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> It's possible he's playing 20x more games than them

Possible but unlikely b/c the person making this claim is the current No. 2 Donkey Kong player in the world Wes Copeland, not Joe Schmo off the street.

Even if Mitchell's disputed scores were accepted they would still be far off Copeland's scores. So when the No. 2 player speaks it carries more weight than just some random dude in his basement.

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Wouldn’t a pro player be playing less games? They’re playing longer, higher scoring games not lots of average scoring games.

Sort of. However, at that level, if you're in the middle of a game and aren't on track to getting a high score, you're probably going to abandon the game and try again from the beginning. Therefore there'll be a fairly high number of games, a sizeable proportion of which are abandoned.

It's like when speedrunners attempt to complete games in the fastest time. If they make a mistake at any point in the game that will cost them a lot of time, they will most likely abandon the game and keep trying until they are able to complete the game without making any costly mistakes.

It depends how much time they put into it. No one checks how many games they play, so one player could play only on weekends while another might also play a few hours every evening.

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