Your Opponents Make Mistakes

Watch your replays.  That's one of the most common pieces of advice that people give to those who want to improve at Starcraft.

And guess what?  It's really, really, really good advice.  It's very hard to determine the scope of your mistakes in the middle of the game - and often, especially at the lower levels, you might not even recognize that you've made a mistake until you're able to review the footage with a clear head.  Sure, you hear the voice telling you to construct/spawn/build additional pylons/overlords/supply depots, but how do you know when in your build you should have invested in additional supply?  How do you know how long you went without guys on gas, or injecting larva, or missing a chronoboost, or leaving a command center or production building naked?  Mistakes in scouting, resource management, supply management, build execution, all of these things become apparent under the magnifying glass that is the replay.

But an additional benefit to the replay is that you get to see the game through the eyes of your opponent as well!  Which means that in addition to every mistake that you made, you get to see every mistake that they made.  Sure, checking out what your opponents did right is important as far as teaching you how to scout for certain builds and timing attacks.  But seeing what your opponents did wrong, I think, provides you with several very important mental benefits.

Firstly, it puts your gameplay into the perspective of your opponents' mistakes.  Did you pull ahead because your opponent kept getting supply blocked?  Was your opponent not mining gas when he thought he was?  Did he move his army into a bad location, did he mess up his build, did he screw up with composition or a bad tech switch?

Once you identify your opponents' mistakes, you then need to ask yourself these two big questions:

1. Why didn't you know your opponent had screwed up?
2. Why didn't you capitalize on your opponent's mistake?

Now, it's possible that you didn't have a way of seeing the mistake in real-time.  Fog of war and a focus on your own game can make spotting those errors difficult.  But you need to at least *try* to spot them.  A lot of lower-level players have difficulties with scouting and map presence.  Scouting just means sending out an early worker to poke around the opponent's base until it's killed, followed by almost *nothing* for the rest of the game.

But...that's not to say that you couldn't have seen *any* evidence of a mistake.  If you scout the front of his base and his army is smaller than it should be, or if you scout his third and find that his CC/Nexus/Hatch is landing later than it should be, then you can recognize that it's a mistake and capitalize on it.  The problem is that you have to *actually scout it* in order to take advantage of it.  And reviewing your opponent's mistakes during replays can help you figure out not only what sorts of screw-ups are common, but what you can do in the future to actively detect those errors and duly punish them for it.

The second good reason to watch for your opponents' mistakes in replays is because it humanizes them.

The Internet has done incredible things for multiplayer gaming.  But think back to those days on the couch or at a LAN party where you got to hear and see your opponents regret a mistake in real-time.  Seeing that let you know that you weren't playing against robots or unstoppable killing machines ready to squash your every move.  No, you're playing against real people, guys and girls who are going to mess up just as many times as you are.  Yeah, that two-base all-in or strong timing attack might seem perfectly executed and impossible to beat...but if you look at your opponent's view while they were working up to it, you're going to find errors in their play.  It's because they're human, they're playing a difficult game, and there's the very real possibility that you're going to steamroll them before they can assemble their crushing attack.  They're facing the same agitations that you are, and are prone to the same mistakes...it's your job to not only minimize your own errors, but to pick apart your opponents' and capitalize on them.  And until you know how your opponents are messing up, you can't respond to them as appropriately and as efficiently as necessary.

And one final note - the exercise is not to rage about how OP a specific race or build is because they were able to win "even with all those mistakes".  It's to learn about how to spot your opponent's weaknesses and turn them against them.  Abandon winning for learning, and you will win.  Abandon rage for curiosity and you will find peace.  Or something like that ;)

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.