Competitive...?

There’s “Competitive” and then there’s “Competitive”
I’ve noticed in my years of trawling the internet that communication is prone to almost unlimited misinterpretation. The larger the audience, the less likely the message will be consistently interpreted.
Though there are a thousand culturally significant examples of this, the one I’m going to choose for this forum is the advice/opinion of a man named Stelek at the blog “Yes the truth hurts”.
If you haven’t read his material, you should. He’s an intelligent and amusing author with a wealth of knowledge concerning 40k.
He has very specific and strong opinions on the strength of the different armies in a competitive environment.
His detractors often point to results in tournaments that seem to contradict his opinion and go “See, Stelek has no idea what the hell he is talking about, clearly Orks are a very competitive army, they are winning all over the place.”
The problem here isn’t that Stelek is wrong. It’s that his statements on the strength of the different armies are predicated on an assumption of competitive conditions.
That’s the crux of this blog.
In a competitive environment as Stelek sees it, the terrain, mission and scoring system are designed to not favour either player, regardless of their army choice. Leaving ideally only two factors that can decide a game: General and the inherent strength/weakness of their list.
Under those conditions, he is essentially saying that if you turn up with Orks, against an opponent with a similar skill level, you will lose to the armies he has ranked above Orks.
For what it’s worth I agree with his rankings. Under the specific competitive conditions he assumes.
The point is that tournaments are anything but a truly competitive environment, particularly by the narrow and specific definition that Stelek espouses.
Under the conditions that are common to existing tournaments it is quite possible for Orks to perform well, in fact they commonly do. Chaos demons can perform well, though they require very favourable conditions and often custom missions that accidentally favour them heavily.
Stelek is on a crusade (a successful one judging by NOVA) to create tournaments that are competitive and in those tournaments it’s no surprise to see mech based, MSU armies doing very well. Particularly space wolves and blood angels.
For the rest of the world, and my home state of Western Australia, its a different kettle of fish. Some of our tournaments are competitive in layout, some are not.
I’m happy with that personally, to me it adds another dimension to the game when you are thrown a different set of missions and you need to think about what list will perform better in that environment rather than in the ‘absolute’ environment of a truly competitive tournament.
I guess to some extent I would argue that you need these ‘non-competitive’ tournaments to make those who play the less optimum armies actually fun to play at a tourney.
God knows I’d be stuffed if they changed to all nova format tourneys, my Eldar would struggle, my Chaos would be a write-off.
So I am happy to play as a competitive gamer in a tournament scene that is a different flavour of competitive. Where an additional skill is required, the ability to adapt your list writing to meet changing conditions of different tournaments.