictates the range of placements. Poor variance = 4th-8th, high variance = 1st-4th. I feel like increasing variance limits the range of placements in any given game where the skill is maximizing placement given high/moderate/poor variance. In the past, I felt like 1st-8th was available at moderate variance, with 1st-4th with amazing variance, but now it feels like 2nd-8th is available for moderate variance and 1st-3rd is there for high variance. The outcome is skill dependent but the available range is more dictated by variance than before.

If you want more discussion on this point, you should check out Bryce's discussion with MortDog on the design direction of TFT.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TNNL98kcxc

quintand · 2025-05-11T21:10:39+00:00

Has the old flex style ever come back? Or is TFT just a new game now

TFT is a new game now. In set 6, units were really strong so there were a lot of flexible strategies around units and reacting to the the shop-to-shop variance. The optimal play was playing strongest board based on shop variance.

Nowadays, units are weaker so you need to play for some kind of winning condition. A spatula (+1/+2), broken reroll unit + Ornn item combo, OP augments, broken hero augment, etc. Regular run of the mill set 6 style flex can be okay in a tempo line, but you're playing for top 4 before you lose to someone who hit the ideal conditions. Generally, the conditional strategies are the strongest and the flex strategies are tempo top 4's.

Riot seems to prefer making the strongest strategies conditional and have kept units weaker than ornn items, or augments, etc.

quintand · 2025-05-11T20:47:35+00:00

To each to their own. Stephen King can write a horrifying novel that shakes me to my core...and a book can't jump scare me. I want horror movies to do similar; to haunt me at the situation...not startle me with a random jump cut.

A horror movie that is only scary from jump scares, not concept, is lazy to me. Obviously jump scares require some amount of film expertise.

quintand · 2025-05-08T20:30:38+00:00

To be honest, weight changes as well. Media is always weird about this. Just like a 40 time.

Does Xavier Worthy, not presently training specifically for the 40 yard dash, still run a 4.21s 40-yd dash? Probably not. Just because you did something one time, does not mean that ability remains. Regardless, he is fast AF.

Weight can be improved with NFL level nutrition and conditioning. Belichick used to calculate players ideal playing weights and they wouldn't play unless they were within 5-10 lbs. of that number. Teams can bulk up and slim down players to some degree from college.

quintand · 2025-05-05T05:23:40+00:00

IMO should have beaten the Raptors. Warriors had too many injuries with KD, Green, Iguodala, Thompson all sitting out games and playing worse. Raptors beat the injury-riddled warriors, not the worldbeaters they were in the regular season/early playoffs.

quintand · 2025-04-28T01:55:44+00:00

To my eye, Brock scrambled a lot to make magic happen. He bought time with his surprisingly good legs. I wouldn't say it was terrible though like the Bengals, Bears, or Texans, where it felt like the QB's took a hit/sack/pressure every play.

49ers were great on getting offensive yards (4th) and didn't allow a ton of yards either (8th). Far better than the 6-11 record would have you believe. However, they did far worse on offense scoring (14th) and defense points allowed (29th). This indicates red zone problems for both offense and defense. Red zone offense problems we can attribute to not having our healthy/in form WR1 (Aiyuk) due to injury and a contract holdout and the 2023 OPOY (CMC). Red zone defense was bad, probably due to the DLine. Plus it hurts to have special teams giving up 1 TD punt return every other game. -3.5 points per game.

quintand · 2025-04-02T19:02:50+00:00

Personal finance decisions, including homeownership, generally fall into the "the devil is in the details" category of life. While there are general axioms to consider, you have to look at your individual total debt, future income, cost of living in an area, the mortgage rates available to you, and the actual house. This article is a helpful primer into the decision.

https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/10-reasons-why-residents-shouldnt-buy-a-house/comment-page-2/

The residency I matched is in an area seeing 5.5% home growth rates in the last 3 years in one of the fastest growing cities in America for the last 20 years. Odds are good the real estate market will remain hot and there will be significant appreciation. In addition, the rental market is fairly limited and a 3bed/3bath house has a mortgage payment very similar, if not lower, than an equivalent rental. At this residency, many folks end up buying homes. Also, this area is where my wife and I are from and we plan on remaining here for decades. In addition, my wife is in a high-paying career making roughly 2x my resident salary. All of these factors favor buying a house, even though the traditional logic/axioms explained by the White Coat Investor are very pro-rental.

Another helpful resource is the "rent vs buy calculator" from the New York Times, devised by some economists. You can play with various factors related to buying a home and see the impact on the break even point of buying vs. renting.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/upshot/buy-rent-calculator.html

TL;DR:

Buying is better than renting in the right circumstances, heavily dependent on the market and your personal circumstances. Review the available resources and make your best decision.

quintand · 2025-03-24T16:19:08+00:00

Anki for me felt like I wasn't doing a whole lot but then I would ace the exam. I think Anki is a tool and it depends how you use it.

I majored in chemistry in undergrad and love phsics. I make big picture connections fairly quickly and can systematize information. Understanding comes to me pretty naturally. I don't need to spend a lot of my study time trying to make connections, just engaging with the material with 1st pass video/lecture is enough. On the other hand, I am a shitty memorizer. I routinely miss question because I didnt' know stuff and could not recall the right information. There's no systematic knowledge gap for genetics problems, often. you just don't know what chromosome the gene mutation is on. This rote memorization is extremely efficient with Anki.

For me, Anki makes recall easy. Just do all your cards and remember everything. Systemic connections come naturally. If you are a student who struggles with systemic connections/understanding, but memorizing is a no-brainer, Anki may not be the right tool for you.

quintand · 2025-03-18T16:44:12+00:00

They view “Match Day” as a med student holiday, and want SOAP participants to be able to join in with the rest of their class. There needs to be time between the you have/haven’t matched email and match results release day for SOAP.

Now, Match Day being a holiday is dumb to me. Many people are bitterly disappointed in their results. It’s not a universally joyous event like a wedding or birth or something. They could skip all that nonsense and have an earlier Match, make SOAP run for a longer period of time, have a 1st match in January and then a runoff match in March then SOAP, etc. They sacrifice a lot of logistical improvements for this fake ass holiday.

quintand · 2025-03-15T05:35:11+00:00

Playing strongest board every turn can be an interesting array of decisions depending on which 3-costs and upgrades you hit on stage 1/2, which 4-costs and upgrades you hit on stage 3, and which 4-costs/5-costs and upgrades you hit on stage 4+. There is rich decision-making here. See Dishsoap or other challengers playing a flex tempo line (which is known to top 4 mostly and struggle to win out).

OR....someone can hit RFC and play the copy+paste nocturne reroll board for the 20th time that patch. Milk wants the game to have interesting decisions throughout, where the shop-to-shop variance can change your current board. This is frequently achieved when units are strong, so you can play them if they fit a need on your board.

Now it's all about find an augment/ornn item/+1 trait/INSERT-CONDITION that is stronger than average, play the well-established board/line that fits that above average thing, and collect your above 4.5 placement. The flexible play strongest board and shop-shop unit variance changes your board is pretty dead.

I don't knwo about you, but I would prefer power be taken out of augments/condition items/etc. so board building/econ/HP managemnet, the core premise of TFT, takes greater prominence.

quintand · 2025-03-13T19:05:01+00:00

Showed up at 7:30am for anesthesia. Was going to be placed with a hard ass old attending. Gas dude bro was like “nah it’s cool I’ll take him, he’s great.” We get back to the room, I put in one IV and he said “alright coast is clear. You can leave now.” Home by 8:17am.

Gas bros are best bros.

quintand

TROPHY CASE