The tournament Quotes

“I would like to thank everyone who supported me to be fit for the Euros. I had some fitness problems before the tournament, but I am here now!”

“As a tennis player, you have to get used to losing every week. Unless you win the tournament, you always go home as a loser. But you have to take the positive out of a defeat and go back to work. Improve to fail better.”

“I don't think there has been enough communication between the players and the tournaments. In one sense it's just as much the players' fault. Players talk between each other and in the locker room about things that can be improved and then when the time comes to talk and really do something about it they stop.”

“Kenzie took two staggering steps backward, staring at the feeline as if in a daze. "O-kay," she breathed, shaking her head slightly. "A cat. A cat that talks. I'm going crazy." she glanced at me. " Or you slipped something into my drink at the tournament. One or the other.”

“Many of those who elected to remain might have escaped. 'Chivalry' is a mild appellation for their conduct. Some of the vaunted knights of old were desperate cowards by comparison. A fight in the open field, or jousting in the tournament, did not call out the manhood in a man as did the waiting till the great ship took the final plunge, in the knowledge that the seas round about were covered with loving and yearning witnesses whose own salvation was not assured.”

“Speaking of your eyeballs, dear brother,I overheard some girls talking about you in the restroom at the tournament hotel. Apparently rumor now has it that you won’t allow anyone to see your eyes—ever. In fact, according to this knowledgeable source, you even sleep and shower with your glasses on in case someone unexpectedly walks in...one of them said she’d seen your eyes for herself two years ago and could only describe them as 'ferocious and roving,’ and ‘burning white-hot with a primal, raw wildness.”

“Perhaps you have been wondering about how you will win the tournaments of life. This is an important moment of your life. Just know where your goals are. Dress in the jersey of action and enter the game of vision! Work with your talents, skills, and tactics and with determination! Don’t commit any foul; don’t put yourself on an offside position. Be at the right place at the right time. Attack your failures and defend your goals; look up and watch the time because the whistle may blow at any time. Don’t waste the chances you get! Target the goals and with winning in focus, you will be there!”

“I sometimes rented a car and drove from event to event in Europe; a road trip was a great escape from the day-to-day anxieties of playing, and it kept me from getting too lost in the tournament fun house with its courtesy cars, caterers, locker room attendants, and such — all amenities that create a firewall between players and what you might call the 'real' world — you know, where you may have to read a map, ask a question in a foreign tongue, find a restaurant and read the menu posted in the window to make sure you're not about to walk into a joint that serves only exotic reptile meat.”

“Strategies that did well in competition with other strategies were not, however, those that maximized the returns to agents. Rather, we found a strong inverse relationship between the mean fitness of individuals in populations containing only one strategy, and that strategy's performance in the tournament. This finding illustrates the parasitic effect of strategies that rely heavily on OBSERVE. Strategies using a mixture of social and asocial learning are vulnerable to being outcompeted by those using social learning alone, which may result in a population with lower average returns. These findings are evocative of an established rule in ecology; this specifies that, among competitors for a scarce resource, the dominant competitor will be the species that can persist at the lowest resource level. An equivalent rule may apply when alternative social learning strategies compete: the strategies that eventually dominates will be the one that can persist with the lowest frequency of asocial learning.”