I had a long, one-on-one, KoF session last week with KrsJin (for him not knowing my blog exists, he sure does get mentioned a lot).
It went... poorly...
The final score was 36 - 11, KrsJin. I lost a lot and was dealt with an amount of discouragement that I could, metaphorically, bathe myself in during this session. Hell, KrsJin went on a 20-something game win streak before I even started to break the streak with my own wins. It was only by luck that I had won my first streak-breaking game, so it wasn't a feel-good win.
I realize that discouragement is something I don't manage well. At all. My whole mental game is terrible and all sorts of fucked up. This is just how I am; I hate losing, I hate screwing up, and the game has been out for so long I feel awful that I am so far behind another player. I expect a LOT out of myself, so that way I will always need to work on my insatiable goals. One cannot get better without expect to make mistakes, and then to learn off them, but in the heat of feeling discouraged, I have a harder time learning.
I can't think of a more discouraging situation than continuously losing a set of games against someone and having no answer, no knowledge, and no ability to mount any sort of counter-offense. The only thing known is "I'm being out-played." Even when recapping and thinking through the matches matches, there are no answers or deeper understandings found. Similar to when an English teacher asks about the deeper meaning of a poem or piece of literature, and no one answers because that answer or deeper understanding is just not there, leaving everyone without an answer and trying to avoid eye contact with the teacher.
As stated before, Discouragement management is a major point I need to work on. Taking games very nonchalantly has helped me to a point: enjoying the game, win or lose. Although, I feel if I'm doing this I'm not taking the game seriously at all. I feel I am not learning anything because I'm not realistically following my actual actions to the game's situation that allows me to reflect on actions I think are right. I need to see what things occur when I'm playing at a serious level so I know what will happen later when I'm playing with the same mindset. Am I not respecting the same move over and over, expecting to beat it? Am I not making use of certain moves of mine? So on and so forth.
This is the position I will take often during matches. Many other players do too, to be fair.
My discouragement comes from the expectations of myself. While they may be hard-to-achieve expectations they're still real, I believe. I really expected to have a greater understanding of KoF at this point. Furthermore, I expected to keep up more with KrsJin, considering he hasn't had the game for a couple months now to practice, except at gatherings...
...I'm not 100% sure if he picked up the game again or got it back from the guy who was borrowing it, to be honest, but I should be at a level closer to his, still.
With EVO in a few days, I need to better understand this pressure I put on myself to do well and replace it with a pressure to do my best. Maybe I need to replace it with no pressure what-so-ever? I'm very likely NOT going to make it out of pools.
Not because I'm being a Negative Nancy, but due to people in my bracket. I have at least Bala, the EVO 2011 KoFXIII champion and winning nearly every KoFXIII major he attended this year, and AfroCole, Street Fighter 2 legend, to get through. Then there's the people who aren't big names but are still good, too. I really want to play Bala, though he's close to the opposite side of the bracket from me, so I have to play VERY well to even get to him. As long as I don't go 0-2, I won't completely and mentally obliterate myself.
Wish me luck at EVO. If you want the chance to catch me on stream, my pool will be at 8 AM MST, Friday. Still, I gotta play well to even get to be on the stream. Regardless, watch the EVO stream, it'll be a good weekend. Grab a pizza, beer, and friends; this is your new Super Bowl Sunday.
So I wrote way too many words and even after editing a whole bunch it won't take my comment. So I'll just cut it into two bites and it will hopefully stop whining at me.
ReplyDeleteThere is no way KrsJin has been without practice for that long. Aside from the week where he had my copy, I'm pretty sure he did in fact get a hold of Andy's or something. I refuse to believe that he learned to play Benimaru and Iori without one. (Which doesn't make it not true. It not being true would make it not true.)
Anyway, 100% with you on the issue of feeling like you're not improving or learning anything being the absolute worst part of pretty much anything. Ever. I can name at least a half dozen games that I quit playing for long stretches or even permanently (...for now) because I simply couldn't bring myself to keep playing after going so long without any motivational success.
But in KOF I tried to reduce some of the pressure by leaving my goals more open-ended, and, well, not especially aspirational. When it first came out, it was THE GAME I HAD BEEN WAITING ALMOST TWO YEARS TO PLAY. And shortly after I realized I sucked horribly at it and wondered if the hype I'd built up in my head was too much. (To which recent events have clearly indicated: HAHAHA NO.) The thing I had found with SF4 and Marvel was that the more I learned about the game...the more I found to hate about it. So I got this feeling, like, I'm just gonna hang in there with each game until one I like more comes out, and eventually there's going to be some game that will never make me super angry and I'm gonna hold on to that as long as possible.
Well that's laughable because if there's one thing I learned from all those other games it's that if I'm not getting frustrated I'm not trying hard enough. But I don't always want to be frustrated, and sometimes I've thought that I'm just biding my time until a game comes out that I truly love. In light of recent events though, it's probably even more likely that it's KOF than Persona (as I may have thought for a while).
My entire goal in terms of mental pressure is to just pretend it doesn't exist. Is it a good solution? Well...I'm not entirely convinced that it isn't, and I've never found reason to believe it's really failed me, but I'm not sure how effective it is when you're in a really intense situation, with the money and pride right there, because I've never felt that it was right there. Could I keep myself from feeling it even when I knew it was? I don't know.
Anyway, I hope that you look at how you did at Evo and realize that in the broader picture-you've improved a lot, especially in the last couple months. I know for me I've had a hard time feeling like I've been improving in state, because everyone else is also improving, and in particular I felt you were improving MUCH MUCH faster than me for a while, and still learn faster in general. And at this point we've all played each other so much that it's hard not to react to the habits we've found in each other, which is a totally different game from playing random dudes from out of state.
DeleteAnd personally, every. single. session. at KrsJin's starts with me playing so badly that I wonder why I'm even wasting my time, and slowly recovering to the point where I start to feel like I'm getting somewhere, both over time and just on the evening. It's a weird feeling, but it pretty much always goes like that. And either way, it's way better than the alternative.
Over the long term though, I really feel that if you're getting what you want, in any pursuit that takes this sort of dedication...you're not asking enough of yourself. I know we talked about Champ some during and after Marvel, but I dunno if you heard: like, the day after Evo, he was already back at the FGTV house grinding Marvel again. He wants that SBO win (which will be interesting either way since at this point he's one of the only top players to really use counterpicking a lot), and while I have no idea what's next if he gets it, I think there's a strong message there: being satisfied is basically the same as giving up. And to turn that around, getting too down on yourself is just saying that there's nothing more for you to do. Somehow you have to stay hungry, but get enough to know that there's more out there for you to eat.
And it's funny because I still think you're the one who taught me this in the first place. hahaha. I guess maybe this isn't that interesting or helpful after all. It's hard for me to address what seems to be the central point here though (what to do when it feels like you can't do anything)...because it still happens to me a lot and I fucking hate it. I always feel better after a good sleep though.