It’s been awhile, but I’m back on my grind-set. I hate that term. A lot has changed since the last entry. Loving the new jobs. It’s truly a dream come true, but holy hell has my personal skill in smash taken a back seat. Ironic. Now it’s my job and I’m the worst I’ve been since I moved to Colorado. My recent performance has motivated me to get back into the improvement, so it’s a good excuse to bring this series back.
I’ve learned a lot from doing this series. It’s helped me become more self-reflective and aware of myself in game. The problem is, I often forget the good habits I start to implement. For example, I was starting to catch landings very well, but after a week of implementing that, I stopped. Why? Well let’s find out.
I asked some other people if they forget certain aspects of their gameplay. Chronos said that this does happen to him frequently, but he combats it by VOD reviewing. I’ll be honest. I wrote a whole piece on VOD review and I haven’t been doing it at all. I even started a grind session where one of the biggest draws is that people get to come play a top player and have it on stream to review later, yet I still don’t review my own VODs regularly.
I asked some other people and they also confirmed that forgetfulness is a problem they run into as well. Usually when given a problem in smash, I’ll do some research on how to fix that problem. If it’s not directly linked to Smash or has very little to no Smash content on it, I’ll find info on it through other sources and convert it to be useful in Smash. The problem is, nobody really talks about this issue, at least not in “searchable” terms. It’s surprising given how important of a topic I believe this to be. Get on it Dabuz. I see them Youtube shorts.
So given the lack of resources on the topic, I’m forced to speculate. Hopefully the solutions I cook up work.
I think VOD review is a key component like Chronos said. Self awareness is key to being able to keep track of what you’re doing and not doing. If I’m not catching landings, I can tell from my VODs and hopefully focus on fixing that in the future. The problem I seem to have is that I’ll notice I’m not catching landings, but then I stop doing something else, like feinting a landing aerial on shield and then short hop nairing immediately. I can’t retain all of that knowledge all at once, and I need to find a way to streamline the implications of these habits.
I think this is where we can start learning from some pre-established ideas. Auto-pilot is something I touched on early on in this series. Auto-pilot is something many people think is inherently bad. I did too, but then I watched a Dabuz video where he talked about how you actually do want a majority of your game plan to be auto-pilot. The more you’re auto-piloting, the more brain power you can use towards analyzing your opponent. I think the key is to incorporate these habits you want into your auto-pilot, in-turn, making them easy to incorporate into your gameplay. How do we do this? I’d say VOD review and pick one thing you really want to incorporate more often. Focus on doing that for a session or tournament and keep doing it until it sticks. For me, it’ll probably take longer to do this than for others. I play a lot of smash and go through phases of implementing things, so I might really need to hardcore focus on one thing for a long time to really get it down.
That’s the plan for now. Hopefully returning to this series and some self reflection will help get me back to a level of proficiency. I really miss doing this and flexing the muscle that I use when writing this series. I hope to do it more often, but I can’t commit to it like I used to. We’ll see. I still love Smash, I just do things like coach and host tournaments now, and it takes a lot away from my focus on improving at the game. Let’s see if I can handle both! Thanks for reading!
Bernard Lamar Rice 