Okay, when I said I was going to be updating every time I got promoted in the CS:GO matchmaking system, I think I wasn’t really expecting a promotion at the rate of less than ten wins peerage. If I can recall correctly, the day after I made my update post to Silver IV, I was promoted to Silver Elite.

And then, after a few more losses than wins, I was finally placed into Silver Elite Master.

This past Saturday, even though I was one of the worst players on my winning team (it certainly felt like I was playing badly), I finally broke through to Gold Nova I.

I am noticing something that’s becoming a bit more prevalent in the games that I end up playing that has me a bit worried, though: when I make really stupid mistakes in the middle of a round that end up costing me my participating in that particular round, my first thought is that I am a moron and should stop playing. My second thought is to exclaim out loud my first thought. Now, since I can’t really yell “FUCKIN’ DAMMIT SHIT DAGNABIT I AM BAD AT THIS GAME” out loud in the house that I share with other people, I usually end up pounding my desk with my recently free mouse hand. I’m not sure how loud that is compared to me yelling over a mistake in the drama of the moment, but I imagine that it’s going to start wrecking my hand sooner or later.

One of the ways that I’ve started to combat this trend is to just let everyone on my team know, regardless of performance, of the following things, in no particular order:

• I am bad at this game.
• I am playing on a Mac.
• I am playing on a wireless connection.
• I have Comcast’s shit-tier home service.

Usually this causes some sort of laugh or at least a nervous acknowledgement or two from the players who have pics that can hear me, and we all move on with the understanding that I am bad, and I know I am bad.

This usually turns around the mindset of playing for me, which isn’t just to get as many wins as I can, but it’s to prove myself wrong, that I’m not completely terrible at the game and that a i7 BTO MacBook Air is a perfectly fine gaming machine for Source games like CS:GO.

Maybe not that last bit so much, but the first bit for sure.