We’ve all felt it. We’ve all certainly heard someone claim they were playing “off”. I personally hate this excuse. If everyone is playing “off” when they lose, does anyone outplay their opponent when their opponent is at their best? One player will always win, and you could legitimately be playing worse than usual, but that is NEVER a legitimate excuse if you want to improve as a player.
You will always fluctuate in skill. You will be directly affected by things unrelated to smash like your sleep, diet, and exercise. These things are controllable most of the time, but the outcome won’t always be predictable, especially for smash. You can do your best to control these things, but they will only fluctuate your skill from the median point it is currently at. We’ll call this median point of your skill your “true skill” to be ironic. True skill is a term used in a common-ranking website that I personally don’t think shows people’s true skill that well, but stupid references aside, what determines your true skill?
Your true skill fluctuates as well. As I said, it’s the median of your performance and it’s redefined constantly. I’d argue it is more solid than your fluctuating day-to-day performance, so one bad tournament will not tank your true skill. Hell, two bad tournaments might not affect it much, but if you keep performing lower and lower, your true skill will reflect that.
One of the most important things in competition is being honest with yourself. Don’t make excuses for yourself. You don’t get better by excusing all of your losses for untrue reasons, and it makes it harder to accurately identify your true skill. If you don’t feel like you’re playing off, don’t say you’re playing off as an excuse. If you are playing off, find out why and fix it.
I’ve been on a roll recently. My results have been pretty solid again and I want to keep it up. Thankfully, we have a grind session in my scene now and I was lucky enough to get 3 sets recorded on stream with someone who I’ve been going back and forth with in bracket. I won the last encounter we had in the tournament, but I lost all 3 of our sets during the grind session. It was so bad that I think I only took a single game in all 3 of those sets. I bring this up because I felt like I was “playing off”. While our last set was close, I felt as if I had the upper hand, but this time I was completely outclassed. Aside from the pure results, I also felt like I wasn’t as locked in mentally, and my gameplay wasn’t as thoughtful as it has been.
After these sets, I decided to think of the things that might affect my gameplay. I had the Colorado PR Championship this last weekend before the grind session and it severely interrupted my diet, sleep, and exercise. I stayed the night in Denver, barely got any sleep, and drank some caffeine for the first time in a while on the ride back because I was the driver, and as I said, I barely got any sleep. Caffeine is an easy factor for me to point out. I have had a very interesting relationship with caffeine and I’m currently very sensitive to it. I know this, so I avoid it, but since I was driving, I felt like the safest thing would be to have a small amount to make sure we all got home from Denver safely, and I mean a small amount. I had a few sips of Coke. I thought this would be enough to wake me up and hopefully avoid the negative side effects I’m prone to. The side effect that affects me the most in Smash is my lack of ability to focus and I felt as if that impacted me during the grind session.
So caffeine is one potential factor, but I’ve noticed some other trends. I won’t go fully into all of them because a few are a bit personal and not SFW (I’m sure you can guess one of them), but I will say that exercise and diet are important for me as well. Complex sugars in fruits seem to do good for me and getting my heart rate up even for a few minutes once a day helps keep my mind sharp.
The final thing I’m going to do is write up some observations from the stream sets I had at the grind session. I’m finally doing VOD reviews more consistently! Look at me… growing. I’ll probably post that as well and I’ll edit it into this post when it’s done.
These are specific factors that seem to affect me, you need to find out what works for you. I hope this can help others in identifying what throws their gameplay off. Thanks for reading!
Bernard Lamar Rice 