This is probably what happens when I choke closing out games/sets. My conscious mind takes over and I freeze up, forget what the heck I was just doing in neutral, and then whiff all my punishes to ultimately throw most games where I have a 2-stock lead.
i had no idea the inner game was a meme in melee loool the one for music is the one i read and was extremely helpful for all facets of skill expression.
I remember playing you from years ago. It was a ball state tournament and I was about a year or half a year into playing melee. You stomped me (no pun intended) and ended up tied for 8th. I felt good after the time I dedicated to getting better feeling rewarded, but as the years went on I never really felt like I accomplished much. I practiced and practiced till my hands couldn't and still felt like I was going nowhere. After the years went on I deterred myself so much from playing cause I felt it was a waste of time and gave up melee entirely. I never understood what I was really missing and no one seemed willing to even help me try and figure it out. I spent hours studying tech and never realized what I was missing. After watching hours of more content, this time directed at my mental and getting more used to understanding myself on a personal level I decided to take it serious again. Started with SF5 then 6 came out and saw rapid improvement from learning to coach myself outside of game then to do it as much in the actual game and let myself go while playing and to just do my best and now I am back into melee and feel so much improvement all around without even touching the new tech skill that's around since I was gone from the scene. This video reminds me of all the Sajam/Core-A/etc. vids I watched before that helped me a lot and this was just what I needed to hear to keep myself motivated. Thank you Phrigid If you ever remembered the name EzE or Fiji, I was a sheik player from back in the day traveling to the FW locals here or there and entering in the bigger Indiana majors from 2016-2018. If you ever see this I hope to see you in more Indiana stuff in the future
Really enjoyed this video, but it left me wondering how to combat a problem that is just as pervasive as consciously trying too hard... That is, how do you prevent autopilot, while also allowing your subconscious to do its thing? I suppose learning this balance is what it means to be a good player..
i actually had a section i had to cut about that! Its the opposite problem where youre leaving too much to your subconcious. Im working thru that problem myself rn so i may have a video on it soon lol
I see it in a way that you have to be 100% focused in the moment so your mind or conscious self is engaged as well in the fight, taking choices on the fly and not thinking -too- much of others things that can disrupts this focus. Having a little conscious mind reserved for gameplan, techskill adjustments, etc is good too but just so its enough to adjust your gameplay and stay at that 100% focus
I think autopilot gets a bad rep, when it's actually good because you are letting self 2 do it's thing. The only thing lacking is awareness of what's happening
I've learned this recently. I play ultimate and I started doing well at my weeklies. As I want to consistently place top 5 at my weekly, i began thinking I had to have my conscious self be involved throughout the game as I was nervous to lose to "bad" players. My conscious self was thinking about very interaction and mistake for most of the sets and that's when i got 7th place. I started to balance out the conscious part and learned to trust the sub conscious. It's like magic that I can have an observation with my conscious mind and then i just let my sub conscious actually implement a solution even if my concsious mind didn't make up a solution, just identified the problem. I've noticed that I do stuff in bracket now that i wouldn't consciously do but that my sub conscious comes up with. It's amazing
This is a lesson that probably took me over 10 years to learn, and it was in Ultimate that I learned. That game is very messy, and you can lose to players much worse than you by making really silly errors, so it's easy to find it tilting.
"Please like and subscribe to help me sustain dopamine levels" LMAO And I feared the well of creativity had run dry on melee improvement content. You've got a new sub.
Very wise. Lately I've been grinding with my mains, Sheik and Link, and going really hard in tournaments, with what I now recognize as my conscious mind taking over due to nerves. I've consistently gone 0-2, and have even been doing worse in unranked on Slippi. However, I recently switched from those mains to playing online as Marth, who I have 0 hours of practice in, with the tag Fsmash McGee. My online win rate has skyrocketed, funny enough!
During hand warmers I watch their tech habits and shadow box them. Before I play I run warm water on my hands, sit down at the screen, look at my hands and close my eyes and then reopen my eyes looking at the screen.
4:51 omg I'm so happy!, I know EXACTLY what this means and feels like. It's really flattering? I don't think that's the right word for this but whatever, it feels great to have a skill advanced enough that I noticed and described to myself what it was that was going on in my brain, then years later get vindicated by a book haha! massive W good job me 🎉
i like to think the cs and the scs as the doer vs the be-er. the masculine and the feminine - not necessarily in our traditional gendered context but one as the essence of taking action and thinking logically and consciously, and the other with just being, the automatic processes, free-flowing fun and enjoyment. it seems our traditional understanding of getting better at things, be it melee, a hobby, anything that has quantifiable progression, is to just ram our head into the wall over and over and work harder and harder. we've missed a core concept which you've demonstrated very consisely in this video; to stop trying, to stop doing (in excess; doing is still important) and to start just being and let things flow. great video.
Just started watching. But for me, I feel like yesterday I noticed for the first time that I dont play good unless I'm slightly angry/annoyed. I showed up for pre tourney friendlies and just noticed that I really had no feeling going on, just "meh, I'm here and the brackets gonna be tough, I'll try my best". It's probably not good, but I have to be feeling some sort of emotion to enter "the zone" In lieu of all this, during this tournament and the previous couple ones, I noticed my nerves and composure getting better and better when it's time for bracket. What makes different people tick is gonna be different for everyone, competing is all about self awareness. The biggest challenge for me is overcoming the roller coaster of emotions of playing good in tourney, still not being enough and losing, and being distraught over the fact that several people have been playing for less than a year and are pretty much already better than me.
