Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Monday, November 2, 2009
In-game resources and concentration
Mleh, this one's kind of rambling, but I hope it proves interesting.
What are the things that your character "has" during a match? You have stock and percent. The match itself has time, which can affect how you play strategically. In the case of the ICs, you have a Nana. As a Peach, sometimes you have a projectile. As a recovering Link or Samus, you may or may not have your grapple available.
Playing well is determined by how these resources are used and expended. Obviously you don't want to lose stocks or gain percent, but sometimes strategically expending those resources is smart. Crouch-canceling comes to mind; SD'ing in a 2v2 match can get you back into the fight faster to help a teammate. Or having your teammate take a stock may cost you resources but give you an immediate advantage in its place.
In one of David Sirlin's articles (can't find it at the moment) he mentions that in Starcraft there are minerals, gas and units as your resources. However, there is another resource that players have, which is attention.
Where you put your attention is incredibly important. There are times where you have to be focusing on different aspects of the match, otherwise you screw up. You have to pay attention to executing this combo, then you have to pay attention to guessing this tech-chase, and so on.
You can also think of your attention placement as a strategic decision. It takes a lot of concentration to execute difficult technical maneuvers; if you believe your opponent to be weak against technical rushdown, it might be a good idea to stop thinking and start hammering him with relentless shield pressure. I try not to be extra technical so that I can instead pay attention to guessing what my opponent will do. However, one of my friends was also a mentally focused player, but had trouble dealing with really fast players. When I needed to beat him, I stopped worrying about what he would do and focused instead on having an extremely fast and tight aggressive game so he wouldn't have time to think at all.
Now for a different story! I recently started learning some Marvel vs. Capcom 2, and my friend was showing me basic combos and giving me some idea about the flow of a typical round. So, having learned only one or two useful combos, I tried playing against a different friend named Joe who was only a little better than me.
I had no idea where to put my attention. It didn't matter if I could guess when Joe was going to throw out his assist, because I didn't know what to do. I also couldn't focus on what I wanted to do, because then I was just attacking blindly and running into his stuff. It took a lot of rounds before I didn't have to consciously remember some of the game's most basic mechanics, but afterwards I immediately started landing punishes with significantly more efficiency. Of course, I'm still terrible :)
I bring that up to demonstrate a few things. First, unless you completely understand something, you will use extra attention on it. Second, because you only have so much attention to pay, if you aren't spending it in the appropriate area at the appropriate time, you will get distracted and screw up.
So let's recap. Performing unusually challenging technical stuff takes up your attention (though this differs from player to player). Trying to watch for a specific approach, or look for a particular opening takes up your attention. Figuring out what move you want to use at any moment takes up your attention. If you know exactly what the opponent will do next, and your technical game is 100% ingrained into your hands, and you always automatically know what move works best, then you don't have to pay attention at all to win. It would actually be accurate to say that you aren't paying attention to more things than other people; instead, you don't need to pay attention because you perceive those things automatically.
Assuming your brain doesn't instantly and perfectly process every detail of the match, you will have to swap your focus around a lot. It's not enough to say "I need to concentrate better," but you have to know what to concentrate on at a given point. You have to focus on watching the opening, then you swap your focus to tracking DI for your grab combo. Then you swap again to see if he'll land on a platform or bounce off, then you move over into calling his tech. However, if you know that he always techs left when he lands on the right platform of Battlefield, you can focus on spacing your tech-chase knee perfectly instead. Then you'll be paying attention to how many taunts you can get away with before they respawn.
In order to make use of this knowledge, it's incredibly important to understand your own capabilities. You need to know what you can do automatically and with great consistency, and make that the foundation of your game.
There's more though. Being able to shift your opponent's attention during a match is a valuable skill, and an important part of this game's mental battle. If your approaches are weird and unorthodox, your opponent must make a choice. They will either start putting attention on trying to understand your playstyle and mentality--which increases the likelihood that they make other mistakes--or they will ignore it, which increases the odds they will make bad decisions.
If you mix up your rhythm, the opponent can become distracted while trying to figure out your erratic movement patterns. If you alternate between rapid-fire technical rushdown and patient, turtle style defensiveness, the other guy will become preoccupied trying to figure out what on earth you're about to do next, which can make him impulsive and less attentive to things like smart positioning, good mix-ups, or even the right timing for a shffl'd n-air.
There are a million things that can shift your attention; good focus is based on knowing when, where, and why it happens and being in control of it. The first step is shutting out ALL external factors, because those have nothing to do with whether you should be shield pressuring with drill-shines or spacing cross-up back-airs. After that, it's up to you and understanding your own skillset. Know what you can do with minimal focus, and put that attention elsewhere.
I'm sorry that rambled so much, but I hope it proved interesting nonetheless. Peace.
Edit: I was really out of it when I posted this and left a few random sentences unfinished. I apologize to anybody confused by my spaced-out silliness.
What are the things that your character "has" during a match? You have stock and percent. The match itself has time, which can affect how you play strategically. In the case of the ICs, you have a Nana. As a Peach, sometimes you have a projectile. As a recovering Link or Samus, you may or may not have your grapple available.
Playing well is determined by how these resources are used and expended. Obviously you don't want to lose stocks or gain percent, but sometimes strategically expending those resources is smart. Crouch-canceling comes to mind; SD'ing in a 2v2 match can get you back into the fight faster to help a teammate. Or having your teammate take a stock may cost you resources but give you an immediate advantage in its place.
In one of David Sirlin's articles (can't find it at the moment) he mentions that in Starcraft there are minerals, gas and units as your resources. However, there is another resource that players have, which is attention.
Where you put your attention is incredibly important. There are times where you have to be focusing on different aspects of the match, otherwise you screw up. You have to pay attention to executing this combo, then you have to pay attention to guessing this tech-chase, and so on.
You can also think of your attention placement as a strategic decision. It takes a lot of concentration to execute difficult technical maneuvers; if you believe your opponent to be weak against technical rushdown, it might be a good idea to stop thinking and start hammering him with relentless shield pressure. I try not to be extra technical so that I can instead pay attention to guessing what my opponent will do. However, one of my friends was also a mentally focused player, but had trouble dealing with really fast players. When I needed to beat him, I stopped worrying about what he would do and focused instead on having an extremely fast and tight aggressive game so he wouldn't have time to think at all.
Now for a different story! I recently started learning some Marvel vs. Capcom 2, and my friend was showing me basic combos and giving me some idea about the flow of a typical round. So, having learned only one or two useful combos, I tried playing against a different friend named Joe who was only a little better than me.
I had no idea where to put my attention. It didn't matter if I could guess when Joe was going to throw out his assist, because I didn't know what to do. I also couldn't focus on what I wanted to do, because then I was just attacking blindly and running into his stuff. It took a lot of rounds before I didn't have to consciously remember some of the game's most basic mechanics, but afterwards I immediately started landing punishes with significantly more efficiency. Of course, I'm still terrible :)
I bring that up to demonstrate a few things. First, unless you completely understand something, you will use extra attention on it. Second, because you only have so much attention to pay, if you aren't spending it in the appropriate area at the appropriate time, you will get distracted and screw up.
So let's recap. Performing unusually challenging technical stuff takes up your attention (though this differs from player to player). Trying to watch for a specific approach, or look for a particular opening takes up your attention. Figuring out what move you want to use at any moment takes up your attention. If you know exactly what the opponent will do next, and your technical game is 100% ingrained into your hands, and you always automatically know what move works best, then you don't have to pay attention at all to win. It would actually be accurate to say that you aren't paying attention to more things than other people; instead, you don't need to pay attention because you perceive those things automatically.
Assuming your brain doesn't instantly and perfectly process every detail of the match, you will have to swap your focus around a lot. It's not enough to say "I need to concentrate better," but you have to know what to concentrate on at a given point. You have to focus on watching the opening, then you swap your focus to tracking DI for your grab combo. Then you swap again to see if he'll land on a platform or bounce off, then you move over into calling his tech. However, if you know that he always techs left when he lands on the right platform of Battlefield, you can focus on spacing your tech-chase knee perfectly instead. Then you'll be paying attention to how many taunts you can get away with before they respawn.
In order to make use of this knowledge, it's incredibly important to understand your own capabilities. You need to know what you can do automatically and with great consistency, and make that the foundation of your game.
There's more though. Being able to shift your opponent's attention during a match is a valuable skill, and an important part of this game's mental battle. If your approaches are weird and unorthodox, your opponent must make a choice. They will either start putting attention on trying to understand your playstyle and mentality--which increases the likelihood that they make other mistakes--or they will ignore it, which increases the odds they will make bad decisions.
If you mix up your rhythm, the opponent can become distracted while trying to figure out your erratic movement patterns. If you alternate between rapid-fire technical rushdown and patient, turtle style defensiveness, the other guy will become preoccupied trying to figure out what on earth you're about to do next, which can make him impulsive and less attentive to things like smart positioning, good mix-ups, or even the right timing for a shffl'd n-air.
There are a million things that can shift your attention; good focus is based on knowing when, where, and why it happens and being in control of it. The first step is shutting out ALL external factors, because those have nothing to do with whether you should be shield pressuring with drill-shines or spacing cross-up back-airs. After that, it's up to you and understanding your own skillset. Know what you can do with minimal focus, and put that attention elsewhere.
I'm sorry that rambled so much, but I hope it proved interesting nonetheless. Peace.
Edit: I was really out of it when I posted this and left a few random sentences unfinished. I apologize to anybody confused by my spaced-out silliness.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Blech
So my computer, a five year-old Dell laptop with enough cracks in it to be classified literally as "falling apart," and also containing all my articles-in-progress, has died.
I lost quite a bit of work in there, so that bites. Just wanted to update and say that because I haven't updated lately at all, and didn't want anyone to think I'd forgotten. I've just been working on several things that have all now vanished.
In the words of a great philosopher, "wah." But I'll have some stuff soon anyhow. Promise.
Peace.
I lost quite a bit of work in there, so that bites. Just wanted to update and say that because I haven't updated lately at all, and didn't want anyone to think I'd forgotten. I've just been working on several things that have all now vanished.
In the words of a great philosopher, "wah." But I'll have some stuff soon anyhow. Promise.
Peace.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Emotional Control, Part 2: Depression
Emotional Control, Part 2: Sadness and Depression
Let's start by saying that if there's something I have a lot of experience with, it's being depressed. I've been to psychologists, psychiatrists, and at one point earned myself a stay in a mental hospital for multiple reasons, the primary one being depression. Most people don't know that after most of my temper tantrums, I'd spend the next few hours or days or weeks in a serious depressive spell. Being depressed sucks. A lot.
Fortunately, stuff has become a lot better in recent months, much like with my anger issues. It also means I've got a good insider's view to share on what being depressed means. And, of course, how it relates to your smash playing, because that's why you read this blog :)
The next thing that needs saying is that there is a difference between sadness and depression.
Sadness is an emotion. It's a temporary feeling that you get in response to different stimuli. It's pretty normal for people to become sad. Depression, however, is a combination of emotions and patterns of thought that can quickly become debilitating.
Here's an example: you're in a tournament, and you make it to winner's finals. You sweep your opponent 3-0, and then when you play in grand finals, you win two in a row. You're close to winning the third game, but self-destruct. After that, your play becomes sluggish and you lose the first set. You get discouraged, and then lose the second set 1-3.
Instead of being angry, you become sad. You start thinking "if only I'd done this," or "if I hadn't gone for a risky edgeguard." You feel bad for a bit, thinking about the things you should have done. Later, however, it passes on, and at the IHOP or Denny's after the tournament you cheer up and have fun. You console yourself that you're going to try harder to do better next time, you'll practice on X counterpick more, whatever.
That's sadness. Being sad when something bad or unfortunate happens is pretty normal. I'm not gonna tell you not to be sad, because that's actually kind of unhealthy. Constant, perpetual bubbly happiness often indicates that you're a bit out of touch with reality. Besides, a lot of the time if you become consciously aware of your sadness, you can think of ways to deal with it. Depression, however, is something else entirely.
Depression is feeling sad, then thinking, "I'm a screw-up," "I can never win when it counts," "I'm a failure," "I'll always suck," and stuff like that. Then, instead of picking yourself up and moving on, you make yourself feel worse, and the emotion lasts far longer than the experience that triggered it.
Depression, in short, is sadness that gets out of control. Much like anger, sadness is a useful emotion. It tells you that something is askew and needs fixing. Since you feel bad about it, it gives you motivation to fix it because you don't *want* to feel bad anymore. If you can't handle the sadness, and you start thinking thoughts that only make you sadder, it becomes self-perpetuating. That's the thought pattern of depression.
If anger is based on denial and believing that the world isn't the way it's supposed to be, then depression is hopeless acceptance. "This will never change." "I'm a terrible player, of course I screwed up." "Everybody's better/faster/smarter/more talented." Stuff like that. When it's really bad, you start spreading the sadness to other experiences, or you bring outside experiences in to bolster the depression. "Well, it's no surprise since I'm a failure in everything else."
Like anger, depression is tough to stop once it gets going. The real trick is catching the feelings as they begin. Remember, you usually have a lot of input into your emotional reactions. And the more you start actively and consciously thinking about an emotion, the less impact it begins to have.
Let's look at certain habits of depressive thinking.
Generalizations
"Everything," "always," "never," "every time," "nothing." These are the kinds of words that pop into your head when you start thinking depressive thoughts. "I always mess that up," "I never win," "everything goes wrong," "nothing works," and so on.
The thing to remember is that generalizations are always incorrect (ho ho ho). If you want to quickly kill a generalization, just think of a time when it wasn't true. And then remember that if you can do something once, you can probably do it again and again.
I always screw up my l-cancels -- no you don't. Remember the dozens of l-cancels you executed this match? And the chaingrabs and shine combos? Sometimes you succeed, sometimes you mess up. If you're messing up more than you're comfortable with, turn that discomfort into energy to practice.
I never win -- well, maybe if you have gone 0-2 at every tournament and you've lost every friendly since the dawn of time, this one is legitimate. Odds are, however, you win sometimes, and sometimes you lose. It will keep you from getting depressed, however, if you ask why, then come up with an answer.
"Why do I keep losing?"
"Well, he keeps destroying me on edgeguards and getting low percent KOs."
"How can I stop him from doing that?"
Then you answer. If you can't come up with an answer, ask somebody else. Put your energy towards finding solutions. Don't put your mental energy in focusing entirely on the problem, or else you begin to feel helpless and hopeless.
Compare these two reactions:
"He hits me with d-air a lot, what can I do to stop him?"
"He always hits me with d-air, I can't get away."
The first reaction is a pretty good way to think about situations. You start by acknowledging your situation, then you immediately turn
The second reaction is negative. It can easily cause you to start adding thoughts like, "because I suck," which probably put you in a worse mood. That leads to feeling like there is nothing you can do avoid the d-air. Which, incidentally, is the next part of depression I want to talk about.
Hopelessness
Another word that you start thinking a lot is "can't." "No matter what I do, I *can't*" do something or other. Blind and unhappy acceptance of a situation is a prime indicator of depression.
"That doesn't work for me." "That's not the way I do things." "That's not who I am." These are pretty common sentiments, and they're also rather unhelpful for the most part. If the way you do things isn't working after many attempts, you should try changing your methods. And remember, new methods require practice and adjustment, so don't forget to give them a fair shot.
Come up with an idea. Then try it out, and if it doesn't work, adjust the idea. Try new stuff. Ask for outside advice and then try it. Believe that your situation can be changed and start looking for ways to make it happen. Don't despair and discount possible solutions without giving them an honest try.
When things feel hopeless or scary or threatening, people come up with a lot of defense mechanisms. One of them is sandbagging. As long as you weren't playing at full power, you can convince yourself that you always had a shot. If you lose, you were sandbagging; if you win, you feel good because you weren't even trying! Same with not practicing; you screw up when you don't practice, it's only to be expected. If you succeed, you can brag: "yeah, I don't even own a copy of the game, I just kinda show up and win, lololol." This isn't the only reason somebody might sandbag or not practice, obviously, but I hope you see what I mean.
That's detrimental to you as a player. You've got to accept that you may lose or fail, that some people may play better than you, and accept that it's FINE. Of course you don't want to lose or make mistakes, and you shouldn't let people walk all over you and never try to get better; you want to push yourself and take your matches seriously, invest effort, and get returns. So yeah, it's kind of annoying when somebody has been playing for 1 year and you've played for 5 and they've got more tech-skill than you, or when somebody beats your serious tournament main with a character they never use. I speak from personal experience.
This is going to happen, and it doesn't really matter if it does. Take it from me, it's easy to invest a lot of personal and emotional energy in this game, and it sucks when you get a bad return. People will give you crap for your failures, and you'll often think "that was dumb of me." I recall losing an IC ditto in tournament to Axe, who doesn't play ICs with any real dedication. Nevertheless, he beat me in a serious game; I felt so stupid and embarrassed that I wanted to unplug my controller and walk out of the venue. There is something worse than having that stuff happen to you, however. That is having it happen to you, and letting it break you down.
Fortunately, my example was a day that I didn't let my emotions get the better of me, and I stayed calm and repeated the ditto on the same stage, and won. I actually learned a lot from losing that IC ditto with him, so I actually have that loss to thank for teaching me so much about the ditto.
Enough sidetracking! Moving on...
Outside Factors
Again, some things lie beyond your control. They may happen to you quickly and without warning, and they will affect your mental state in a variety of different ways.
I'll restate my advice for dealing with anger: be aware of these things as they happen and decide how you want to deal with them.
Your emotions are, for the most part, your own decision Obviously, chemical imbalances notwithstanding. If your emotions truly are beyond your control, seeing a doctor is a really really good idea.
Most people don't fall into that group though. For many people, our emotions are based on habits. People make themselves sad or angry more than they should, simply because they tend to think in ways that promote those emotions.
Analogy time: if you make a groove in the surface of something and pour water into it, the water will follow the groove to a specific destination. If you think certain thoughts long enough, you create a groove in the surface of your mind. As a result, your thoughts will lead you to the same emotional destination. In the end, no matter what the situation is, you will wind up making yourself sad, or angry, or whatever.
Sorry, that was kind of lame. The point is, you don't want thought habits that always make you depressed or angry. Otherwise, you drive yourself to the same negative place again and again; all the while, you reinforce the habits through repetition.
So... don't do that. Direct your mental energy towards solutions and what you can do. If you feel like you're in control over your situations, it's harder to feel either angry or sad. If you honestly recognize that something is beyond your control, you can stop worrying about it! If you can't do anything about it, then there's no point in wasting your energy and time thinking about it.
Final Note
Last, but not least; if your emotions begin getting the better of you and you feel like you're legitimately going to lose control, step away. Quit your match, tell your opponent, "good stuff man," and walk away. It's not worth it to dig yourself into an angry or depressive pit for the sake of a single game. Take it from me; when it comes to importance, put your mind before your matches. Take a break or a breath or whatever you need, and don't let yourself become bitter, stubborn, or unhappy. You will stop playing this game one day, and that's not the emotion you want to associate with it.
That was kind of rambly, but I hope it was worth reading. I guess that's all. I might try to write a third section about focus and concentration, but I'm not really qualified -_-
Peace, folks.
Let's start by saying that if there's something I have a lot of experience with, it's being depressed. I've been to psychologists, psychiatrists, and at one point earned myself a stay in a mental hospital for multiple reasons, the primary one being depression. Most people don't know that after most of my temper tantrums, I'd spend the next few hours or days or weeks in a serious depressive spell. Being depressed sucks. A lot.
Fortunately, stuff has become a lot better in recent months, much like with my anger issues. It also means I've got a good insider's view to share on what being depressed means. And, of course, how it relates to your smash playing, because that's why you read this blog :)
The next thing that needs saying is that there is a difference between sadness and depression.
Sadness is an emotion. It's a temporary feeling that you get in response to different stimuli. It's pretty normal for people to become sad. Depression, however, is a combination of emotions and patterns of thought that can quickly become debilitating.
Here's an example: you're in a tournament, and you make it to winner's finals. You sweep your opponent 3-0, and then when you play in grand finals, you win two in a row. You're close to winning the third game, but self-destruct. After that, your play becomes sluggish and you lose the first set. You get discouraged, and then lose the second set 1-3.
Instead of being angry, you become sad. You start thinking "if only I'd done this," or "if I hadn't gone for a risky edgeguard." You feel bad for a bit, thinking about the things you should have done. Later, however, it passes on, and at the IHOP or Denny's after the tournament you cheer up and have fun. You console yourself that you're going to try harder to do better next time, you'll practice on X counterpick more, whatever.
That's sadness. Being sad when something bad or unfortunate happens is pretty normal. I'm not gonna tell you not to be sad, because that's actually kind of unhealthy. Constant, perpetual bubbly happiness often indicates that you're a bit out of touch with reality. Besides, a lot of the time if you become consciously aware of your sadness, you can think of ways to deal with it. Depression, however, is something else entirely.
Depression is feeling sad, then thinking, "I'm a screw-up," "I can never win when it counts," "I'm a failure," "I'll always suck," and stuff like that. Then, instead of picking yourself up and moving on, you make yourself feel worse, and the emotion lasts far longer than the experience that triggered it.
Depression, in short, is sadness that gets out of control. Much like anger, sadness is a useful emotion. It tells you that something is askew and needs fixing. Since you feel bad about it, it gives you motivation to fix it because you don't *want* to feel bad anymore. If you can't handle the sadness, and you start thinking thoughts that only make you sadder, it becomes self-perpetuating. That's the thought pattern of depression.
If anger is based on denial and believing that the world isn't the way it's supposed to be, then depression is hopeless acceptance. "This will never change." "I'm a terrible player, of course I screwed up." "Everybody's better/faster/smarter/more talented." Stuff like that. When it's really bad, you start spreading the sadness to other experiences, or you bring outside experiences in to bolster the depression. "Well, it's no surprise since I'm a failure in everything else."
Like anger, depression is tough to stop once it gets going. The real trick is catching the feelings as they begin. Remember, you usually have a lot of input into your emotional reactions. And the more you start actively and consciously thinking about an emotion, the less impact it begins to have.
Let's look at certain habits of depressive thinking.
Generalizations
"Everything," "always," "never," "every time," "nothing." These are the kinds of words that pop into your head when you start thinking depressive thoughts. "I always mess that up," "I never win," "everything goes wrong," "nothing works," and so on.
The thing to remember is that generalizations are always incorrect (ho ho ho). If you want to quickly kill a generalization, just think of a time when it wasn't true. And then remember that if you can do something once, you can probably do it again and again.
I always screw up my l-cancels -- no you don't. Remember the dozens of l-cancels you executed this match? And the chaingrabs and shine combos? Sometimes you succeed, sometimes you mess up. If you're messing up more than you're comfortable with, turn that discomfort into energy to practice.
I never win -- well, maybe if you have gone 0-2 at every tournament and you've lost every friendly since the dawn of time, this one is legitimate. Odds are, however, you win sometimes, and sometimes you lose. It will keep you from getting depressed, however, if you ask why, then come up with an answer.
"Why do I keep losing?"
"Well, he keeps destroying me on edgeguards and getting low percent KOs."
"How can I stop him from doing that?"
Then you answer. If you can't come up with an answer, ask somebody else. Put your energy towards finding solutions. Don't put your mental energy in focusing entirely on the problem, or else you begin to feel helpless and hopeless.
Compare these two reactions:
"He hits me with d-air a lot, what can I do to stop him?"
"He always hits me with d-air, I can't get away."
The first reaction is a pretty good way to think about situations. You start by acknowledging your situation, then you immediately turn
The second reaction is negative. It can easily cause you to start adding thoughts like, "because I suck," which probably put you in a worse mood. That leads to feeling like there is nothing you can do avoid the d-air. Which, incidentally, is the next part of depression I want to talk about.
Hopelessness
Another word that you start thinking a lot is "can't." "No matter what I do, I *can't*" do something or other. Blind and unhappy acceptance of a situation is a prime indicator of depression.
"That doesn't work for me." "That's not the way I do things." "That's not who I am." These are pretty common sentiments, and they're also rather unhelpful for the most part. If the way you do things isn't working after many attempts, you should try changing your methods. And remember, new methods require practice and adjustment, so don't forget to give them a fair shot.
Come up with an idea. Then try it out, and if it doesn't work, adjust the idea. Try new stuff. Ask for outside advice and then try it. Believe that your situation can be changed and start looking for ways to make it happen. Don't despair and discount possible solutions without giving them an honest try.
When things feel hopeless or scary or threatening, people come up with a lot of defense mechanisms. One of them is sandbagging. As long as you weren't playing at full power, you can convince yourself that you always had a shot. If you lose, you were sandbagging; if you win, you feel good because you weren't even trying! Same with not practicing; you screw up when you don't practice, it's only to be expected. If you succeed, you can brag: "yeah, I don't even own a copy of the game, I just kinda show up and win, lololol." This isn't the only reason somebody might sandbag or not practice, obviously, but I hope you see what I mean.
That's detrimental to you as a player. You've got to accept that you may lose or fail, that some people may play better than you, and accept that it's FINE. Of course you don't want to lose or make mistakes, and you shouldn't let people walk all over you and never try to get better; you want to push yourself and take your matches seriously, invest effort, and get returns. So yeah, it's kind of annoying when somebody has been playing for 1 year and you've played for 5 and they've got more tech-skill than you, or when somebody beats your serious tournament main with a character they never use. I speak from personal experience.
This is going to happen, and it doesn't really matter if it does. Take it from me, it's easy to invest a lot of personal and emotional energy in this game, and it sucks when you get a bad return. People will give you crap for your failures, and you'll often think "that was dumb of me." I recall losing an IC ditto in tournament to Axe, who doesn't play ICs with any real dedication. Nevertheless, he beat me in a serious game; I felt so stupid and embarrassed that I wanted to unplug my controller and walk out of the venue. There is something worse than having that stuff happen to you, however. That is having it happen to you, and letting it break you down.
Fortunately, my example was a day that I didn't let my emotions get the better of me, and I stayed calm and repeated the ditto on the same stage, and won. I actually learned a lot from losing that IC ditto with him, so I actually have that loss to thank for teaching me so much about the ditto.
Enough sidetracking! Moving on...
Outside Factors
Again, some things lie beyond your control. They may happen to you quickly and without warning, and they will affect your mental state in a variety of different ways.
I'll restate my advice for dealing with anger: be aware of these things as they happen and decide how you want to deal with them.
Your emotions are, for the most part, your own decision Obviously, chemical imbalances notwithstanding. If your emotions truly are beyond your control, seeing a doctor is a really really good idea.
Most people don't fall into that group though. For many people, our emotions are based on habits. People make themselves sad or angry more than they should, simply because they tend to think in ways that promote those emotions.
Analogy time: if you make a groove in the surface of something and pour water into it, the water will follow the groove to a specific destination. If you think certain thoughts long enough, you create a groove in the surface of your mind. As a result, your thoughts will lead you to the same emotional destination. In the end, no matter what the situation is, you will wind up making yourself sad, or angry, or whatever.
Sorry, that was kind of lame. The point is, you don't want thought habits that always make you depressed or angry. Otherwise, you drive yourself to the same negative place again and again; all the while, you reinforce the habits through repetition.
So... don't do that. Direct your mental energy towards solutions and what you can do. If you feel like you're in control over your situations, it's harder to feel either angry or sad. If you honestly recognize that something is beyond your control, you can stop worrying about it! If you can't do anything about it, then there's no point in wasting your energy and time thinking about it.
Final Note
Last, but not least; if your emotions begin getting the better of you and you feel like you're legitimately going to lose control, step away. Quit your match, tell your opponent, "good stuff man," and walk away. It's not worth it to dig yourself into an angry or depressive pit for the sake of a single game. Take it from me; when it comes to importance, put your mind before your matches. Take a break or a breath or whatever you need, and don't let yourself become bitter, stubborn, or unhappy. You will stop playing this game one day, and that's not the emotion you want to associate with it.
That was kind of rambly, but I hope it was worth reading. I guess that's all. I might try to write a third section about focus and concentration, but I'm not really qualified -_-
Peace, folks.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Emotional Control, Part 1: Anger
Maybe it's weird for me of all people to be writing about this subject. I've had emotional control issues in every part of my life for years now. Rage, depression, you name it and I've probably had to deal with it. It might actually be more accurate to say that I have not been dealing with it. At least not very well.
Until recently, I more or less ran into the same mental and emotional walls while I played. It was not until around this March that I finally stopped to ask myself questions that needed answering and made some improvement.
Maybe this does make me qualified? Either way, I hope this helps give other players some perspective. Like everything else in this game, I also hope you can find ways to translate them into other areas of your life. If you don't have trouble with controlling your emotions, this whole thing will probably seem like a no-brainer. If you do have problems with emotional control like I do, then maybe this will help you out.
For better or worse, there are a lot of personal anecdotes and viewpoints in here. This writing is based on my experiences, and perhaps they differ utterly from yours. I can only really write what I know, and what I know best are my own emotions and reactions.
Like most of what I write, this is split up into two parts: anger and depression.
For starters, let's talk about the emotion I'm somewhat famous for: anger. I've ragequit, thrown controllers (and other stuff), punched/kicked/headbutted walls (and other stuff), stormed out of venues, and so on. I'd say the culmination of all this happened at Mango Juice earlier this year when, after getting obliterated by Silent Spectre, I did all of the above.
So... anger. One thing I've noticed about it is this: you aren't just "angry." You have a lot of emotions, thoughts, attitudes and experiences combining and boiling inside of you. With the right catalyst, they become a singular, explosive emotion.
Let's take a look at my most explosive outburst. I was just about to get 3-stocked. I was in front of a big crowd of people, almost none of whom were cheering for me. It happened at the tail-end of a long and arduous tournament day, so I was tired; I'd also just made a long trek through loser's bracket after getting stomped on by Zhu (something I also didn't take well).
And then there was my mental state. First off, I put a tremendous amount of pride and ego into the match. Even though I was thinking to myself before the match, "I'm probably going to lose," my mind wasn't prepared to accept that happening, let alone getting 3-stocked. I've built a lot of my identity around being a high-level smash player. I had just screwed up an infinite, my trademark move. A large crowd of people was watching me get reamed. I was the last Arizona player in the bracket and felt like I had to represent my state. I had to represent myself and show people I was a good player.
Every mistake I made was like an insult to myself as a player. When I screwed up an L-cancel or wavedash, it felt like I'd wasted the previous four and a half years of practice and dedication to the game. When I botched my infinite, I wasn't only thinking about the stock I failed to take, but the fact that I screwed up something I can do--and actually *have done*--blindfolded. It peaked when I did an empty short-hop by mistake (to this day I can remember spazzing out and missing the buttons I intended to hit) and SS landed a knee in my face. That was the point I quit the game and flung my controller at the wall, then stormed outside.
Not to mention, I was tired. Managing tournament fatigue is an important part of playing well and placing highly, and I had been doing a very poor job of it. I'd also had *two* emotional outbursts earlier, one after a loss in 2v2 winner's bracket and another after losing to Zhu in singles. Two large outbursts of emotion, a long day... my brain was exhausted. And after that match, assuming I won, I would have to play Zhu--and repeat the same ordeal--and if I somehow won that I'd play Mango, and if through some crazy miracle I beat him in one set, I'd have to do it again.
To top it all off, I'd been looking forward to the tournament for months and now I was--in my mind--completely ruining it (you know, ignore the fact that I'd already made it to fourth place among some of the west coast's toughest competition, and the two people who eliminated me are both really flipping good players).
Mentally speaking, I did not prepare myself to play that match at all. I psyched myself out, so I wasn't prepared to win and keep playing. I invested my pride and ego in the match, so I wasn't able to deal with losing. There was no way for me to come out of this situation feeling good, and the hole I dug for myself got deeper and deeper.
Here are the two main points I want to make by describing that experience. First, anger is a combination of a lot of different things. If you don't want to get angry, you have to be aware of the things causing your anger and manage them. You can't magically decide "I won't be angry," because anger doesn't just magically happen. It's the natural result of a chain of thoughts, feelings, and events, so you have to catch it in advance. If you *do* start getting angry, remove yourself from the situation ASAP before your rage gets the better of you.
The second point I want to make is that every factor contributing to my anger, except for the fact that it was late at night when I played the match, I inflicted upon myself. I decided that I absolutely had to win that match or I'd look like a fool. I decided that making mistakes was an insult to myself as a player. I decided that losing would be unacceptable, that if I won I'd have to play matches I didn't want to play, that I wanted to be anywhere but in the chair I was sitting in, and so on and so forth endlessly. Having decided all that, it was inevitable that I would become angry with the way things turned out. However, I didn't need to make those decisions in the first place. So you can't suddenly put the brakes on your anger, but you *can* decide how you react to what causes it. That, in turn, keeps the anger from ever occurring.
So more or less, I did it to myself. What's funny is that if I hadn't been so bent on winning and playing perfectly, I wouldn't have become so angry. I probably would have played a lot better, maybe even to the point of winning.
It's surprisingly Zen. You have to hold two contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time. Giving everything you have to win and pushing towards perfection, yet being content with losing and making mistakes. To get what you want, you have to stop wanting it so badly in the first place. To avoid being angry so you can play well and win, you have to decide that playing well and winning isn't as important as remaining calm.
This, I think, is the key. However, you can't focus on keeping calm without knowing what will keep you from doing so. Let's look at what factors can lead to anger, and what we can do to control those factors and hopefully keep anger in check.
Pride
I believe that pride is one of the main roots of anger. I'm not talking about positive aspects of pride, like integrity and honor. What I'm talking about is self-importance, ego, and lack of humility.
When you have too much pride and someone or something challenges it, it's very easy to beome angry. When you're proud of something you've accomplished and somebody else says that achievement was worthless, it probably upsets you. If you have a positive view of yourself and something happens to turn it upside down, it probably hurts.
Personally, I've developed a lot of pride in myself as a Smash player. It makes me feel fantastic to say that I may be one of the best ICs in the world. I can say that I know way more about this game than most people, that I know more about the Ice Climbers than almost anybody. Weird as it sounds, because I've learned so much about Nana's AI and weird behaviors, it feels like I know her as a person. I've invested a lot into this game, and integrated it into my self-image When things start challenging and contradicting that self-image, it hurts me, because this is an important part of my identity.
So what's the solution? I think it's pretty simple: abandon pride. What good does it do you? It can help you push yourself further, but it can also hold you back. More often than not, pride blinds you to things that are actually happening around you. You can't accept the things that challenge your pride, and being unable to accept them (even when they're true) easily leads to anger.
Or if abandoning pride seems impossible, change the things you take pride in. I've started to put my emphasis on how I feel and think during tournaments rather than how I perform. For most of my career so far, I've entered matches wanting to play at my peak, wanting to win, wanting to be the best. In recent tournaments, however, my emphasis has been on the following things: keeping calm, being a good sport whether I win or lose, maintaining a positive attitude, never getting discouraged, never quitting a match out of despair, and having fun with a game I love. If I can achieve those, then I can take pride in my time at the tournament, even if I've taken last place.
Funnily enough, since I started doing that, I've been playing better and better. When I'm playing poorly and getting angry, I start asking myself questions: "why do I want to win so badly?" I want to be good at the game, but getting pissed doesn't make me any better--it usually makes me worse. "What's the worst that happens if I lose?" Maybe I'll get eliminated from a tournament, but at least I can have fun in the mean time. If I enjoy the time I spend doing what I'm doing, then the time was fulfilling regardless of the outcome. "Who cares if I make a bunch of dumb errors?" Maybe I look stupid, but it's better than looking like a sore loser and getting angry over a bad performance. If I laugh at my mistakes, I can even turn a bad performance into something enjoyable. And then I remember that even players like M2K in his prime would make technical errors; thinking that, I can't honestly feel that mad about my own.
What's most important here is that even when things around me are outside my control, *I* can choose how I view them and how I react to them. If I keep these things in mind, I don't think it's even possible for me to get angry at all. However, if I let them get out of control, anger isn't an emotion I'll just be able to shut off.
In all honesty though, I still haven't gotten rid of my pride, but I think I've channeled it somewhere more useful. I'm proud of the new player I'm becoming, and if something challenges or contradicts that pride, I can use it as a guide for my own improvement. I recommend others do the same.
Denial
Denial, it seems to me, is another part of anger. When things don't go our way, sometimes we deny their legitimacy. Because we can't accept that the problem exists, we can't fix it. It's nice, cliched, and stolen from the twelve-step method for fighting addiction, but that doesn't make it less true.
Let's say that you believe you are the best player in the world, and then you lose. There is now a contradiction between your view and reality. There are several possible responses:
--Claim that the other players aren't really better than you. They clearly just got lucky, or they were playing cheaply or unfairly. You're still the better player.
--Blame your loss on something like a controller malfunction, or an unfair counter-matchup, or that you just got over the swine flu, or that it was raining and made your amputated leg ache, or that your mommy didn't hug you that day. You're still the better player.
--Accept that you lost, and use your loss as motivation to practice.
--Accept that you lost, and decide that being the best isn't as important as having fun.
--Other stuff.
In the first two cases, it's easy to imagine somebody getting angry in those situations. The world is not how they thought it was; they've been humbled in front of other people and can't accept the disgrace of losing.
Of course, maybe your controller DID break or you caught SARS right before your match or something. The point here is not to say "you are always completely 100% to blame for a loss" but for you to honestly acknowledge the source of your defeat.
Often when I'm angry, I start muttering things to myself like "I'm better than this" or "I should be better than this," and, internally, I begin fighting reality.
It's not just Smash. Most people have a tough time accepting hard truths about themselves and the situations around them. People justify and rationalize their own shortcomings and failings because they really don't want to admit certain facts. It's part pride, and part denial.
In place of denial, you want honesty. You need to honestly assess the causes of your loss before you can change them. It's not helpful to say "he picked a gay stage" and pretend that you, not your opponent, is superior. Instead, you have to say, "I was not prepared to win on that stage," and practice it so it will never be a factor again. Don't deny that you weren't ready, and you will help eliminate your anger. You also give yourself a clear plan for improvement. With that in your mind, you won't even have room to be angry; you'll have a positive goal instead.
Outside Factors
There's a lot of stuff going on in your head at all times. Sometimes you're hungry, tired, sick, cold, hot, whatever, and it's throwing you off balance. Sometimes you're worrying about a job you lost, or a fight you had with a friend. I've gone into tournaments worrying about sick relatives on more than one occasion. Sometimes you hate the person you're playing against and want very badly to beat them. Maybe somebody is talking trash about your region, or your friend, or your mother, or your Hello Kitty backpack. Maybe everything just seems to be going wrong; your car breaks down on the way to the venue, and when you get out to see why, a truck splashes you with mud, and then when you get to the venue you find you forgot your controller and during one of your matches a power surge resets your Gamecube....
These things originate outside of you. Though you can try to have some influence on these environmental factors, you can't possibly control them all. The only thing you can do is decide how you will react to the things happening around you. Here are some questions I've come up with to keep myself from getting into out of control rage at external factors.
--Does it actually matter? If it doesn't, I do my best to ignore it. If it does, I move on to the next question.
--Am I somehow able to deal with it? If no, then I just accept it and move on. You'd be surprised how easy it is not to get angry at something if you just acknowledge its existence. If you *can* deal with it, however...
--What's the best way to deal with it? When I ask this, my mental energy gets transferred to solving the problem rather than raging at it.
Steadily eliminate the factors that can cause you stress and anger, and the anger will never become an issue.
I hope this helps. The next section will be about anger's close relative, depression. See you next time.
* *
Below is a write-up from last weekend's tournament, so check that out too!
Peace.
Until recently, I more or less ran into the same mental and emotional walls while I played. It was not until around this March that I finally stopped to ask myself questions that needed answering and made some improvement.
Maybe this does make me qualified? Either way, I hope this helps give other players some perspective. Like everything else in this game, I also hope you can find ways to translate them into other areas of your life. If you don't have trouble with controlling your emotions, this whole thing will probably seem like a no-brainer. If you do have problems with emotional control like I do, then maybe this will help you out.
For better or worse, there are a lot of personal anecdotes and viewpoints in here. This writing is based on my experiences, and perhaps they differ utterly from yours. I can only really write what I know, and what I know best are my own emotions and reactions.
Like most of what I write, this is split up into two parts: anger and depression.
For starters, let's talk about the emotion I'm somewhat famous for: anger. I've ragequit, thrown controllers (and other stuff), punched/kicked/headbutted walls (and other stuff), stormed out of venues, and so on. I'd say the culmination of all this happened at Mango Juice earlier this year when, after getting obliterated by Silent Spectre, I did all of the above.
So... anger. One thing I've noticed about it is this: you aren't just "angry." You have a lot of emotions, thoughts, attitudes and experiences combining and boiling inside of you. With the right catalyst, they become a singular, explosive emotion.
Let's take a look at my most explosive outburst. I was just about to get 3-stocked. I was in front of a big crowd of people, almost none of whom were cheering for me. It happened at the tail-end of a long and arduous tournament day, so I was tired; I'd also just made a long trek through loser's bracket after getting stomped on by Zhu (something I also didn't take well).
And then there was my mental state. First off, I put a tremendous amount of pride and ego into the match. Even though I was thinking to myself before the match, "I'm probably going to lose," my mind wasn't prepared to accept that happening, let alone getting 3-stocked. I've built a lot of my identity around being a high-level smash player. I had just screwed up an infinite, my trademark move. A large crowd of people was watching me get reamed. I was the last Arizona player in the bracket and felt like I had to represent my state. I had to represent myself and show people I was a good player.
Every mistake I made was like an insult to myself as a player. When I screwed up an L-cancel or wavedash, it felt like I'd wasted the previous four and a half years of practice and dedication to the game. When I botched my infinite, I wasn't only thinking about the stock I failed to take, but the fact that I screwed up something I can do--and actually *have done*--blindfolded. It peaked when I did an empty short-hop by mistake (to this day I can remember spazzing out and missing the buttons I intended to hit) and SS landed a knee in my face. That was the point I quit the game and flung my controller at the wall, then stormed outside.
Not to mention, I was tired. Managing tournament fatigue is an important part of playing well and placing highly, and I had been doing a very poor job of it. I'd also had *two* emotional outbursts earlier, one after a loss in 2v2 winner's bracket and another after losing to Zhu in singles. Two large outbursts of emotion, a long day... my brain was exhausted. And after that match, assuming I won, I would have to play Zhu--and repeat the same ordeal--and if I somehow won that I'd play Mango, and if through some crazy miracle I beat him in one set, I'd have to do it again.
To top it all off, I'd been looking forward to the tournament for months and now I was--in my mind--completely ruining it (you know, ignore the fact that I'd already made it to fourth place among some of the west coast's toughest competition, and the two people who eliminated me are both really flipping good players).
Mentally speaking, I did not prepare myself to play that match at all. I psyched myself out, so I wasn't prepared to win and keep playing. I invested my pride and ego in the match, so I wasn't able to deal with losing. There was no way for me to come out of this situation feeling good, and the hole I dug for myself got deeper and deeper.
Here are the two main points I want to make by describing that experience. First, anger is a combination of a lot of different things. If you don't want to get angry, you have to be aware of the things causing your anger and manage them. You can't magically decide "I won't be angry," because anger doesn't just magically happen. It's the natural result of a chain of thoughts, feelings, and events, so you have to catch it in advance. If you *do* start getting angry, remove yourself from the situation ASAP before your rage gets the better of you.
The second point I want to make is that every factor contributing to my anger, except for the fact that it was late at night when I played the match, I inflicted upon myself. I decided that I absolutely had to win that match or I'd look like a fool. I decided that making mistakes was an insult to myself as a player. I decided that losing would be unacceptable, that if I won I'd have to play matches I didn't want to play, that I wanted to be anywhere but in the chair I was sitting in, and so on and so forth endlessly. Having decided all that, it was inevitable that I would become angry with the way things turned out. However, I didn't need to make those decisions in the first place. So you can't suddenly put the brakes on your anger, but you *can* decide how you react to what causes it. That, in turn, keeps the anger from ever occurring.
So more or less, I did it to myself. What's funny is that if I hadn't been so bent on winning and playing perfectly, I wouldn't have become so angry. I probably would have played a lot better, maybe even to the point of winning.
It's surprisingly Zen. You have to hold two contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time. Giving everything you have to win and pushing towards perfection, yet being content with losing and making mistakes. To get what you want, you have to stop wanting it so badly in the first place. To avoid being angry so you can play well and win, you have to decide that playing well and winning isn't as important as remaining calm.
This, I think, is the key. However, you can't focus on keeping calm without knowing what will keep you from doing so. Let's look at what factors can lead to anger, and what we can do to control those factors and hopefully keep anger in check.
Pride
I believe that pride is one of the main roots of anger. I'm not talking about positive aspects of pride, like integrity and honor. What I'm talking about is self-importance, ego, and lack of humility.
When you have too much pride and someone or something challenges it, it's very easy to beome angry. When you're proud of something you've accomplished and somebody else says that achievement was worthless, it probably upsets you. If you have a positive view of yourself and something happens to turn it upside down, it probably hurts.
Personally, I've developed a lot of pride in myself as a Smash player. It makes me feel fantastic to say that I may be one of the best ICs in the world. I can say that I know way more about this game than most people, that I know more about the Ice Climbers than almost anybody. Weird as it sounds, because I've learned so much about Nana's AI and weird behaviors, it feels like I know her as a person. I've invested a lot into this game, and integrated it into my self-image When things start challenging and contradicting that self-image, it hurts me, because this is an important part of my identity.
So what's the solution? I think it's pretty simple: abandon pride. What good does it do you? It can help you push yourself further, but it can also hold you back. More often than not, pride blinds you to things that are actually happening around you. You can't accept the things that challenge your pride, and being unable to accept them (even when they're true) easily leads to anger.
Or if abandoning pride seems impossible, change the things you take pride in. I've started to put my emphasis on how I feel and think during tournaments rather than how I perform. For most of my career so far, I've entered matches wanting to play at my peak, wanting to win, wanting to be the best. In recent tournaments, however, my emphasis has been on the following things: keeping calm, being a good sport whether I win or lose, maintaining a positive attitude, never getting discouraged, never quitting a match out of despair, and having fun with a game I love. If I can achieve those, then I can take pride in my time at the tournament, even if I've taken last place.
Funnily enough, since I started doing that, I've been playing better and better. When I'm playing poorly and getting angry, I start asking myself questions: "why do I want to win so badly?" I want to be good at the game, but getting pissed doesn't make me any better--it usually makes me worse. "What's the worst that happens if I lose?" Maybe I'll get eliminated from a tournament, but at least I can have fun in the mean time. If I enjoy the time I spend doing what I'm doing, then the time was fulfilling regardless of the outcome. "Who cares if I make a bunch of dumb errors?" Maybe I look stupid, but it's better than looking like a sore loser and getting angry over a bad performance. If I laugh at my mistakes, I can even turn a bad performance into something enjoyable. And then I remember that even players like M2K in his prime would make technical errors; thinking that, I can't honestly feel that mad about my own.
What's most important here is that even when things around me are outside my control, *I* can choose how I view them and how I react to them. If I keep these things in mind, I don't think it's even possible for me to get angry at all. However, if I let them get out of control, anger isn't an emotion I'll just be able to shut off.
In all honesty though, I still haven't gotten rid of my pride, but I think I've channeled it somewhere more useful. I'm proud of the new player I'm becoming, and if something challenges or contradicts that pride, I can use it as a guide for my own improvement. I recommend others do the same.
Denial
Denial, it seems to me, is another part of anger. When things don't go our way, sometimes we deny their legitimacy. Because we can't accept that the problem exists, we can't fix it. It's nice, cliched, and stolen from the twelve-step method for fighting addiction, but that doesn't make it less true.
Let's say that you believe you are the best player in the world, and then you lose. There is now a contradiction between your view and reality. There are several possible responses:
--Claim that the other players aren't really better than you. They clearly just got lucky, or they were playing cheaply or unfairly. You're still the better player.
--Blame your loss on something like a controller malfunction, or an unfair counter-matchup, or that you just got over the swine flu, or that it was raining and made your amputated leg ache, or that your mommy didn't hug you that day. You're still the better player.
--Accept that you lost, and use your loss as motivation to practice.
--Accept that you lost, and decide that being the best isn't as important as having fun.
--Other stuff.
In the first two cases, it's easy to imagine somebody getting angry in those situations. The world is not how they thought it was; they've been humbled in front of other people and can't accept the disgrace of losing.
Of course, maybe your controller DID break or you caught SARS right before your match or something. The point here is not to say "you are always completely 100% to blame for a loss" but for you to honestly acknowledge the source of your defeat.
Often when I'm angry, I start muttering things to myself like "I'm better than this" or "I should be better than this," and, internally, I begin fighting reality.
It's not just Smash. Most people have a tough time accepting hard truths about themselves and the situations around them. People justify and rationalize their own shortcomings and failings because they really don't want to admit certain facts. It's part pride, and part denial.
In place of denial, you want honesty. You need to honestly assess the causes of your loss before you can change them. It's not helpful to say "he picked a gay stage" and pretend that you, not your opponent, is superior. Instead, you have to say, "I was not prepared to win on that stage," and practice it so it will never be a factor again. Don't deny that you weren't ready, and you will help eliminate your anger. You also give yourself a clear plan for improvement. With that in your mind, you won't even have room to be angry; you'll have a positive goal instead.
Outside Factors
There's a lot of stuff going on in your head at all times. Sometimes you're hungry, tired, sick, cold, hot, whatever, and it's throwing you off balance. Sometimes you're worrying about a job you lost, or a fight you had with a friend. I've gone into tournaments worrying about sick relatives on more than one occasion. Sometimes you hate the person you're playing against and want very badly to beat them. Maybe somebody is talking trash about your region, or your friend, or your mother, or your Hello Kitty backpack. Maybe everything just seems to be going wrong; your car breaks down on the way to the venue, and when you get out to see why, a truck splashes you with mud, and then when you get to the venue you find you forgot your controller and during one of your matches a power surge resets your Gamecube....
These things originate outside of you. Though you can try to have some influence on these environmental factors, you can't possibly control them all. The only thing you can do is decide how you will react to the things happening around you. Here are some questions I've come up with to keep myself from getting into out of control rage at external factors.
--Does it actually matter? If it doesn't, I do my best to ignore it. If it does, I move on to the next question.
--Am I somehow able to deal with it? If no, then I just accept it and move on. You'd be surprised how easy it is not to get angry at something if you just acknowledge its existence. If you *can* deal with it, however...
--What's the best way to deal with it? When I ask this, my mental energy gets transferred to solving the problem rather than raging at it.
Steadily eliminate the factors that can cause you stress and anger, and the anger will never become an issue.
I hope this helps. The next section will be about anger's close relative, depression. See you next time.
* *
Below is a write-up from last weekend's tournament, so check that out too!
Peace.
ActiveGamers tournament and notes for improvement.
This past weekend I attended the ActiveGamers tournament in California.
Even though I only took 7th in Melee Singles, the event felt like a major victory to me for several reasons.
1) Even though at many times I felt myself beginning to get angry, I caught myself very early and kept my cool. Except for when I became incredibly tired, the tournament remained a fun experience for me the entire time.
2) Typically in the matches that I lose, I feel as though I could have been playing much better. I'm making lots of technical errors, getting flustered and impatient, not thinking clearly, etc. This was not the case this time; I managed to keep good control over my nerves and play at a level I was proud of. There was obviously room for improvement (for instance, I could have won ^_^) but I was pretty happy with my play, and I would say it accurately reflected my current skill level. That is, pretty good, but with a lot of places to improve.
3) I took 3rd in doubles with Romeo even though both of us showed up to the tournament without a partner, wondering if we'd even be entering the event. We worked together surprisingly well!
4) I learned some very important stuff about Melee that I can start focusing on and practicing that may be the next step in improving my game.
I also did pretty well in Brawl doubles too, taking 9th with my teammate Darklink. I also improved quite a bit at doubles from this, and if it wasn't for our Brawl 2v2 matches I don't think Romeo and I would have taken 3rd in Melee.
Some highlight moments from the tournament:
--In Brawl 2v2, my teammate played as MK and I played as Wario; during several of our matches we landed our new signature team combo, tornado into fart. Not only that, during one match I actually managed to use Wario's u-air and clap somebody out of MK's tornado from above by falling down into it.
--After winning one of my Melee matches, I got text messages from two different people congratulating me. They'd been watching it on live-stream and were supporting me from completely different states. It was a great feeling and gave me a major confidence boost.
--At Denny's with Mew2King, he opened up the menu and started shouting. The very first thing that he saw on it was strawberry mango tea and he shouted, "I can't get away from him! He's everywhere!"
* * *
Now for the *really* interesting part, which is the stuff I learned and get to improve on.
Studying the opponent's movement
During one of my money matches against a Fox player, I began falling behind and felt like I had no idea where he was going to move next. I was trying to catch him but it felt like I was playing the match with a blindfold on.
Suddenly it hit me, *really* hit me that he actually used relatively few approaches. He would dash dance until he reached the right distance, then come in with a SHFFL'd d-air or n-air. He would drop through platforms and double jump back onto them until I hit a certain distance, then he'd fall through with retreating b-air. If we were under one of the side platforms, he'd run off the edges to b-air me.
As I thought about my other matches, it was the case with almost every other player. They had about three or four approaches that they rely on, and maybe one or two tricks to bait me into approaching. A Falcon might throw out a full-jumped u-air to trick you into attacking, but he has more than enough time to fast-fall a b-air and then retreat. He might land on platforms with a d-air then run off with an u-air to punish you for approaching.
But even knowing this, I was still getting hit by a lot of this stuff. Is it just a lot of spacing errors? Not always; I typically have pretty good spacing. I realized that when I got hit by this stuff, I would only see it coming at the last moment, just in time to realize that I was about to get my face kicked in.
I got to thinking about this and understood that predicting your opponent isn't just knowing what the trick is, or what move is coming. It's about studying how they move and where they move.
In a sword fight, good fighters spend less time watching the sword and more time watching the opponent's feet and torso. In martial arts and boxing, you study the opponent's footwork to understand where they plan to move, how they've shifted their weight and what that means about the attack they're going to launch. So in Smash, it makes sense to me that if you want to be a good player, you don't study only the opponent's attacks, tricks, or techniques, but their movement. The rhythm of their dash dance, the way they fall and guide themselves through platforms, will tell you exactly where they plan to go, and as a result, exactly which move you can expect them to do.
This also tells you that to be better, you need to have as many solid approaches mastered as you can, and that you have to be as unpredictable with your movement rhythm as possible.
Concentration
How do you know you're actually focused on the match?
--Your movements are sharper, faster, and have less error.
--Anytime you have a thought like "how could I have messed that up?" or "what an annoying cheer," it passes quickly from your mind.
--You make your decisions faster and with more confidence. They are also typically better.
--Moments in the match seem to flow naturally together and make sense; each event seems perfectly, completely connected, like it's impossible for anything else to be happening.
How do you do it? I don't know. I'm one of those folks who has trouble concentrating on anything period, so... I have no idea how I can improve in this area. My one experience with absolutely perfect concentration feels very far away from me now.
It makes me wonder if good concentration is a thing that you make happen, or you allow to happen. Or maybe it's different for different people. I don't know. All I know is this is the area of my game that requires the most improvement, and I don't really know how to do that. At least, however, I know *what* I'm looking for, which is a step up from where I was before this tournament.
I'd love it if people posted some advice or personal experiences with good concentration so that I can get some ideas. I'll post my own as they come; for now I can only identify how it feels to be utterly focused and assert that this focus is what creates consistently strong performance. So Adderall, basically.
Kidding! But only kind of.
Doubles
This one is very short. If you want to win in 2v2, don't play 2v2. Turn it into 2v1 as often as possible; wall out the other player and then go in to help your teammate. Any time your teammate gets hit or punished, the opponent should suffer equally if not more. Any time your opponent hits the opponent, you should be there to add damage.
Teams usually have some kind of skill imbalance, so focus on the weaker player. Force the better of the two to make constant sacrifices to help his teammate out, and you can decrease both players' efficacy.
If you know for a fact that you and your partner are better at 1v1, turn the game into two 1v1s! Before Taj retired and we played a lot of doubles together, I was always confident that if he could get a Fox or Falco off the edge, that Fox or Falco would be toast. As a result, my goal was to keep the other player distracted and unable to assist. Likewise, if I land a grab with my ICs, his goal is not to help me combo them but to keep me as free as I can to punish with all my might.
When Romeo and I played M2K and Zhu, Zhu was doing an excellent job of bouncing me around and keeping me occupied while M2K focused on fighting Romeo. M2K was playing Sheik against Romeo's Falcon, so as long as Zhu's Fox kept shining me, M2K could abuse the character matchup advantage he had to its fullest potential. On the other hand, when I got a successful chaingrab against M2K going, Romeo put all his effort into keeping Zhu occupied while I hit M2K with a zero-to-death ledge CG and edgeguard.
So here's the basics: you want to make it 2v1 as much as you can so your opponent can never gain a good foothold with a combo or edgeguard. When your opponents have good teamwork but aren't as good when fighting straight-up 1v1s, you want to force 1v1 situations and abuse their weaknesses.
So pay attention to fighting with your teammate and keeping the opponent from doing the same. It's kind of general, but it's hard to get into the specifics of it when there are so many team combinations and individual playstyles... I'll be posting much more about doubles at a later date though, so look forward to that :)
That's all for now. Peace, folks.
Even though I only took 7th in Melee Singles, the event felt like a major victory to me for several reasons.
1) Even though at many times I felt myself beginning to get angry, I caught myself very early and kept my cool. Except for when I became incredibly tired, the tournament remained a fun experience for me the entire time.
2) Typically in the matches that I lose, I feel as though I could have been playing much better. I'm making lots of technical errors, getting flustered and impatient, not thinking clearly, etc. This was not the case this time; I managed to keep good control over my nerves and play at a level I was proud of. There was obviously room for improvement (for instance, I could have won ^_^) but I was pretty happy with my play, and I would say it accurately reflected my current skill level. That is, pretty good, but with a lot of places to improve.
3) I took 3rd in doubles with Romeo even though both of us showed up to the tournament without a partner, wondering if we'd even be entering the event. We worked together surprisingly well!
4) I learned some very important stuff about Melee that I can start focusing on and practicing that may be the next step in improving my game.
I also did pretty well in Brawl doubles too, taking 9th with my teammate Darklink. I also improved quite a bit at doubles from this, and if it wasn't for our Brawl 2v2 matches I don't think Romeo and I would have taken 3rd in Melee.
Some highlight moments from the tournament:
--In Brawl 2v2, my teammate played as MK and I played as Wario; during several of our matches we landed our new signature team combo, tornado into fart. Not only that, during one match I actually managed to use Wario's u-air and clap somebody out of MK's tornado from above by falling down into it.
--After winning one of my Melee matches, I got text messages from two different people congratulating me. They'd been watching it on live-stream and were supporting me from completely different states. It was a great feeling and gave me a major confidence boost.
--At Denny's with Mew2King, he opened up the menu and started shouting. The very first thing that he saw on it was strawberry mango tea and he shouted, "I can't get away from him! He's everywhere!"
* * *
Now for the *really* interesting part, which is the stuff I learned and get to improve on.
Studying the opponent's movement
During one of my money matches against a Fox player, I began falling behind and felt like I had no idea where he was going to move next. I was trying to catch him but it felt like I was playing the match with a blindfold on.
Suddenly it hit me, *really* hit me that he actually used relatively few approaches. He would dash dance until he reached the right distance, then come in with a SHFFL'd d-air or n-air. He would drop through platforms and double jump back onto them until I hit a certain distance, then he'd fall through with retreating b-air. If we were under one of the side platforms, he'd run off the edges to b-air me.
As I thought about my other matches, it was the case with almost every other player. They had about three or four approaches that they rely on, and maybe one or two tricks to bait me into approaching. A Falcon might throw out a full-jumped u-air to trick you into attacking, but he has more than enough time to fast-fall a b-air and then retreat. He might land on platforms with a d-air then run off with an u-air to punish you for approaching.
But even knowing this, I was still getting hit by a lot of this stuff. Is it just a lot of spacing errors? Not always; I typically have pretty good spacing. I realized that when I got hit by this stuff, I would only see it coming at the last moment, just in time to realize that I was about to get my face kicked in.
I got to thinking about this and understood that predicting your opponent isn't just knowing what the trick is, or what move is coming. It's about studying how they move and where they move.
In a sword fight, good fighters spend less time watching the sword and more time watching the opponent's feet and torso. In martial arts and boxing, you study the opponent's footwork to understand where they plan to move, how they've shifted their weight and what that means about the attack they're going to launch. So in Smash, it makes sense to me that if you want to be a good player, you don't study only the opponent's attacks, tricks, or techniques, but their movement. The rhythm of their dash dance, the way they fall and guide themselves through platforms, will tell you exactly where they plan to go, and as a result, exactly which move you can expect them to do.
This also tells you that to be better, you need to have as many solid approaches mastered as you can, and that you have to be as unpredictable with your movement rhythm as possible.
Concentration
How do you know you're actually focused on the match?
--Your movements are sharper, faster, and have less error.
--Anytime you have a thought like "how could I have messed that up?" or "what an annoying cheer," it passes quickly from your mind.
--You make your decisions faster and with more confidence. They are also typically better.
--Moments in the match seem to flow naturally together and make sense; each event seems perfectly, completely connected, like it's impossible for anything else to be happening.
How do you do it? I don't know. I'm one of those folks who has trouble concentrating on anything period, so... I have no idea how I can improve in this area. My one experience with absolutely perfect concentration feels very far away from me now.
It makes me wonder if good concentration is a thing that you make happen, or you allow to happen. Or maybe it's different for different people. I don't know. All I know is this is the area of my game that requires the most improvement, and I don't really know how to do that. At least, however, I know *what* I'm looking for, which is a step up from where I was before this tournament.
I'd love it if people posted some advice or personal experiences with good concentration so that I can get some ideas. I'll post my own as they come; for now I can only identify how it feels to be utterly focused and assert that this focus is what creates consistently strong performance. So Adderall, basically.
Kidding! But only kind of.
Doubles
This one is very short. If you want to win in 2v2, don't play 2v2. Turn it into 2v1 as often as possible; wall out the other player and then go in to help your teammate. Any time your teammate gets hit or punished, the opponent should suffer equally if not more. Any time your opponent hits the opponent, you should be there to add damage.
Teams usually have some kind of skill imbalance, so focus on the weaker player. Force the better of the two to make constant sacrifices to help his teammate out, and you can decrease both players' efficacy.
If you know for a fact that you and your partner are better at 1v1, turn the game into two 1v1s! Before Taj retired and we played a lot of doubles together, I was always confident that if he could get a Fox or Falco off the edge, that Fox or Falco would be toast. As a result, my goal was to keep the other player distracted and unable to assist. Likewise, if I land a grab with my ICs, his goal is not to help me combo them but to keep me as free as I can to punish with all my might.
When Romeo and I played M2K and Zhu, Zhu was doing an excellent job of bouncing me around and keeping me occupied while M2K focused on fighting Romeo. M2K was playing Sheik against Romeo's Falcon, so as long as Zhu's Fox kept shining me, M2K could abuse the character matchup advantage he had to its fullest potential. On the other hand, when I got a successful chaingrab against M2K going, Romeo put all his effort into keeping Zhu occupied while I hit M2K with a zero-to-death ledge CG and edgeguard.
So here's the basics: you want to make it 2v1 as much as you can so your opponent can never gain a good foothold with a combo or edgeguard. When your opponents have good teamwork but aren't as good when fighting straight-up 1v1s, you want to force 1v1 situations and abuse their weaknesses.
So pay attention to fighting with your teammate and keeping the opponent from doing the same. It's kind of general, but it's hard to get into the specifics of it when there are so many team combinations and individual playstyles... I'll be posting much more about doubles at a later date though, so look forward to that :)
That's all for now. Peace, folks.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Big announcement...
I have some exciting news. Though I don't know how successful this project could be, and I alternate between being pumped for the possibilities and doubtful as to its feasibility, what I'm talking about is...
My Smash memoirs! I intend to write a full-length book about my experiences as a competitive gamer; this would be about my induction into the scene, the crazy experiences I've had while playing Smash competitively, and how it's affected me.
I also plan to write a little about *other* games and the competitive experience in general, as sort of an introductory guide to what competitive gaming is all about. I fully intend it to be a marketable item of interest to as many people as possible, gamers and non-gamers alike.
My main doubt is whether or not I'm the person who should be writing this, and if a more successful player should embark on this kind of journey, but I feel the urge to do it.
So the project begins today! I still plan to update the blog with various things, but my primary focus will be on this project. I'm still trying to think of a working title, so any suggestions are welcome :) I'll also be posting random sections from the book on here for you guys to read.
Here is what I'm thinking: for starters, many members of the Smash community might be willing to purchase this book. If I could communicate to a publisher a willing and receptive audience, that would increase the likelihood this could find its way into bookstores. More people buying it = more attention for the book, which = more potential buyers. The bigger it gets, the bigger it can get. I have emphasis on this because my goal is to be a writer of sorts, and it's hard to make a profession out of something that makes you no money.
Most importantly, I'm passionate about this game and I love to write about it. This project is ideal for me.
Why would it be interesting to anybody? I intend to make it as non-technical and emotionally accessible as I can. People would hopefully read it for the same reason they read sports memoirs: for the the ups and downs of the competitive experience. And as far as I know, there are no books quite like this on the market.
This project has a lot of potential factors in its favor and with some savvy I should be able to overcome the cons. So I hope with the community's support, I can turn this into something successful.
And of course, if this book somehow gets any attention at all, it can only mean good things for competitive gaming in the future. So... yeah. This is a big thing for me, and I hope that people will continue to pester me about it to make sure I stay on track.
Next up on the blog will be stuff about emotional control and a tournament write-up.
Peace, folks.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
What's in the works...
Right now I have a bunch of ideas for different articles and posts that I'll be creating in this coming month.
I'll be transcribing some of my thoughts on:
--Playing doubles well, with a bonus feature on using the Ice Climbers in 2v2,
--Managing your emotions during play,
--Being efficient and choosing good options,
--Concentration and attention as in-game resource,
and others as well, probably. There's also an exciting new project that I'm embarking on (non-smash related) that I plan to write about as well, if only to help myself achieve the goal. So that's what you have to look forward to regarding this blog. I hope it proves interesting!
I'll be transcribing some of my thoughts on:
--Playing doubles well, with a bonus feature on using the Ice Climbers in 2v2,
--Managing your emotions during play,
--Being efficient and choosing good options,
--Concentration and attention as in-game resource,
and others as well, probably. There's also an exciting new project that I'm embarking on (non-smash related) that I plan to write about as well, if only to help myself achieve the goal. So that's what you have to look forward to regarding this blog. I hope it proves interesting!
Thursday, September 3, 2009
The Best Melee of My Life, Part 2
Before I start talking about this mentality, I want to link to a Wikipedia article that correlates strongly with how I felt during my matches:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushin
And then this related article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
Lastly, there’s this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes-Dodson_law
For awhile I was wearing the tag “flow” from reading a book of the same name by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, because I thought it was rather inspirational and wanted to remind myself some of the book’s concepts during matches.
In any event, the first two links should give you a good idea of how I felt during my matches, and the third may be part of explaining why it happened.
I’ll repeat from the previous entry: my mind felt like it had no room for any emotional response to anything happening on screen. When I was winning, losing, making mistakes or doing things perfectly, I had almost exactly the same reaction: “okay.” I did some stuff I normally never have the presence of mind to do, and I occasionally did things that were just completely outside my normal playstyle. What was going through my mind? In a lot of ways, nothing, which is weird.
Most people who know me (or read anything I write) know that I’m very analytical; I’ve usually got an analytical voice running non-stop in my brain even when I’m playing important tournament matches. This voice didn’t completely go away, but it felt extremely muted.
Because I’m so analytical, I want to break down that tournament day and see what sort of stuff I come up with.
To begin, I had a decent amount of sleep and woke up refreshed. I’m a total insomniac, especially before tournaments and especially considering I’d just *had* a day full of tournament play. I wasn’t expecting to get even four hours of sleep, let alone a solid seven-and-a-half.
I was pretty anxious about the tournament because I’d played a little Melee the day before and felt really sluggish. That seems to be the case when I move from Brawl to Melee, but it felt really exaggerated and I was thinking I might not place top 3 (or possibly top 5, even). It was looking like the tourney would have me, Taj, Forward, Axe and Light, AZ’s top 5 Melee players; all of those four folks are more than capable of beating me in any tournament on any given day, whether I’m playing well or not. This doesn’t even account for Tai, who plays decently technical space animals and—randomly—goes on rampages where he plays really well. Later that day, he would handily 2 stock my ICs with Falco in a friendly before the tournament, which didn’t help my nerves.
I’m getting ahead of myself. My ride showed up and we stopped by Taco Bell before the tournament; normally I don’t do so hot if I eat a lot, so I got a taco, a chicken burrito and a small Dr. Pepper (cost me about $3.50, go Taco Bell). When we got to the venue I sat down and finished the taco and ate about half the burrito before giving it to Forward. For whatever reason (might have been the nerves) I wasn’t hungry anymore and couldn’t finish.
I played friendlies with some people, and probably won about 30% of them, losing a lot of games with ICs. I was getting the feeling that I wouldn’t be doing well today; even worse is that day was also Brawl low-tier and my lowest tier character, Sheik, is in C tier, one tier too high to enter. I’d been messing around with Mario for the week to try and prepare, but I didn’t have any real hopes about winning.
Here is where I think the making of my mental state began. At this point, I was thinking rather negatively: “I’m going to lose,” “I’m playing badly,” and so on. Thinking like that though I also came to the conclusion, “so what if I lose?”
Most people, particularly after my spectacular rage explosion at Mango Juice, believe me to be a sore loser. This is probably 40% true. I don’t like losing, and I like winning. I want to clarify something though; apart from taking medication and going to therapy for two mental disorders, I invest a lot of my emotion into this game. I practice a lot. I think about it a lot. When I don’t play well, I get very mad, thinking “I shouldn’t be this bad.” I also get mad at my inability to control my temper. I start thinking things like “I can’t. This takes attention away from the game, causing me to make more mistakes, making me angrier, etc.
I don’t want that to be a justification, just an explanation. People shouldn’t flip out and throw their controllers and storm out of venues and if they want to be part of the community, they should learn to control themselves. My recent retirement announcement was based on two things: I felt like I wasn’t improving, and I felt like my mindset and presence were too destructive for me to belong in the community anymore. Good advice from a friend has helped me with the first one; flipping out at Mango Juice made me strongly re-evaluate the second. I’m happy to say that I haven’t flipped out since Mango Juice, haven’t thrown a controller, and haven’t acted like a total disgrace.
But yeah, losing is something I highly dislike. That day, however, it really hit me: “so what if I lose?” People lose all the time. The game doesn’t care about who you are, doesn’t care what your screenname is. There will be more games. There will be more tournaments. Pride and ego have done almost nothing but backfire on me throughout my entire career; maybe it’s time I got rid of them.
My first set against Axe was difficult, and I played about as well as I expected. I won a game from my counterpick, Fountain of Dreams, but otherwise he solidly outplayed me.
It was until I got into my match against South Paw that I started thinking more about my own mentality. He was playing viciously in our first game, landing lots of shines and controlling most of the match. I thought , “at this rate, he could definitely win.” For some reason, I was fine with that. Losing to an opponent who is on top of his game is more of an honor than anything.
At this moment, I had two things in my head at once: I didn’t want to lose, but I wasn’t afraid of losing. Suddenly, they were both gone. I was thinking almost entirely about the game.
I didn’t really see its effects until I got to game 3 against Forward. During games one and two and right before we started game three, I was talking to other people, talking to Forward, and not acting at all like I was 1-1 in Loser’s Finals. Then the moment we hit start and began game three, something changed.
I don’t know if it was Mushin or Flow or what. I just wasn’t thinking about anything but “what next?” Normally I feel like I’m fighting with my hands to get them to cooperate; this time they were just ready and willing to do whatever I wanted. By the time I realized I needed to do something, I did it with no hesitation. Everything was sharp. My conscious mind was only thinking one thing: “keep it up, he can still come back.” And I kept it up, and won. We went to game four, Peach vs. ICs on Dreamland, and I felt the exact same way. I wasn’t playing perfect by any means, but I was playing better than I ever had in my entire life.
Axe came over and sat down to play me, and it was the same. Regardless of the circumstance, winning, comboing or being combo’ed, my mind stayed calm; I remember one thing that stood out—his Falco was approaching me while I was facing backwards. A laser hit my shield and I did the fastest b-air out of shield that I’ve ever done in my life, caught him DI’ing down out of his SH approach and won the round. For a brief second, I thought “did I really do that?” It’s more like I watched it happen.
It sounds absurd to say this in the context of a videogame, but it felt like enlightenment. I felt tranquil, serene, peaceful, quiet, and every other synonym I can throw out there. It’s like nothing mattered but being there and playing. It’s like I wasn’t even holding a controller, like I wasn’t sitting on a couch in a friend’s apartment; it’s like I was somewhere else entirely.
Afterwards I went into Brawl low-tier grand finals (which earlier I had unexpectedly made it to) still feeling this way. I was just watching things unfold, really seeing things, understanding them in ways I never had before, and won 6-0 with a character I barely played. I just could see what worked, and my body just let me make it possible.
What happened and how did it happen? This is what I know: I wasn’t hungry or tired, but I wasn’t full or energetic either. I wanted to win, but I was perfectly willing to accept my losses.
On the one hand, it was the greatest feeling in the world, completely unique and unlike anything I’d experienced before. On the other hand, I’m worried I might never feel it again.
I don’t really know what else to say. See you folks next time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushin
And then this related article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
Lastly, there’s this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes-Dodson_law
For awhile I was wearing the tag “flow” from reading a book of the same name by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, because I thought it was rather inspirational and wanted to remind myself some of the book’s concepts during matches.
In any event, the first two links should give you a good idea of how I felt during my matches, and the third may be part of explaining why it happened.
I’ll repeat from the previous entry: my mind felt like it had no room for any emotional response to anything happening on screen. When I was winning, losing, making mistakes or doing things perfectly, I had almost exactly the same reaction: “okay.” I did some stuff I normally never have the presence of mind to do, and I occasionally did things that were just completely outside my normal playstyle. What was going through my mind? In a lot of ways, nothing, which is weird.
Most people who know me (or read anything I write) know that I’m very analytical; I’ve usually got an analytical voice running non-stop in my brain even when I’m playing important tournament matches. This voice didn’t completely go away, but it felt extremely muted.
Because I’m so analytical, I want to break down that tournament day and see what sort of stuff I come up with.
To begin, I had a decent amount of sleep and woke up refreshed. I’m a total insomniac, especially before tournaments and especially considering I’d just *had* a day full of tournament play. I wasn’t expecting to get even four hours of sleep, let alone a solid seven-and-a-half.
I was pretty anxious about the tournament because I’d played a little Melee the day before and felt really sluggish. That seems to be the case when I move from Brawl to Melee, but it felt really exaggerated and I was thinking I might not place top 3 (or possibly top 5, even). It was looking like the tourney would have me, Taj, Forward, Axe and Light, AZ’s top 5 Melee players; all of those four folks are more than capable of beating me in any tournament on any given day, whether I’m playing well or not. This doesn’t even account for Tai, who plays decently technical space animals and—randomly—goes on rampages where he plays really well. Later that day, he would handily 2 stock my ICs with Falco in a friendly before the tournament, which didn’t help my nerves.
I’m getting ahead of myself. My ride showed up and we stopped by Taco Bell before the tournament; normally I don’t do so hot if I eat a lot, so I got a taco, a chicken burrito and a small Dr. Pepper (cost me about $3.50, go Taco Bell). When we got to the venue I sat down and finished the taco and ate about half the burrito before giving it to Forward. For whatever reason (might have been the nerves) I wasn’t hungry anymore and couldn’t finish.
I played friendlies with some people, and probably won about 30% of them, losing a lot of games with ICs. I was getting the feeling that I wouldn’t be doing well today; even worse is that day was also Brawl low-tier and my lowest tier character, Sheik, is in C tier, one tier too high to enter. I’d been messing around with Mario for the week to try and prepare, but I didn’t have any real hopes about winning.
Here is where I think the making of my mental state began. At this point, I was thinking rather negatively: “I’m going to lose,” “I’m playing badly,” and so on. Thinking like that though I also came to the conclusion, “so what if I lose?”
Most people, particularly after my spectacular rage explosion at Mango Juice, believe me to be a sore loser. This is probably 40% true. I don’t like losing, and I like winning. I want to clarify something though; apart from taking medication and going to therapy for two mental disorders, I invest a lot of my emotion into this game. I practice a lot. I think about it a lot. When I don’t play well, I get very mad, thinking “I shouldn’t be this bad.” I also get mad at my inability to control my temper. I start thinking things like “I can’t. This takes attention away from the game, causing me to make more mistakes, making me angrier, etc.
I don’t want that to be a justification, just an explanation. People shouldn’t flip out and throw their controllers and storm out of venues and if they want to be part of the community, they should learn to control themselves. My recent retirement announcement was based on two things: I felt like I wasn’t improving, and I felt like my mindset and presence were too destructive for me to belong in the community anymore. Good advice from a friend has helped me with the first one; flipping out at Mango Juice made me strongly re-evaluate the second. I’m happy to say that I haven’t flipped out since Mango Juice, haven’t thrown a controller, and haven’t acted like a total disgrace.
But yeah, losing is something I highly dislike. That day, however, it really hit me: “so what if I lose?” People lose all the time. The game doesn’t care about who you are, doesn’t care what your screenname is. There will be more games. There will be more tournaments. Pride and ego have done almost nothing but backfire on me throughout my entire career; maybe it’s time I got rid of them.
My first set against Axe was difficult, and I played about as well as I expected. I won a game from my counterpick, Fountain of Dreams, but otherwise he solidly outplayed me.
It was until I got into my match against South Paw that I started thinking more about my own mentality. He was playing viciously in our first game, landing lots of shines and controlling most of the match. I thought , “at this rate, he could definitely win.” For some reason, I was fine with that. Losing to an opponent who is on top of his game is more of an honor than anything.
At this moment, I had two things in my head at once: I didn’t want to lose, but I wasn’t afraid of losing. Suddenly, they were both gone. I was thinking almost entirely about the game.
I didn’t really see its effects until I got to game 3 against Forward. During games one and two and right before we started game three, I was talking to other people, talking to Forward, and not acting at all like I was 1-1 in Loser’s Finals. Then the moment we hit start and began game three, something changed.
I don’t know if it was Mushin or Flow or what. I just wasn’t thinking about anything but “what next?” Normally I feel like I’m fighting with my hands to get them to cooperate; this time they were just ready and willing to do whatever I wanted. By the time I realized I needed to do something, I did it with no hesitation. Everything was sharp. My conscious mind was only thinking one thing: “keep it up, he can still come back.” And I kept it up, and won. We went to game four, Peach vs. ICs on Dreamland, and I felt the exact same way. I wasn’t playing perfect by any means, but I was playing better than I ever had in my entire life.
Axe came over and sat down to play me, and it was the same. Regardless of the circumstance, winning, comboing or being combo’ed, my mind stayed calm; I remember one thing that stood out—his Falco was approaching me while I was facing backwards. A laser hit my shield and I did the fastest b-air out of shield that I’ve ever done in my life, caught him DI’ing down out of his SH approach and won the round. For a brief second, I thought “did I really do that?” It’s more like I watched it happen.
It sounds absurd to say this in the context of a videogame, but it felt like enlightenment. I felt tranquil, serene, peaceful, quiet, and every other synonym I can throw out there. It’s like nothing mattered but being there and playing. It’s like I wasn’t even holding a controller, like I wasn’t sitting on a couch in a friend’s apartment; it’s like I was somewhere else entirely.
Afterwards I went into Brawl low-tier grand finals (which earlier I had unexpectedly made it to) still feeling this way. I was just watching things unfold, really seeing things, understanding them in ways I never had before, and won 6-0 with a character I barely played. I just could see what worked, and my body just let me make it possible.
What happened and how did it happen? This is what I know: I wasn’t hungry or tired, but I wasn’t full or energetic either. I wanted to win, but I was perfectly willing to accept my losses.
On the one hand, it was the greatest feeling in the world, completely unique and unlike anything I’d experienced before. On the other hand, I’m worried I might never feel it again.
I don’t really know what else to say. See you folks next time.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Another Weekend, Another Tournament, and the best Melee of my life.
Warning: Long post ahead!
This past weekend an AZ smasher held a semi-small tourney in his apartment. The events included:
Brawl Singles
Brawl Doubles
Melee Singles
Brawl Low-tier
I took first in Brawl Singles with Wario and 1 round of Metaknight, first in doubles with my teammate JustinKamikaze, who played MK and Snake. I went MK for a few of the matches in Winner's and Grand Finals of teams because my Wario wasn't really shaping up, but fortunately my fat man helped bring in the win in the end :) I dislike switching off Wario because too many people have MK experience, I don't seem to have the right mindset to play him well, and relying on him seems like it will be detrimental to my game in the long run. However, he's such a strong character in doubles and I play different in teams than I do in singles, so I guess it kind of works out sometimes? :)
Melee Singles came the next day, and something interesting happened to me (mentally) during one of my matches in loser's finals. Whatever it was, this one day [i]officially[/i] made five years of playing Melee worth it. Every crappy day, every botched victory, every heartbreak tournament elimination, every ragequit, every john, everything.
I'll just give a rundown of my play. First round I got a bye (thanks to the # of entrants and some seeding). Second round, I wound up playing one of the few AZ Brawl players who's also invested some training time into Melee, Jar'd. He's got a remarkably good competitive attitude and he's actually kind of okay at Melee for not being part of its scene.
My next match is against another (relatively) young guy, Axe. For people who don't know him, Axe is AZ's newest up and coming Melee star, beating JMan at Genesis with his Pikachu; he also holds a beastly Fox and Falco. It's bad enough that he's technically flashy, he also knows when to go for efficiency instead, and he makes a LOT of irritatingly smart calls. I think he needs more tourney experience and confidence, but he's also got one of the best attitudes of any gamer I've met and he's unbelievably nice too.
Not in game though. In game he's a jerk, which he demonstrated by repeatedly killing my Nana off the top of Yoshi's and Battlefield with shines and up+b as Falco. He called me out on some of my gambles to try and take the edge rather than return to the stage, so he also got some clutch KOs that way which were a bit disheartening, since I normally get away with that stuff. It sucks when your opponent can kill you AND Nana before you're at fifty just by being intelligent. He wound up defeating me 2-1, and game 3 wasn't exactly what you'd call close :(
Do I want to say that I wasn't really warmed up yet because I'd spent the entire day before playing Brawl? Yes. But I'd also had all morning to get back into my groove, which consisted of Axe destroying me in friendlies as well. No johns!
Loser's bracket I played AltF4Warrior, Southwest forum mod (whom I finally got to congratulate in-person on his engagement.) It wasn't difficult to beat his Marth, but Dan's been out of the serious scene for quite some time and his attendance/entrance was mostly a social thing.
Next match was against South_Paw, another player who's mostly stopped playing. In our first game he seemed to be on top of things with Fox, gimping me *and* Nana pretty fast and going for a lot of surprising grabs, and I managed to win with a solid one-stock. Strangely enough, the next game I four-stocked him in under 1:30
My next match was against Forward, who lost to Axe in Winner's Finals (I'm telling you, the kid is scary). Round 1 he beat me with Falcon on our random, round 2 I took him to FoD where he went Peach and I went Sheik. Neither of us are exceptional with these characters in singles (my Sheik is kind of slow and clumsy, which is much easier for me to get away with in doubles), but the last time I played his Peach in tournament with my ICs, he walked all over me. Bad times.
I barely won, and then something happened. My mind decided to kick into overdrive. 3rd round he took me to Pokemon Stadium and went Falcon, and... I can barely remember anything of the match, except for three things. 1) I made almost ZERO technical errors, something which never happens to me in tournament, 2) I 3-stocked him, something I've never done to Sean in tournament, and 3) my mind went into an unbelievable state of focus that, once again, never really happens to me. For the fourth game, he took me to Dreamland and went Peach. I stayed ICs and 2-stocked him.
I'm trying to find the right words to describe what happened to my mind during this set. To give you some backstory, I have a clinical ADD diagnosis and a prescription for Adderall. I don't take Adderall during tournaments anymore though, because it makes my hands shaky, I get moody afterwards and then I can't sleep later; I pretty much use my medication exclusively for schoolwork and writing. I bring this up because typically it's impossible for me to concentrate on anything for more than thirty seconds unless I take medication.
However, the state of mind I went into was... beyond Adderall. I felt remarkably serene and detached, yet at the same time more intensely into Melee than I've ever been before. This was more than just "in the zone" play, more than just having "a good Smash day" because until that point, I really wasn't. I'd been playing kind of clumsy, my mind wasn't as sharp or fast as I needed/wanted it to be, and my tournament experience was turning out to be very... "bleh."
Something clicked though. I wasn't talking, I wasn't looking at anything but the screen. I could hear the eight or so spectators cheering, clapping and making "ooooh" noises in the background, but they were like white noise. I was aware of them, but didn't have room in my mind to think of responses besides "oh, okay." My hands were completely listening to me in a way that they never do. It's going to sound rather strange, but I felt like my mind, my body and the game were all communicating. Meanwhile, my conscious inner voice was just spectating, struck speechless by the spectacle. And the alliteration.
This state of mind carried over into my matches against Axe. Against his Falco in game 1, the game came down to the wire but at no point did I feel any hint of nervousness. When the last stock was my SoPo (Solo Popo) against his Falco, I pulled out a clutch victory and barely realized I was doing it. Next game he played Falco again and I can't even remember the counterpick (and normally I have no trouble remembering my tourney matches) and I won solidly. Then he went to Yoshi's, with Pikachu and I won again (though he ended with an SD), taking the first set 3-0.
I did not by any means dominate Axe in these matches, but at the same time I felt like I'd never played better in my life. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say I'd never felt better while playing.
In any event, for the first game of set 2 he tried to throw me off by going Jigglypuff, and we played on FD. I spent my first stock throwing out smashes and doing things seemingly with no battle plan, and to be honest I didn't have one. The part of my brain involved with making plans seemed to be on vacation. We went relatively even and both went to 3 stock (IIRC), and then suddenly my playstyle switched up. I ate about 20 percent before landing a grab and infiniting him. The next stock he went for a rest combo, missed, and I infinited him. His fourth stock I won almost purely by outspacing him with smashes, and finished with a basic SoPo d-throw u-air combo to get the V.
It seemed like my brain in the first stock was just taking its time to learn what Axe's Puff liked to do, then it used the next one to exploit that. His Puff isn't nearly as developed as his other characters so it honestly wasn't tough at all. What's amazing is that at this point, my mind was still focused. Normally, when I go into what several AZ players refer to as "beast mode," it only lasts for about a stock. This weird mindset I was in had lasted me for SIX FULL LENGTH GAMES. Between the matches themselves, time spent on selection screens, that was almost thirty minutes of pure focus for me. It was unreal, yet it kept going.
Between sets I did something that should have been a terrible idea and gave Axe advice on how to counterpick ICs. I told him to play on weird stages because "even if the space animals have good advantages on a neutral, the ICs are at their best on those five levels; they hate the weird ones." So sure enough, for game two he took me to Pokefloats (I had banned Battlefield as it was his favorite Falco stage and I had an almost perfect loss record against him there). I figured that this was going to be a lost round and went Sheik, and his Fox three stocked me by lasering me and hitting me when I tried to come close. I can't imagine it would have gone any better with my ICs.
Normally getting three stocked would throw me out of whatever mental momentum I gained, but then again, nothing seemed to be happening normally this tournament. I just shrugged it off, said "nice" to Axe, then told him we were going to Yoshi's Story. He stayed Fox and we played a close game, but I stayed cool, made some good calls, and linked them into grabs. Thankfully I've been working on my d-throw d-air game a lot, and it paid off. I never relied on it since previously I would just go with an infinite. However, since he was at low percent I used d-throw d-air to link into an infinite and seal two of his stocks off textbook openings.
For the fourth game he took me to Corneria. This stage is one of Chu's favorite counterpicks and most ICs assert that it's good for them, but I've personally never liked it. Axe wanted to camp me under the fin, but fortunately I secured a lead and stayed out on the main body of the ship where he had to fight me in a completely open environment. I got the grabs I needed and took game 4, winning the tournament. There's very little for me to say because... I barely remember any of it.
I hope that wasn't too boring to read. The reason I bother posting all of that is because my mentality was radically different from my typical mindset when I play. Everything from my tech-skill to my thought process to my emotional responses to my reflexes were sharpened in ways that I didn't know were really possible for me. I barely spoke except to ask what stage we were going for counterpick, and I'm usually impossible to shut up.
What's really weird is that even after I won the last game (making for nine games of hyperfocused play) I went into the grand finals of the low-tier Brawl tournament with the same mentality still running strong. I came from loser's bracket in *that* as well and kept my mentality to win 6-0 against my opponent who had, earlier that day, 3-1'ed me with total ease.
So for fifteen games straight (six of which were Brawl matches which lasted almost 40 minutes in total when adding in my opponent's counter-stages and character select screens), I played different opponents, different characters and different GAMES in a mental state that I normally can't maintain for more than thirty seconds at a time. By my count, it lasted almost eighty minutes. When the tournaments ended and I snapped out of it, I was both exhausted and exhilarated. The second day of this local tournament was, without question, one of the best days of my career as a Smash player and possibly one of the best days of my life.
I'm going to post again later today with more thoughts on that mentality; this post has gone on long enough. Peace.
Friday, August 28, 2009
Subtractive Playstyles, Part 3: Case Studies
Subtractive Gameplay, Part 3: Case Studies
I've discussed in part 1 and part 2 the pros and cons of the subtractive playstyle. For the third part, I'm going to look at players who demonstrate this playstyle, for better or worse.
B-stick
For starters, somebody you probably don't know. B-stick is an Arizona Marth player who has managed to remain near the top of AZ's Melee scene for a long, long time. His playstyle has always, for at least 4 years now, consisted almost entirely of of grabbing and forward-smashing.
Unless you are perfect at sweetspotting and edge-teching, he will almost always perfectly time f-smashes and tippers to keep you off the level. He happily stays near the edge for most of the match, using dash-dances into grab and shield-grabs to throw you off the level so he can f-smash away. Occasionally he uses full-jumping forward-airs from his shield, and I swear I once saw him up-tilt. He can wavedash and short hop, but he'd rather walk and smash.
Why is his playstyle so successful? For starters, Marth's f-smash is a really really good move. Damaging and far-reaching, decent speed when it comes out, and with appropriate spacing almost impossible to beat. Its weakness, of course, is its long ending lag; additionally, many bad Marths overuse it and it becomes very exploitable. You can shield it and then wavedash out to punish it, you can roll behind him or simply dodge. Such a good move is bound to be overused, and therefore become predictable and easily beatable.
B-stick seems to break this convention. His f-smashes seem perfectly timed to reach through and hit you just when you decided you wanted to aerial, and at least half of them are tippers. He's very good at judging its spacing, and reading opponents' movements to call when they will leave themselves open. When it comes to using this move, B-stick is a pro. (His advice to a Marth player who was having trouble winning against Peaches was "less technical, more forward-smash," and the player immediately improved).
On top of that, his shield grab timing is very precise, which lets him deal nicely with most characters' shield pressure. He can also actually combo and chase people around the level with aerials when the opportunity falls in his lap, but he prefers to f-smash and grab, which works out nicely for him.
B-stick is hardly perfect though. For one thing, though he's very precise at what he does, he has a definitive technical limit. He almost never short-hops out of shield, he doesn't wavedash out of shield, and he has trouble dealing with people who are just too fast for him. He rarely travels out of state, so he lacks experience and can have trouble reading players from different regions, and sometimes he's bewildered by uncommon matchups.
However, he's been of tremendous benefit to the Arizona scene. He forces people to learn how to deal with his playstyle and the wall of priority that Marth can throw out, he forces them to learn to sweetspot, and he forces them to adapt to his patient yet brutal method.
HugS
HugS is a Samus player whose successful career began based around almost a single move: up+b out of shield. While the meta-game began revolving around Foxes and Falcos with powerful shield pressure, HugS mastered one of the best anti-pressure moves in the game. Using his shield almost as a weapon, he made it very difficult for most players to even attack him as he wormed his way in.
His second major claim to fame was his f-tilt. HugS spaced f-tilt about as perfectly as it could be spaced. He coupled it with wavedashes, erratic dash-dances, and confused people's spacing. They ended up pressuring his shield and eating an up+b, or they would try to space and get poked.
Mastery of these two moves gave HugS a foundational, positional playstyle that let him sneak in a few of Samus' other moves. He loved poking shields, so it came as a surprise when he'd throw out a seemingly random grapple, and when the opponent became too impatient, he'd have an f-smash or charge shot. Combined with solid up-tilting for edgeguards, HugS ate most space animals alive.
He didn't stop there, though. He gradually began adding components to his game that gave him more options and made him more difficult to read. He added up-air and f-air to his Samus game, giving him an extra degree of aerial pressure and combo ability. He also pioneered the use of Samus' n-air to edge guard: when his opponents were focused on sweetspotting and escaping the wrath of his u-tilt, he'd simply run off the stage and n-air them while they were vulnerable (and very surprised). He remained a top player on the West Coast for a long time with his own distinct style until he retired. He claims he'll be making a comeback though, so I'm looking forward to that (but not to playing him in tournament :/).
Chu Dat
Chu more or less invented most of the tricks Ice Climbers players use, and he was singlehandedly responsible for raising them up to high-tier Melee's metagame. He's been, for most of his career, a top contender in every tournament he attends. There was a long period, in fact, where it would be a shock to everybody if Chu did not take top 3 at a tournament, regardless of size and location.
Chu's game, however, was based around surprisingly few things. When he grabbed people, he would have Nana blizzard, and then d-throw d-air them. If they were at KO percents, he would grab smash. When not grabbing, he would focus on spacing d-smashes around his opponent's approaches, intercepting people in the air with u-air, and then throwing out surprise b-airs as his wildcard approach.
What really defines Chu's ICs, however, is the way he moves. The ICs are naturally an erratic character; their wavedash allows them to move in bursts, but their running speed is relatively low. Chu maximizes that by dashing, then shielding to immediately stop his momentum, then wavedashing out of the shield. Sometimes he shields for seconds at a time, sometimes he shields for only a few frames. Sometimes he keeps dash-dancing, sometimes he fox-trots away. The opponent almost never seems his actual decision to attack or retreat coming.
He couples that by slowly figuring out his opponent's timing and favored approaches. This often costs him stocks and even the first game of his set--it's not uncommon for players far beneath his level to take the first game against him, myself included--but by the second game he's unconsciously assimilated his opponent's style. These two skills--they aren't even actual moves--are the main reasons why Chu has always been so good regardless of the state of the metagame: he's difficult to read and a very fast learner.
He's hindered somewhat by the fact that his favored chaingrab, d-throw d-air, is escapable, and more players are familiar with the timing of the smash DI needed to escape; as a result, his grab punishes aren't as deadly as they once were and he's lost some of his efficiency. Nevertheless, he's still an amazing player.
Others
Those are the players who really stand out to me with this playstyle (and they're the ones I've really stopped to analyze). Here are some other examples:
--Hungrybox, a Florida Jigglypuff and recent national breakout, was known for initially relying almost exclusively on Jigglypuff's b-air.
--Drephen, Sheik player from Ohio, was known for happily abusing Sheik's d-smash, and mixing it up with the occasional tilt, grab and f-air. You can see this highlighted in his combo video "All this nigga do is grab."
--JMan, Fox from NY and mentioned in part 2, is incredibly fond of using n-air as his cure-all move, and he's very good with it.
--Just about every community's got one, really.
And that's about it. It's important to know that mastering a technique doesn't just mean being good with one or two moves. Often, it also means skill with your character's movement and understanding their attributes. It means knowing the crucial peculiarities that set your character apart and knowing how to exploit them to maximum advantage. It means knowing how to keep the fight in a place where you have control and forcing the opponent to fight at a pace you dictate.
I hope this has been an interesting and educational read for everybody. Peace out.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
A couple things: recent tourney and approaching backwards
Recently went to a tournament in Tucson, have some sets up against Axe and Forward. Here's the thread.
Those vids should highlight how important it is never to mess up your guaranteed combos. I lose quite a bit of percent and even stocks off mistimed infinites, which is not at all bueno.
It's been awhile since I've fought really fast Falcos; they're scary. You can also see Axe using a lot of f-throw, which (for some reason) makes Nana drop her shield when he grabs you. That keeps her from being able to shield grab, which sucks. The throw hitbox also has strangely powerful knockback, meaning the two of you will get separated in a heartbeat. Falco can also CG with it at low percents :(
And his pressure game... ouch. The real trick to getting away from his lasers and shield pressure is simply calling whether you should roll.
You also see me having to fight off a lot of f-smashes; it isn't until the end of my set vs. Forward that I start spacing around it. Forward likes to predict the rhythm of people's movement, so by the end I was consciously trying to kill off my rhythm and make him whiff. It worked once or twice, I think :D
There's also a spacing against the f-smash where you can shieldgrab it, but I don't know what it is. You might need to wavedash into your shield so that your momentum keeps you from sliding back so far. It might also just be if he simply smashes too deep. Anybody who knows should tell me ^_^
--
Part 2! This strategy seems to work decently well against many people and has helped me out a lot against Captain Falcon players. I've known about it for awhile but I'm only recently really exploring the concept of constantly facing away from Falcon.
The following are reasons why I think it's a good idea:
1) D-smash comes out behind you, so you have those few extra frames to take him by surprise. Catching people when they DI badly is how I land a lot of my KOs.
2) His forward+b is punishable from your shield with short hopped b-air; for that matter, you can wavedash into your shield, then suddenly b-air from it, and you can catch him by surprise.
3) This lets you f-tilt-guard into blizzard really really quickly as you advance. Since hitting him with de-sync'ed blizzards can give you crucial openings, finding ways to sneak them into the normal flow of battle gives you a big edge.
4) It makes your grabs very surprising, because most characters don't grab while sliding at you backwards. Facing the wrong way is a good way to bait the opponent into shielding.
Points 1 and 3 are applicable against a lot of characters, really.
That's all for now ^_^
Those vids should highlight how important it is never to mess up your guaranteed combos. I lose quite a bit of percent and even stocks off mistimed infinites, which is not at all bueno.
It's been awhile since I've fought really fast Falcos; they're scary. You can also see Axe using a lot of f-throw, which (for some reason) makes Nana drop her shield when he grabs you. That keeps her from being able to shield grab, which sucks. The throw hitbox also has strangely powerful knockback, meaning the two of you will get separated in a heartbeat. Falco can also CG with it at low percents :(
And his pressure game... ouch. The real trick to getting away from his lasers and shield pressure is simply calling whether you should roll.
You also see me having to fight off a lot of f-smashes; it isn't until the end of my set vs. Forward that I start spacing around it. Forward likes to predict the rhythm of people's movement, so by the end I was consciously trying to kill off my rhythm and make him whiff. It worked once or twice, I think :D
There's also a spacing against the f-smash where you can shieldgrab it, but I don't know what it is. You might need to wavedash into your shield so that your momentum keeps you from sliding back so far. It might also just be if he simply smashes too deep. Anybody who knows should tell me ^_^
--
Part 2! This strategy seems to work decently well against many people and has helped me out a lot against Captain Falcon players. I've known about it for awhile but I'm only recently really exploring the concept of constantly facing away from Falcon.
The following are reasons why I think it's a good idea:
1) D-smash comes out behind you, so you have those few extra frames to take him by surprise. Catching people when they DI badly is how I land a lot of my KOs.
2) His forward+b is punishable from your shield with short hopped b-air; for that matter, you can wavedash into your shield, then suddenly b-air from it, and you can catch him by surprise.
3) This lets you f-tilt-guard into blizzard really really quickly as you advance. Since hitting him with de-sync'ed blizzards can give you crucial openings, finding ways to sneak them into the normal flow of battle gives you a big edge.
4) It makes your grabs very surprising, because most characters don't grab while sliding at you backwards. Facing the wrong way is a good way to bait the opponent into shielding.
Points 1 and 3 are applicable against a lot of characters, really.
That's all for now ^_^
Friday, August 14, 2009
A brief note about johning and complaining
It occurred to me last night that making johns and complaints turns you into a worse player. Any time something happens to you and you seriously complain that it's "broken," "unfair," or "gay," you are making yourself a worse player.
If you shift the blame for a loss onto something besides your own mistakes or your opponent's successes, you are telling yourself that you aren't really responsible for losing. It's not that you weren't good enough, something "gay" just happened to you. It's inevitable that this stupid thing happened to you, it was inescapable, it's broken, etc.
Was it really? Don't cement that into your mind. Once you declare to yourself that a matchup is unwinnable or a situation is always going to happen to you, you lose the ability to keep it from coming true.
A personal example: the ICs infinite in Melee is declared broken by some on the basis that it's impossible to avoid getting grabbed, and that every time you get grabbed you will die. It also means that IC players who are "worse" than other people will beat them anyhow.
I noticed something though, which is that the people who didn't seriously complain about the infinite are the ones who did the best job of avoiding grabs. Of course, I still managed to land grabs on them, but they were focused on the solution to the problem. They tried to keep me split apart from Nana, to efficiently KO her; if I was protecting her too well, they would focus on zoning me and shutting me out as much as possible. Even if watching for the grab meant they got hit by other attacks more often, that was fine with them because an isolated u-air is far better than losing a whole stock.
Some people complained that it was cheap, broken, gay, etc., and almost everybody who said that would get their asses handed to them. It's okay though, because I wasn't better and I wasn't outplaying them, they were just victims of my bullshit. They didn't have to improve, I was playing brokenly. I was the "worse" player, they were really "better," and their game didn't have to change. They just had to ban my broken tactic and I'd lose like always.
Maybe the IC infinite *is* broken? Doesn't matter. As long as you have to deal with it, complaining isn't the answer. Same with any other tactic in the game. Marth's f-smash is really good, but it's punishable and avoidable. Peach's d-smash can be DI'd and teched, or baited and punished as well. People complain about how unfair these moves are, and as a result they conclude it's not their fault they lost. This doesn't help them improve; it does the opposite.
I've DEFINITELY been a culprit of this mindset of thinking. ICs vs. Peach is genuinely a difficult matchup, but I've slowly been finding answers and ways to mitigate some of the advantages she has. I spent years whining to myself about how broken and unfair and stupid her character design was, and how she seemed custom-made to rape my ICs; the moment I stopped and said, "okay, let's assume there's a way to deal with Peach. How can I find it and stop losing?" I immediately started doing better. Some of it was simply "space better and outthink her," some of it was tactical, but I wasn't able to find it until I stopped complaining and looked. I still lose to Peaches (it's a genuinely difficult matchup after all) but my attention nowadays is focused more on solving matchup problems, and I do way, way better.
In Brawl--which I play less intensely--I use Wario and he has trouble dealing with campers. His amazing air control makes up for priority deficits against other top tiers, but he still has no projectile and can be grab released into extreme pain. At first I just complained and johned endlessly believing that Wario "shouldn't be able to win," but then... why were other Wario players winning? The fault was clearly mine. I started using his air control to deceive my opponent, DACUS to quickly and surprisingly approach projectile campy characters like Olimar, and as a result my game immediately expanded. I just lost against a Diddy in tournament, so I decided to practice glide tosses and mixing them with DACUSes; I can't wait to see how it works out, if only because it's better and more productive than complaining that Diddy's banana game is unfair.
No johns, Wobbles.
Edit:
It bears mentioning that sometimes things *really are* broken, unfair, or imbalanced. The important thing is that you look at things honestly and not shift blame from yourself as an automatic ego defense.
If you shift the blame for a loss onto something besides your own mistakes or your opponent's successes, you are telling yourself that you aren't really responsible for losing. It's not that you weren't good enough, something "gay" just happened to you. It's inevitable that this stupid thing happened to you, it was inescapable, it's broken, etc.
Was it really? Don't cement that into your mind. Once you declare to yourself that a matchup is unwinnable or a situation is always going to happen to you, you lose the ability to keep it from coming true.
A personal example: the ICs infinite in Melee is declared broken by some on the basis that it's impossible to avoid getting grabbed, and that every time you get grabbed you will die. It also means that IC players who are "worse" than other people will beat them anyhow.
I noticed something though, which is that the people who didn't seriously complain about the infinite are the ones who did the best job of avoiding grabs. Of course, I still managed to land grabs on them, but they were focused on the solution to the problem. They tried to keep me split apart from Nana, to efficiently KO her; if I was protecting her too well, they would focus on zoning me and shutting me out as much as possible. Even if watching for the grab meant they got hit by other attacks more often, that was fine with them because an isolated u-air is far better than losing a whole stock.
Some people complained that it was cheap, broken, gay, etc., and almost everybody who said that would get their asses handed to them. It's okay though, because I wasn't better and I wasn't outplaying them, they were just victims of my bullshit. They didn't have to improve, I was playing brokenly. I was the "worse" player, they were really "better," and their game didn't have to change. They just had to ban my broken tactic and I'd lose like always.
Maybe the IC infinite *is* broken? Doesn't matter. As long as you have to deal with it, complaining isn't the answer. Same with any other tactic in the game. Marth's f-smash is really good, but it's punishable and avoidable. Peach's d-smash can be DI'd and teched, or baited and punished as well. People complain about how unfair these moves are, and as a result they conclude it's not their fault they lost. This doesn't help them improve; it does the opposite.
I've DEFINITELY been a culprit of this mindset of thinking. ICs vs. Peach is genuinely a difficult matchup, but I've slowly been finding answers and ways to mitigate some of the advantages she has. I spent years whining to myself about how broken and unfair and stupid her character design was, and how she seemed custom-made to rape my ICs; the moment I stopped and said, "okay, let's assume there's a way to deal with Peach. How can I find it and stop losing?" I immediately started doing better. Some of it was simply "space better and outthink her," some of it was tactical, but I wasn't able to find it until I stopped complaining and looked. I still lose to Peaches (it's a genuinely difficult matchup after all) but my attention nowadays is focused more on solving matchup problems, and I do way, way better.
In Brawl--which I play less intensely--I use Wario and he has trouble dealing with campers. His amazing air control makes up for priority deficits against other top tiers, but he still has no projectile and can be grab released into extreme pain. At first I just complained and johned endlessly believing that Wario "shouldn't be able to win," but then... why were other Wario players winning? The fault was clearly mine. I started using his air control to deceive my opponent, DACUS to quickly and surprisingly approach projectile campy characters like Olimar, and as a result my game immediately expanded. I just lost against a Diddy in tournament, so I decided to practice glide tosses and mixing them with DACUSes; I can't wait to see how it works out, if only because it's better and more productive than complaining that Diddy's banana game is unfair.
No johns, Wobbles.
Edit:
It bears mentioning that sometimes things *really are* broken, unfair, or imbalanced. The important thing is that you look at things honestly and not shift blame from yourself as an automatic ego defense.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Subtractive Playstyles, Part 2: Problems and Solutions
Let's quickly list the pros and cons of a subtractive playstyle.
Pros:
--Allows for low-energy play; by focusing on abilities that you are good at, you don't need to expend unnecessary mental energy executing them.
--Gives you concrete, measurable improvement.
--You quickly become good at some aspect of the game.
Cons:
--It can be difficult to learn which skills are worth improving and focusing on. How do I know which skill I should be putting my focus on, and which ones aren't worth my time right now?
--You may wind up with a gimmicky style and stagnate as a player.
--You may become easy to read.
--If you practice against people who aren't very good, you may think you've mastered a skill but really haven't, and this comes back to haunt you later.
--If you play against somebody who is better with your specialties than you are, or they have mastered a counter to your specialties, then you have nothing to fall back on.
The pros are great, and don't really need elaborating on. Instead, let's look at the cons and find ways to counteract them. After all, I managed to list more of them than the pros, which kind of makes you rethink whether this is a worthwhile endeavor.
Problem: It can be difficult to learn which skills are worth improving and focusing on.
Solution: Study higher level players and pick important, successful parts of their game to emulate. It's tempting to spend time mastering neat tricks that look really cool but have no use or application. I used to devote a lot of time to practicing things like triple shine into short hop reverse double laser; it goes without saying that I've never used it to any effect in an actual game. I should have been watching videos of the top players and seeing which aspects of their game were successful. If they use some move as their bread and butter approach, pay close attention to how they use that move and try to use it in the same way. Learn everything you can about that one move and why it works so well for them, then master it.
Think critically, and focus on subtle details. For instance, look at JMan and his use of Fox's n-air, like in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMAu3XYdVk0 Look at about 0:14, when JMan starts n-airing Scar from the right side of Dreamland across the stage. The first n-air comes out almost the very frame JMan leaves the ground, and he fast falls as soon as possible. He does it again with the second one; JMan is n-airing as fast as he possibly can. However, after jabbing Scar off the ground, he uses a third n-air that is NOT as fast as the first two. This is because if he had n-aired sooner, he'd have hit Scar's shield too early and risked getting shield grabbed; delaying it put him as close to the ground as possible . I'm willing to bet JMan quickly recognized that; he understands how to use n-air properly even when the situation changes in a subtle way. Sure enough though, after he shines against Scar's shield he throws out a fourth very fast n-air to prevent Scar from escaping his shield pressure.
So on the one hand, you may watch JMan and think "if I can n-air as fast as he does, I'll be a top player," which is incorrect. You should be able to control the n-air as well as JMan, and understand its situational uses as well as JMan, and then... you will be able to n-air as well as JMan, and that's it. But it's a great start, and n-air is a great move.
There is a downside to doing this method: with pure imitation you can only become as good as the player you emulate. However, by watching their videos you can also see what sorts of things they get punished for, or where they fail to follow up effectively. That gives you a good roadmap for how you can eventually surpass them. If they're very effective with a character's b-air but they space f-air poorly, you have a clue as to how you can later develop a skill that they don't have.
That brings me to another point: make your own videos and look for some part of your game that gets you into trouble a lot. Focus your energy on improving those parts of your game; if Peach's d-smash destroys you, deliberately let yourself get hit by it and practice teching out of it, practice DI'ing it so you only get hit by it once, learn how to space away from it when Peach CC's you; focus on all the ways that you can get around the destructive power of this one move. When it's no longer an issue for you, train the next trouble spot of the matchup. You may not even need videos if you have a decent memory. Just think of the things that beat you, and turn all your attention to countering one of those things. Once countering it is second nature, move on.
To start with, however, here are some examples of skills that are good to work on and improve: tech chasing with grabs, spacing moves to avoid shield grabs/CCs, dash-dancing away from a move to punish it, sweet-spotting your character's recovery, perfectly timing shield grabs, absolutely mastering your character's chain grabs (if you have one). Lastly, being able to viciously gimp Fox and Falco will always come in handy in tournament, so master that too; pretty much every character can do it :)
Problem: You may wind up with a gimmicky style and begin to stagnate as a player.
Solution: Don't. Resist laziness and keep finding new skills to improve. If you start seeing results and you wind up winning a lot of your games, you may start thinking that your game doesn't need expanding. However, you must remember this: the more mastered skills you have at your fingertips, the more unpredictable, versatile, and creative you can be. Not only that, it often happens that when you learn a new skill it improves the efficacy of your old ones; you get more mix-ups and more follow-ups, which in turn makes you deadlier.
Against some players you can get away with a lame and gimmicky style. Don't let that spoil you into stagnating; the end goal is expanding your game, not limiting it. Remember this, particularly because of the next problem...
Problem: You may become easy to read.
Solution: At first, there really isn't one. Hopefully you'll be *so* good at whatever your technique is--maybe dash-dance camping into a grab, or tech-chasing with u-air on a platform, or something--that the opponent can't avoid it even if he knows it's coming. However, at high levels of play that's very unlikely, because top players are experienced at dealing with many different situations and will probably know the counter to your technique.
Right now though, we're assuming you're NOT at that high level of play, and you're just trying to improve. Don't worry about those top players at this moment. A lot of people have trouble dealing with various tactics; make your technique as unstoppable as it can be, and you'll quickly surpass all those other people. Then you can add new techniques and become *more* unstoppable. As you learn the intricacies of each skill, you end up making better and better decisions, and you can handle more situations.
I reiterate: the only way to avoid the problem of being gimmicky, stagnant, and easily read is to keep mastering new and useful stuff. For now, accept that your game will be limited and move on.
Problem: If you have poor competition, you may think you've mastered a skill when you really haven't.
Solution: Hopefully, you *do* have at least one person in your area as motivated as you. Even if they aren't good, they can still be a sparring partner for training specific situations.
Try this: set a match to time mode and turn the timer off. Pick something to practice, like drill-shining a shield versus shield grabbing. The two of you will be competing to see who is better at the situation, and you just play at it. Even if your opponent isn't good in the context of a real match, the two of you can still improve in this one area, in that one context. Because the timer is off and there is no stock, there's no pressure; you can experiment with the timing, and if you get shield grabbed or shined... so what? You try again, and again, and cement the proper timing into your hands and mind.
You can also try gimmick matches; your opponent will ONLY edge-camp with Sheik and you'll be Fox, and you'll both try to win that scenario again and again. You will only play on Pokemon Stadium during its transformations; when you're not in it, you both just dash dance around and practice movement tricks.
The goal of this is not only improving your skill at these situations, but to make your competition better.
If you *don't* have a training partner or your local scene is far beneath your level, then you'll have to be imaginative. Even when practicing Brawl by himself, Mew2King tried to imagine and construct in-game situations that he could practice. He'd send a computer Snake into the air with Metaknight, then intentionally up-air beneath him and miss, pretending that the computer was a human who would try to fall and air dodge through him. M2K would fall as he u-aired, then jump and n-air, tracking the computer's movement.
If you're alone, try and practice situations that are very likely to occur. For example, you might play as Marth against a computer and throw it onto a platform. Then you practice hitting it with a tipper after it misses its tech. Try to learn where you need to stand to have the most control over the platform, so that when an enemy is stuck above you, you never miss the tipper. Do the same thing with up-tilt and f-tilt, learn the different spacings on Battlefield, Yoshi's Story, and Pokemon Stadium.
Watch videos and practice scenarios as though you were in those matches. Even though no two matches are identical, most situations are remarkably common and you can find ways to rehearse them, even without an opponent.
Problem: If you play against somebody who can counter your specialty, you'll have no contingency plan.
Solution: There isn't one. In a lot of ways, it's not even a problem. You can say "I should have practiced something else," but that's not very helpful; the same problem will still occur, maybe even against the same opponent. You may wish you were better all-around, but if your opponent is experienced that won't help much either. You may wish to plan and be ready for every scenario and every kind of opponent, but that's not realistic. It's highly likely that you will come against some player or some tactic that simply outclasses what you've got at the moment. Understand that these kinds of losses are possible and then use them as maps. Use them to tell you what skill you should train next, or how you can further expand the one you're using.
Here's something to keep in mind though; in the tough matches that matter, you may have to take risks to win. Perhaps you *will* have to do something with a low chance of success because it's the only path to victory, or it's just more likely to succeed than your other options. It may be something that you're bad at, something that's crazy and situational, or even something that's just really really stupid. There's nothing wrong with going for these, provided you believe it's pivotal to winning that particular game. You never want to give up on a match, or completely assume at any moment that it's hopeless for you. I've seen people drastically improve in the middle of a match to come back and beat people they "should have" lost to; in a few rare instances, I've done it myself.
Furthermore, don't let any kind of pride dictate the way you play. You are not forced to win with your chosen style, or finish with a signature combo. You also aren't forced to play in an entertaining way, or mix up your game when it's disadvantageous. Pick the path that you believe will lead you to victory. If it's your specialty, fine. If it's something you've never done before, fine. If it's boring, fine. If it's risky and exciting, fine. Just remember that in a serious match, you are playing to win by whatever means available to you.
Please comment if you have any questions or comments; this section can be organic and I'll add to it if people raise important or interesting points.
Pros:
--Allows for low-energy play; by focusing on abilities that you are good at, you don't need to expend unnecessary mental energy executing them.
--Gives you concrete, measurable improvement.
--You quickly become good at some aspect of the game.
Cons:
--It can be difficult to learn which skills are worth improving and focusing on. How do I know which skill I should be putting my focus on, and which ones aren't worth my time right now?
--You may wind up with a gimmicky style and stagnate as a player.
--You may become easy to read.
--If you practice against people who aren't very good, you may think you've mastered a skill but really haven't, and this comes back to haunt you later.
--If you play against somebody who is better with your specialties than you are, or they have mastered a counter to your specialties, then you have nothing to fall back on.
The pros are great, and don't really need elaborating on. Instead, let's look at the cons and find ways to counteract them. After all, I managed to list more of them than the pros, which kind of makes you rethink whether this is a worthwhile endeavor.
Problem: It can be difficult to learn which skills are worth improving and focusing on.
Solution: Study higher level players and pick important, successful parts of their game to emulate. It's tempting to spend time mastering neat tricks that look really cool but have no use or application. I used to devote a lot of time to practicing things like triple shine into short hop reverse double laser; it goes without saying that I've never used it to any effect in an actual game. I should have been watching videos of the top players and seeing which aspects of their game were successful. If they use some move as their bread and butter approach, pay close attention to how they use that move and try to use it in the same way. Learn everything you can about that one move and why it works so well for them, then master it.
Think critically, and focus on subtle details. For instance, look at JMan and his use of Fox's n-air, like in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMAu3XYdVk0 Look at about 0:14, when JMan starts n-airing Scar from the right side of Dreamland across the stage. The first n-air comes out almost the very frame JMan leaves the ground, and he fast falls as soon as possible. He does it again with the second one; JMan is n-airing as fast as he possibly can. However, after jabbing Scar off the ground, he uses a third n-air that is NOT as fast as the first two. This is because if he had n-aired sooner, he'd have hit Scar's shield too early and risked getting shield grabbed; delaying it put him as close to the ground as possible . I'm willing to bet JMan quickly recognized that; he understands how to use n-air properly even when the situation changes in a subtle way. Sure enough though, after he shines against Scar's shield he throws out a fourth very fast n-air to prevent Scar from escaping his shield pressure.
So on the one hand, you may watch JMan and think "if I can n-air as fast as he does, I'll be a top player," which is incorrect. You should be able to control the n-air as well as JMan, and understand its situational uses as well as JMan, and then... you will be able to n-air as well as JMan, and that's it. But it's a great start, and n-air is a great move.
There is a downside to doing this method: with pure imitation you can only become as good as the player you emulate. However, by watching their videos you can also see what sorts of things they get punished for, or where they fail to follow up effectively. That gives you a good roadmap for how you can eventually surpass them. If they're very effective with a character's b-air but they space f-air poorly, you have a clue as to how you can later develop a skill that they don't have.
That brings me to another point: make your own videos and look for some part of your game that gets you into trouble a lot. Focus your energy on improving those parts of your game; if Peach's d-smash destroys you, deliberately let yourself get hit by it and practice teching out of it, practice DI'ing it so you only get hit by it once, learn how to space away from it when Peach CC's you; focus on all the ways that you can get around the destructive power of this one move. When it's no longer an issue for you, train the next trouble spot of the matchup. You may not even need videos if you have a decent memory. Just think of the things that beat you, and turn all your attention to countering one of those things. Once countering it is second nature, move on.
To start with, however, here are some examples of skills that are good to work on and improve: tech chasing with grabs, spacing moves to avoid shield grabs/CCs, dash-dancing away from a move to punish it, sweet-spotting your character's recovery, perfectly timing shield grabs, absolutely mastering your character's chain grabs (if you have one). Lastly, being able to viciously gimp Fox and Falco will always come in handy in tournament, so master that too; pretty much every character can do it :)
Problem: You may wind up with a gimmicky style and begin to stagnate as a player.
Solution: Don't. Resist laziness and keep finding new skills to improve. If you start seeing results and you wind up winning a lot of your games, you may start thinking that your game doesn't need expanding. However, you must remember this: the more mastered skills you have at your fingertips, the more unpredictable, versatile, and creative you can be. Not only that, it often happens that when you learn a new skill it improves the efficacy of your old ones; you get more mix-ups and more follow-ups, which in turn makes you deadlier.
Against some players you can get away with a lame and gimmicky style. Don't let that spoil you into stagnating; the end goal is expanding your game, not limiting it. Remember this, particularly because of the next problem...
Problem: You may become easy to read.
Solution: At first, there really isn't one. Hopefully you'll be *so* good at whatever your technique is--maybe dash-dance camping into a grab, or tech-chasing with u-air on a platform, or something--that the opponent can't avoid it even if he knows it's coming. However, at high levels of play that's very unlikely, because top players are experienced at dealing with many different situations and will probably know the counter to your technique.
Right now though, we're assuming you're NOT at that high level of play, and you're just trying to improve. Don't worry about those top players at this moment. A lot of people have trouble dealing with various tactics; make your technique as unstoppable as it can be, and you'll quickly surpass all those other people. Then you can add new techniques and become *more* unstoppable. As you learn the intricacies of each skill, you end up making better and better decisions, and you can handle more situations.
I reiterate: the only way to avoid the problem of being gimmicky, stagnant, and easily read is to keep mastering new and useful stuff. For now, accept that your game will be limited and move on.
Problem: If you have poor competition, you may think you've mastered a skill when you really haven't.
Solution: Hopefully, you *do* have at least one person in your area as motivated as you. Even if they aren't good, they can still be a sparring partner for training specific situations.
Try this: set a match to time mode and turn the timer off. Pick something to practice, like drill-shining a shield versus shield grabbing. The two of you will be competing to see who is better at the situation, and you just play at it. Even if your opponent isn't good in the context of a real match, the two of you can still improve in this one area, in that one context. Because the timer is off and there is no stock, there's no pressure; you can experiment with the timing, and if you get shield grabbed or shined... so what? You try again, and again, and cement the proper timing into your hands and mind.
You can also try gimmick matches; your opponent will ONLY edge-camp with Sheik and you'll be Fox, and you'll both try to win that scenario again and again. You will only play on Pokemon Stadium during its transformations; when you're not in it, you both just dash dance around and practice movement tricks.
The goal of this is not only improving your skill at these situations, but to make your competition better.
If you *don't* have a training partner or your local scene is far beneath your level, then you'll have to be imaginative. Even when practicing Brawl by himself, Mew2King tried to imagine and construct in-game situations that he could practice. He'd send a computer Snake into the air with Metaknight, then intentionally up-air beneath him and miss, pretending that the computer was a human who would try to fall and air dodge through him. M2K would fall as he u-aired, then jump and n-air, tracking the computer's movement.
If you're alone, try and practice situations that are very likely to occur. For example, you might play as Marth against a computer and throw it onto a platform. Then you practice hitting it with a tipper after it misses its tech. Try to learn where you need to stand to have the most control over the platform, so that when an enemy is stuck above you, you never miss the tipper. Do the same thing with up-tilt and f-tilt, learn the different spacings on Battlefield, Yoshi's Story, and Pokemon Stadium.
Watch videos and practice scenarios as though you were in those matches. Even though no two matches are identical, most situations are remarkably common and you can find ways to rehearse them, even without an opponent.
Problem: If you play against somebody who can counter your specialty, you'll have no contingency plan.
Solution: There isn't one. In a lot of ways, it's not even a problem. You can say "I should have practiced something else," but that's not very helpful; the same problem will still occur, maybe even against the same opponent. You may wish you were better all-around, but if your opponent is experienced that won't help much either. You may wish to plan and be ready for every scenario and every kind of opponent, but that's not realistic. It's highly likely that you will come against some player or some tactic that simply outclasses what you've got at the moment. Understand that these kinds of losses are possible and then use them as maps. Use them to tell you what skill you should train next, or how you can further expand the one you're using.
Here's something to keep in mind though; in the tough matches that matter, you may have to take risks to win. Perhaps you *will* have to do something with a low chance of success because it's the only path to victory, or it's just more likely to succeed than your other options. It may be something that you're bad at, something that's crazy and situational, or even something that's just really really stupid. There's nothing wrong with going for these, provided you believe it's pivotal to winning that particular game. You never want to give up on a match, or completely assume at any moment that it's hopeless for you. I've seen people drastically improve in the middle of a match to come back and beat people they "should have" lost to; in a few rare instances, I've done it myself.
Furthermore, don't let any kind of pride dictate the way you play. You are not forced to win with your chosen style, or finish with a signature combo. You also aren't forced to play in an entertaining way, or mix up your game when it's disadvantageous. Pick the path that you believe will lead you to victory. If it's your specialty, fine. If it's something you've never done before, fine. If it's boring, fine. If it's risky and exciting, fine. Just remember that in a serious match, you are playing to win by whatever means available to you.
Please comment if you have any questions or comments; this section can be organic and I'll add to it if people raise important or interesting points.
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