Does Being in Masters Make You Good?

In the last post, I mentioned that you need to define what "good" is before you can start pursuing it.  Now, when it comes to Starcraft, a lot of people might define "good" as being a Master League player, and it's not difficult to understand why.  Master League members are in the top ~2% of all Starcraft players, and the competition to get there is fierce.  Getting to Masters means that you have a very good innate understanding of how to consistently win against the other 98% of the Starcraft 2 playing population.  Builds are crisp, supply blocks are rare, scouting is clutch, micro is tight, and timing attacks are...well...timely.  Basically, the biggest fundamental errors that most Starcraft players will make are either non-existent, immediately corrected, or otherwise strongly mitigated in Master-level play.

For the most part, that all holds true.  What some people forget is that being in Masters literally means that you've won enough games (i.e. have a high enough MMR) for Battle.net to place you into the Master League.  Theoretically, you could be placed in the Master League if all of your opponents coincidentally surrender in the first five seconds of the game.  And let's not forget that players have been able to break into Masters (and beyond?) by cheesing and nothing else.  That's not to say that only bad players cheese.  It's not even to say that cheesing is bad (in fact, it helps make the game that much more dynamic and interesting to play).  What it does mean is that someone can place into Masters without necessarily having all of the breadth and depth of knowledge that most people would expect of them.

So why bring this up?  Well, because defining "good" as being in the Master League might not be the best way to drive your self-improvement.  Cheese and strong all-ins can push you up into the top tiers of 1v1, but they're a fairly one-dimensional approach to the game.  Conversely, being someone who never cheeses or all-ins can also be said to be taking a singleminded approach to Starcraft.  And at the end of the day, being in the Master League only means that you've won enough games to get there.  Focusing on the title of "Master" and the placement into the respective league is a good way to distract yourself from real improvement at the game, and can lead to things like ladder anxiety, league frustration, and misplaced focus - things which just make the game miserable to play.

In the future, I'll talk more about how focusing on a title as a signal for being "good" can get in the way of your improvement.  But for now, go back to your definition of good and try to see whether or not you're explicit about your goal.  Try to see if there's a way to technically achieve your goal in a way that you wouldn't define as a success (cheesing to Masters when you want to be a macro player, for instance) and then refine what you mean by "good".  It's a lot easier to get better at something if you know exactly what you want.