A Quick Test and a Look at Emotions

When you get that pop-up in the middle of a game saying that your opponent is having connection issues, what goes through your head?

Do you take the moment to recalibrate, calculating your next few moves?  Are you bored?  Do you enter a zenlike calm?  Are you annoyed that your opponent's poor network connectivity is wasting your time?

Or do you sit anxiously with your mouse hovering over the "Kick" button, waiting for the counter to reach zero so that you can claim those sweet, sweet ladder points for yourself?

If you get excited when you see the "Waiting for Opponent" screen in the middle of your game, it's likely that you care more about winning than improving.  Now, there's nothing wrong with wanting to win - after all, it's probably the driving force that makes you want to get better at Starcraft - but if you're getting more excited about gaining ladder points than correcting your play, you might find harder to improve as efficiently as you want.

I wrote before about changing your win conditions, which is about adopting your mentality to one where you psychologically reward yourself for succeeding at specific in-game goals rather than for obtaining a VICTORY! splash screen.  But in talking about classical win/loss conditions, you need to keep the following in mind:

You win the game if your in-game actions force the opponent to surrender.

Not if your opponent disconnects due to network issues.  Not if your opponent leaves mid-game.  And not if your opponent beats you, but decides to give you the ladder points by GGing out before you do.  It might feel good to see that green text and ++ points in your match history, but it isn't a real win and it isn't proof of improvement.

The proper response to a disconnecting opponent should be no different than any other game.  Evaluate how you performed against your win conditions, watch the replay, take notes, and approach the next game with a plan and a desire to do better.  It's hard to not get excited when you think you might get an easy "win", and at the end of the day it's okay to feel good about them so long as you continue to work towards improvement.  But you always need to keep an eye on your emotions at the end of each game.  Anger at a loss will keep you from being curious as to why you lost.  Elation at a win makes it easier to gloss over your errors.  It's possible that you'll never feel entirely neutral from  wins/losses, and again, that's fine - so long as you're able to look past your emotions in order to do the work that you need to do in order to get better.  If you can build up the willpower to do what you need to do regardless of how you feel, then you have a good shot at efficient improvement and more wins overall.

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 ;)