These topics are getting out of hand. As a competitive smasher who plays casually just as much, I feel as though I'm constantly under fire from both sides.
In one of the many debate threads, Lauf linked this article:
http://www.sirlin.net/archive/playing-to-win-part-1/
Some summaries:
"Playing to win is the most important and most widely misunderstood concept in all of competitive games...those who do not already understand the implications I'm about to spell out will probably not believe them to be true at all. In fact, if I were to send this article back in time to my earlier self, even I would not believe it."
"The scrub has lost the game even before it starts. He's lost the game before he's chosen his character. He's lost the game even before the decision of which game is to be played has been made. His problem? He does not play to win...The scrub would take great issue with this statement for he usually believes that he is playing to win, but he is bound up by an intricate construct of fictitious rules that prevent him from ever truly competing."
"The scrub labels a wide variety of tactics and situations "cheap." So-called "cheapness" is truly the mantra of the scrub...the scrub is only willing to play to win within his own made-up mental set of rules. These rules can be staggeringly arbitrary."
"A common call of the scrub is to cry that the kind of play in which ones tries to win at all costs is "boring" or "not fun"...the good players are reaching higher and higher levels of play. They found the "cheap stuff" and abused it. They know how to stop the cheap stuff. They know how to stop the other guy from stopping it so they can keep doing it."
"If an expert does anything he can to win, then does he exploit bugs in the game? The answer is a resounding yes...but not all bugs. There is a large class of bugs in video games that players don't even view as bugs... Bugs so extreme that they stop gameplay are considered unfair even by non-scrubs. As are techniques that can only be performed on, say, the one player side of the game."
"I've been talking down to the scrub a lot in this article. I'd like to say for the record that I'm not calling the scrub stupid. I'm not saying he can never improve. I am saying that he's naive and that he'll be trapped in scrubdom, whether he realizes it or not, as long as he chooses to live in the mental construct of rules he himself constructed. Is it harsh to call scrubs naive?...I really have no trouble saying that since we're talking about esoteric, experience-driven knowledge here. I also know that 99.9% of the world (including me) doesn't know how the citric acid cycle and cellular respiration create 38 ATP molecules per cycle. It's an esoteric thing of which I am unaware, just as many are unaware of competitive games."