this will be a more general post that i hope readers interested in at least one of my competitive pursuits can glean something out of. it can, of course, apply to other areas – but i think the more direct applications are for competitive games or sports of some variety.
for basically my entire life, i’ve been involved in competitions in some form or fashion. i played the tcg as a child, went to brawl tournaments shortly thereafter, became heavily involved in gen 5 ou (the first area i saw real competitive success in) during high school, then melee in college, and now i continue to play melee at a decently high level, RS-PK at a high level, and i dabble in chess and smash 64. in all of these pursuits, my improvements within them have been the same since basically as early as i could consciously develop a theory on how i wanted to improve. i noticed my strengths and weaknesses and developed my plans for not only play within the games themselves around this, but also my avenues for improvement and practice.
i know many people are able to determine such things easily, but for others it may be a more abstract thing that they haven’t been able to define into the literal realm yet. for others, this hopefully unbiased on one’s own prospects is merely taken as a trivia about oneself and not a guide to which avenues to take towards improvement. if you haven’t done anything like this before, i urge you to sit down and consider what exactly you believe your strengths and weaknesses are when it comes to whatever game you want to improve at. some of these things may be applicable to some spaces but not others (e.g. my slow reaction time in melee is certainly unfortunate for my improvement in that game, but it doesn’t hinder my RS-PK abilities at all).
some examples of strengths could be:
-patience within the game itself. the ability to get into long, drawn out states where you are pushing slightly for advantages and playing very solidly, waiting for your opponent to tire themselves out.
-patience outside of the game. the ability to be in it for the long haul and take as much time as you need to see improvement as opposed to taking short avenues for quick jumps in potential followed by immediate plateaus.
-game-sense. a bit of a more abstract one, but some people in some competition-based subcultures either have this or they don’t. and you, of course, may have this in strides – there are prodigies everywhere – but it’s important to realize when you don’t as well.
-technical abilities – fast reaction times, quick mental (math) calculation, high dexterity, etc. these are usually somewhat objective to quantify so they are easier to determine than the other categories.
-passion about the game. many people who compete don’t care to improve beyond maybe slightly above their current placement. if this applies to you, then i don’t think that you should worry too much about how to improve.
some weaknesses can be easily defined as the counter of these. someone may be impatient within games and get flustered within long-running ones or incremental gamestates. someone’s reaction time may be slow when compared to their peers. someone may have no idea what game-sense is and just (reasonably) assume they probably aren’t a gretzky or an isai.
once you have more or less determined your actual strengths and weaknesses, and whatever goals you wish to attain for the game you are playing, it’s important to realize how your strengths and weaknesses factor into attaining those goals. for example, a player who is impatient in melee will invariably find themselves in some set against a campy opponent who is of comparable skill, and they will likely end up pushing for advantage in an antsy, punishable manner. this is a learning process for many, though some may find this challenge more difficult than others. is this something you should pour limited time and resources into correcting?
it depends. while a player like mango is certainly not at his peak at the moment, it’s not as though his aggression is what has led to his downfall from the top 5 echelon. similar things can be said for chess players like alireza firouzja, whose relative decline doesn’t appear to have too much correlation to a lack of switching to a more solid, less risky style of gameplay. yet there are players across every game who never seem to amount to greatness due in no small part to their rampant aggression; this need to continue pressing for advantage, the proneness to frustration, etc is something that i’ve observed across every form of competition i’ve ever been in. some players are so naturally talented or hardworking that they can more-or-less power through this; for many others it’s an achilles heel. and some find great success in practicing restraint despite their natural adherence towards aggression; magnus carlsen and wesley so are two chess players that come to mind for this.
so it is important, then, to ask yourself how you will navigate these weaknesses of yours. will you try to solve them actively? will you attempt to play defensively or patiently? find some psychological balance to help you not get flustered? or will you focus on other areas and more or less “lost cause” this element of your game? there’s no correct answer here really; surely we could all do with being more patient in our games, but whether or not it’s a major factor you should be working towards is a complex question that nobody can answer better than you can.
it’s important also to navigate your prowess accordingly. are your technical abilities strong in a game? how can you successfully utilize this strength and hedge your bets against the field? will you play a character that is more demanding of you so that you can capitalize on this? will you simply keep on playing the character that you are playing and try to incorporate as much tech as possible? whatever the case is, you can also apply this in micro interactions as opposed to just the macro: try to find yourself in situations where your technical proficiency can be flaunted in competitively viable ways to opponents unprepared to deal with it at your current skill level. if you don’t immediately know how to do this, start thinking about it.
and this brings me to my final point in improvement theory, which is thinking. for myself, i don’t have much of a game-sense to speak of, my reaction speed is slow, i’m not generally skilled when it comes to video games as far as dexterity goes, and i am frequently lazy when it comes to practicing much of anything. the way that i facilitate improvement at games largely comes outside of the games themselves. now i will note that this is usually most potent after you have revealed an immediate technical familiarity with the games themselves, and you could be classified as an intermediate player in some regard, as before that you basically need to practice the thing itself heavily to grow accustomed to the engine or the basic ideas of the metagame. however, once you are past this point, you don’t even need to play the game to improve.
let’s take an example of this phenomenon. i recently lost a sheik ditto at a melee tournament. this was streamed, which i reviewed with a friend of mine to catch potential improvements for the future. after we did this, i started asking myself about certain low % situations in the MU – how my option after throwing out a whiffed fair changes depending the opponent’s position and percent, and whether it’s best to dashback, dashback pivot, shield, wavedash back, short hop back, or do a more exotic option as a mixup. this is an extremely specific thing to analyze – but it comes up frequently in the sheik ditto and can often be the difference between not-losing a neutral exchange and getting boost-grabbed and chain-grabbed. i thought about this exchange while i was falling asleep, while i was in the shower, and, yes, during the next sheik dittos that i played.
these situations come up in every game – and the better you get, the more specific they tend to get in my experience. i believe one should always be able to identify situations they’re unfamiliar with and attempt to strengthen them, even if it’s outside of the actual game itself. your mind should be able to simulate the situation well enough to the point of where you can prepare counterplay (both barebones and fully-fledged). you can do this in your spare time when you are otherwise meditating or have down-time just to think about the game for some period of time, and i can tell you that it absolutely helps you to improve by doing this.
this is about all i wanted to cover; i hope you have gleaned something useful from this post.
core enforcer 