Ninety minutes before the beginning of the year's most important tournament, the world's best MtG players sit around sipping coffee or Coke products, fooling with their phones, and chatting easily but nervously. These veterans of the circuit — 15 of them played in the Boston-Worcester Grand Prix the previous weekend — know and respect each other. But there's also the issue of the big money and the big stage. They all want to win.

"It was pretty tense yesterday at the meet and greet. We tried to make small talk while trying to figure out what [type of deck] everyone was playing," Owen Turtenwald, the 2011 Player of the Year, says. "It's the bright lights. The cameras. The tons of money at stake. It's crazy." (A few days later, tournament director Scott Larabee tells me Day 1 was the most nervous he's ever seen the normally brash Turtenwald.)

The tournament at Showbox is both unusually intense and unusually laid back for a high-level Magic event. The pressure comes from the cash at hand and the extremely high quality of play, while the intimate feeling stems from the small group involved. Normal Pro Tour events — there are three every year — feature upwards of 400 players. The Grand Prix, tournaments that anyone can pay to enter, routinely draw more than 1,500 contestants and are played in massive convention spaces. "The laid back feel is nice. It's nice not to have to walk around a big event hall," David Ochoa says of the Players Championship, although he and others will admit they miss being recognized by adoring fans.

After a photo op of the entire group, the day kicks off with a Cube draft, one of the many formats of the game. Individual players are better at different variations of Magic, so the tournament features three varieties: Cube draft, booster draft, and Modern constructed. For our purposes here, the specific details of each format are not really important. Basic ones include which cards are allowed to be chosen and whether the decks are constructed before the tournament or drafted in a fantasy football-esque manner the day of the event.

After drafting, the players get 30 minutes to build their decks, then the action begins. Except it doesn't. There's a problem with the audio on the Internet stream. The Players Championship is a spectator experience, but it's an online spectator experience. Fans are welcome inside the Showbox, but there will only be a handful throughout the weekend. The event isn't promoted as an in-person experience. There’s little room because the space is dedicated to creating the Internet experience. Seven thousand viewers consistently watch the stream at all times, peaking just below 9,000 on the final day. The stage holds three tables, while five tables sit stage right for the other games. Equipment for the broadcast takes up the entire left side of the venue. Staff responsible for getting the tournament online outnumber the players nearly two to one. Two announcers at a time — over the course of three days, six men total will offer play-by-play and color — provide commentary throughout the tournament, focusing on the on-stage "feature match." A large boom camera on the floor and two other cameras offer the producers three different angles on the action, allowing commentators and the audience at home to see into the players' hands. But the game cannot start until the audio is ready. Brian Kibler suggests the group "hurry up and wait." An organizer responds, "That's what an event like this is about." Everyone laughs, then sits patiently at their tables while the techs scramble to fix the issue. Soon, they do. Game on.