I’ll start by saying sorry for not publishing a blog last week. I’ve been very busy but one of the things keeping me busy I can talk about now! I’m a part of Heroes eSports! I’m very excited to be a part of their team. Their members include Smash players like SuperGirlKels and Kiwi, players I’ve followed for years. I’m extremely happy to be working with them and all the incredibly talented people at Heroes! There is something else I hope I can announce soon, as well as a few other personal creative projects I’m hoping to publish as soon as possible. I’m super excited about what I have in the works and I hope you all enjoy what’s to come!
As for smash in the last two weeks, oh boy. I think I went 2-2 at every tournament I went to. I went to two ESF’s, a Games Ahoy tourney, a Greely weekly, and the Namki house rooftop monthly. Out of all those tournaments, I only lost to 2 people seeded under me and I fell victim to higher-seeded players getting upset early and finding me immediately in losers twice. Not a horrible couple of weeks, but not great. Rooftop was tons of fun and I had my best performance I’ve ever had in a crew battle even though we lost… Here’s me losing my voice as the lead I got us vanishes before our eyes.
I’ve been slacking in smash. I love the game and it is high on my priorities, but I need to prioritize my career first. I’m still trying my hardest to improve, but I’m not going to sacrifice my career for my tournament performance. We also all know the real money is in content of course! Ethier way, onto the topic for this week.
Frustration. Anger. Annoyance. These are all things I feel when fighting Robber, Colorado’s best Young Link main. Thanks to Robber for inspiring another topic… Young Link is such a frustrating character to me because of his fire arrow, poking tools, kill power, and especially his shield pressure. The flaws that that character has are not apparent to my basic sensibilities regarding smash, and therefore, I feel gatekept by his mere existence.
I hate that little elf, but my rational side knows that he’s not unbeatable. Robber knows the Palutena match-up very well and is a better player than me. I also don’t know the Yink match-up well enough to keep up with one of Robber’s caliber. I feel like one of my biggest flaws while fighting him is how frustrated I get. So I wanted to tackle this topic to see how best to handle this frustration because we all have things in Smash Ultimate that annoy us and if I find a way to handle it myself, maybe the process can help others with their frustrations.
The first thing I want to do is to understand “frustration”. For this, I’ll refer everyone to part of a TED talk where Juna Mustad describes how anger functions using something called the hand model of the brain. The whole video from the time stamp on is relevant to what I’m going to discuss so feel free to watch the whole thing or just from the time stamp. Just as a warning, she talks about an abusive relationship before the timestamp.
I want to touch on what our natural threat response can look like in Smash when we’re losing. If you’re inclined to fight, that can turn into just holding forward. If you’re inclined to flight, you might spam rolls a lot. I know freeze all too well because for a long time it dominated my own threat response. I would just start shielding when in disadvantage if I was getting pressured hard. None of those options are inherently bad, you just can’t do the same one all the time. If you always roll, your opponent will pick up on that, same with every other option you can choose. There is no one perfect option for every scenario. You must pick the best option based on what your opponent is looking to punish. This is hard to do when you’re playing based on fear, so that’s where mindfulness comes into play.
Juna Mustad gives a definition of mindfulness from Dr. Shuana Shapiro. “Mindfulness is paying attention with kindness and curiosity.” This might initially seem hard to translate to Smash, but I think it’s very relevant. It’s about conditioning yourself to pay attention to what is happening and approaching scenarios with positive curiosity. I think Esam shows this the best out of most of the top players in Ultimate. He’ll be seen in player cams during majors giving props to his opponent when they hit him with something crazy, and I think that’s healthy to do. Acknowledge when you get hit with something crazy and give props while also internalizing it to hopefully avoid if it happens again. That’s not to say you shouldn’t be angry when you lose a stock to something incredibly impressive, but recognize that your opponent is playing well.
So we want to play with mindfulness and not frustration. How do you do that? Well, this comes back to a tip from my piece on focus. Deep “in through the nose, and out through the mouth” breathing can really help curb anger as well as help increase focus. We become more relaxed, making it easier to get over the frustration. Now it might be hard to implement this mid-game, but we do play a game with multiple lives. After you lose a stock, especially if you’re angry, take a few deep breaths. You have time on the respawn platform, use it! You might think that it’s a waste to use up the invincibility that you get on respawn if you’re sitting there breathing, but it’s worth it if you’re tilted. You’re more likely to miss if you’re frustrated, so take that time to center yourself so you can more likely get that hit when you eventually do start to play again.
After you breathe acknowledge you are angry. Mustad calls this “name it” and it’s supposed to help you get back to using your rational brain when feeling frustrated.
“Do it differently” is a weird one. I would think it would have more to do with approaching a scenario differently, but Juna Mustad explains it as approaching the situation with compassion for yourself and others and expressing your anger. Compassion for others in Smash would manifest in not getting mad at the other player. It’s never wrong for them to play in a way you find annoying, so don’t blame them. If anything, it’s good that they’re playing well enough to make you angry. It means they’re playing well themselves and that is a good thing. As for physical expressions of anger like clenching your fists and vocalizing that you’re angry, that’s harder to do mid-set. Again, utilize the respawn platform and let out your anger in a way that doesn’t disrupt your opponent or anyone else around you. I’ve hit my own leg in a way that isn’t too loud but does help me release my anger. I think clenching your fist might help too. Just make sure you’re not bothering anyone because you don’t want to get a warning or be banned for raging.
I think “inquire” is used in Smash best when we ask “Why did I get hit here?” Find where you can change what happened in the scenario that made you mad. A lot of people when they’re frustrated in Smash will say “I couldn’t do anything”, but that is almost never true. Smash games and platform fighters as a genre are games where you have much more agency in disadvantage than traditional fighting games, so see if you can actually do a different option or DI/SDI differently when put in the same scenario. If you can’t and it’s one of the few true combos/kill confirms that the game has, avoid the hit that will start the scenario. There’s always counterplay, you just need to find it.
I like this whole TED talk and it helped me understand the benefits anger can have. I’ve covered before how I used to not get angry enough at Smash and how I’m trying to utilize anger more, and I think this presentation really helped me better understand the process of using the emotion itself. I know it’s kind of a stretch to relate it back to Smash how I did, but I think improving at Smash can be greatly helped by improving ourselves in other aspects of our lives that we wouldn’t generally associate with Smash.
Let’s now look into specific tips for my problem match-up, Young Link. Again, I really dislike fire-arrow and the double aerials on my shield that Yink can do, so what do we do from here? Well, it’s the constant pressure from Yink that annoys me, and that could also be considered “Spam”. Spam is a very negative term when most people use it but if we’re using the skills we learned above, we’ll know that it’s good to use strategies that find success and it’s not wrong for someone to utilize spam. So I looked up a video on how to deal with spam and came across this baby. Warning, his mic’s a bit loud but this is a solid video.
My big takeaway from this video is the counterplay to safe spam. I usually feel like I can’t punish the end lag on any of Yink’s projectiles and aerials, but Mike gives the advice to punish what they do next instead of the moves they’re spamming. Even people who play safe will have openings and it’s all about capitalizing when you finally get that first hit or grab. That’s where Yink’s weakness comes into play. He’s very light and doesn’t have an amazing recovery, so if you win neutral just a few times, he’ll be closer to death than most characters. This means I should really optimize my punish game on Yink to make sure every time I hit him, I get maximum damage or even the kill.
So that’s my theory crafting going into my next Yink set. It’s crucial to understand that this might not work. Robber is a very good player and capable of adapting, but at least I have a game plan going into our next set that can help me overcome the frustration that I experience every time we play. If I still lose, we analyze what didn’t work and continue to theory craft. There is always room to improve. Even at the highest level of play, we saw a period of time when Spargo got multiple wins on MkLeo, but Leo came back and improved himself. You never stop improving, and I plan to keep trying.
Shout out to Robber. Follow his Twitter, he’s a toxic boy, but he’s cool I guess. Shout out to Heroes! Follow them on Twitter, Twitch, and Youtube to keep up with my work with them! Thanks for reading!
Bernard Lamar Rice 
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