Today was supposed to be a different post and working on my Tuesday post(during game) fully fleshing it out, but I wanted to get this out because I've briefly talked about it in other posts, and I feel it's the major reason I lost last night. Most of my posts have a vague outline. This one will not. This may not even read that well, it's just my thoughts written down as I think them.
As with most sports and games really the Mental game is very important. Basically competition in general.
Defining the Mental game. The outer game is the choosing what to do each turn, who you're bringing, etc. The inner game is what's going on in your mind. And a lot of times you're nervous or anxious or angry or on tilt or whatever, and you're basically playing a game against yourself trying to master those emotions. Or have them not become a hindrance to you. To make sure that your thought process is clear and that you make the best choices that you possibly can. I can say there have been many games, not just of Pokemon, that I could have won, if I hadn't lost the mental game against myself.
Okay, so, there's a book that was recommended to me called The Inner Game of Music, which is part of a larger group of books, tennis, skiing, etc. Some of the things I'll bring up will be from it.
One of the ideas is this equation that he writes that is Performance = Potential - Interference. And so, I think part of the reason I like that equation is I know a lot of times for myself that it's like I'm my worst enemy at the table, and I think that's true for a lot of people. There've been times that I've lost to people, and I don't mean to sound arrogant here, but I've lost to people that there wasn't a snowballs chance in hell and I come up crit failure on my mental game and all of the sudden that snowball comes flying out. It happens to everybody. Part of the reason I think this is important is because in this equation there's two things, there's Potential and there's Interference. And so most of us think about we are trying to improve our potential, trying to improve our skill, trying to get more practice time in, whatever. But a lot of the time we only look at it from the performance perspective, "oh I did poorly that time" but we don't think about "okay how good could I have done, what was my potential and why did I do as poorly as I did?"
Why I think this is important is because for most times, you've been getting practice, you've been getting good, you start getting better, and the area where you can actually see your biggest increase in performance, isn't necessarily in increasing your potential, it's with decreasing your interference.
Some good and bad habits with the mental game.
Let's start with the bad. Easy one is when you start blaming dice/RNG, even though that's more a symptom. The number one commonality in bad habits is you make sub-optimal decisions based on how you feel or on bad information or you're kind of shooting off from the hip. Basically knee-jerk not thinking about your reactions.
A lot of the times, it's you're allowing emotions to cloud your analysis. Whether it's you feel intimidated, nervous, excited, you feel like your opponent made a huge mistake and you don't do all the math(HINT THIS IS WHAT I DID LAST NIGHT). You don't stay even keeled, you let emotions get involved. And that's sometimes hard to prevent.
I'm going to go on the dice/RNG thing, or whatever it happens to be. You're letting outside influences, letting things you cannot control, affect your emotional state. You should always be focused on the things you can control. Stop focusing on the things you cannot control, and start focusing on the things that you can. You can control, who you bring, what they bring, what attacks you choose, who is on the field, etc. You cannot control whether that Scald hit its burn. You CAN control your reaction to the RNG, you CAN control how your plan changes. But you cannot control what your opponent does, so when your opponent switches the way you didn't want them to, okay you deal with it. You continue on but you do not fret over it because that is not something that
is in your sphere of control.
Some of the good habits. I think something that is useful or effective is to try to think of when you play your best game, what's your mental game like? and for most people it's like you're having fun, you're not stressed, you don't have huge emotional spikes either way, there's another term I've read in a different book that calls it FLOW.
Flow is basically, is a 4 step process.
1. Unconscious Incompetence - where you're making poor decisions and doing bad things and you don't really understand how or why. Everyone basically starts here in most things.
2. Conscious Incompetence - where you're still making mistakes, still doing shitty, but you're starting to recognize that and can start making adjustments to your mistakes.
3. Conscious Competence - when you're able to keep interference down and keep your eye on the prize, you can do the math and make the right analysis. You know what to do and you're doing it.
4. Unconscious Competence - Flow - where you don't even think about it, you're making the right plays. Do or do not, there is no try.
If you can get past all the other mental game and you can play a competent game without having to let outside emotion or thinking be involved, which in itself is a fairly long process, but if you watch some of the better skilled players of this game(or other games), they don't sit and worry about the dice math, they have a fairly good idea, because they've played enough games, they know what's going to be successful and what's not going to be successful. That's more about the practice side, but it definitely helps you maintain an even keel and maintain the healthy mental state.
You can have the skills to be in an unconscious competence state but you also have to have the mental state to achieve that.
Obvious good habit. Don't let your opponent put you on tilt. Not letting things outside your influence put you on tilt. There's a few good habits that you can do before and after a game too. Reviewing what you did and how you can improve, preparing yourself before you get into that situation, where you don't show up late rushed, you have a good breakfast, get good sleep, things like that. And that affects people differently, but I feel like those are things that most people can use help with. If you spend a few minutes the night before, the week before, and not building your list that morning, then you will be better prepared so those things won't be background noise.
Another thing that can be a good habit, is figuring out what is going to be your plan when you get into a bad mental state during the game. You're going to have triggers during a game, and you need to have a plan.
Another example is the status tilt, that is a thing. And I know, I talked about not worrying about RNG. But if you hit three scald burns in a row, it can easily tilt your opponent, if you really need that burn and after six turns you keep missing, you can easily go on tilt. Your reaction to these things is something you can train. I've been conscious about that lately. If you can master that, so that it never phases you, is that when it phases your opponent, then you get to do little backflips inside.
Some of the time I feel like you get to the next week and see your opponent and you have someone who's difficult to play against, this can be socially, or time wise or whatever, or you can someone who's just your nemesis and stuff. A lot of the best players on the national scene are very good at managing difficult situations. A good portion of this game isn't played through the 3DS, it's played against your opponent. If you have a really nice opponent, where you're both playing a good etiquette game, where they're playing tight, you're playing tight. Then this doesn't even happen. The game is entirely on the table. But some of the time, the majority of the game is played between the social interaction between you and your opponent. And if you're not able to manage your opponent, and make sure they don't run over you as far as forcing you to do things you don't want to do. I've seen players do this, typically more at in person events. So I guess this isn't super relevant to this league. We're all gamers. And as a whole, a lot of the time, we're socially inept. And that's just how it is. If you're reading this, you're probably socially inept in some way. You may not be as bad as others, but you probably have some sort of social ineptitude. If you have any issues with an opponent, there's no reason to feel bad about calling a mod into things. In the RDL, we only have one mod in Michael, but if you have any issues, you can always come to me, and a few of you already do that. The benefit of my schooling being mostly over and just projects is I can focus on other things at the same time. You can always go to someone else in the league if you have issue with some player. Don't ever feel like you're being a douche about it or whatever, you just want a good, fair game. If your opponent calls a mod over, don't take offense to it either. If a mod gets called you have to stay even keeled. It's a neutral body in a situation.
Let's take a moment and talk about nemesis opponents, or since this is Pokemon, let's call them Rivals. And I'm talking Gen 1-2 Rivals. Not those Gen 6 BS Rivals. There are particular opponents that will put me on tilt instantly. They don't have to do anything wrong. We can have a perfect game, where neither person does anything wrong, and I will be on tilt the entire time. This is something I need to work on, I don't have the perfect answer here. It all comes back to not letting external influences affect how you approach the game. I can only let the things I do affect the game.
Be aware of when tilt is coming on for these reasons. I'm up against my rival, I know I'm going to have tilt triggers, when that happens I'm going to do this ____. And I think that's my problem, I don't have a good plan. A lot of the time when you're set to play your rival, you're psyched up for it the week before, the tilt has already begun. And it can affect you before the match even happens. The worst feeling is knowing that you have to go against that player, and you can't let that time ramp you up. I think this may have affected me last season during the playoffs a bit. I knew that Santoro had beaten Adam in the semi-finals. I had lost to Santoro twice already that season. I was already worried about that match before I had even started my match against Michael. It's too easy to start spiraling out of control during that time. And that's not to say that I don't like playing against Santoro. I love it. He's a much better player than I am, in my opinion, and I feel like I get better when I play him. Plus I feel like there's a lot of mutual respect across this league for every player.
You have to be committed to playing a tight game even when it doesn't benefit you. So when people's lives come in and things have to change around, your opponent is thinking "This guy is a jerk" he's thinking "they just want to play a tight clean game" And when your opponent is getting angry, it's sometimes difficult to keep your level when your opponent's tilt level is going up. I don't really want to call anyone out on this but there was a huge case of that during week 3 of this season. And that's something I haven't touched on thus far, but when your opponents tilt factor goes up you don't let yourself get caught up in that emotion.
This potentially is my biggest downfall. I can go back and look at my matches and see where I had the game and I lost it completely. And I think this is something everyone can address in themselves, even Santoro, while he hasn't lost yet, there have been a few mental errors that can be addressed. All that matters is that you're improving and removing the background noise. When people are watching for you, you feel a lot of interference. This explodes in the playoffs. Just take all of that and discard it. One thing I was taught by a player in another game was at events, 40-350 people, I need to go into the bathroom before the event even starts, I need to look into the mirror and tell myself, there's no one at this event that I cannot beat. I can win this event. And I'm going to say this to everyone else. I don't care if it's Wolfyglick. If you have played to the best of your potential, and you're practiced and you're ready. You can win. Now if you let the background influence win out before you even get to the table, you've already lost. There have been times where I let the person I'm playing, and more importantly everyone knowing who the person I'm playing get the best of me. Like oh that's so-and-so I'm in big trouble. You can beat those people. Sometimes you beat those people and don't know who they are. Other times you get your ass kicked by them and find out later that they're some big name.
So yeah there's a lot of my thoughts on the mental game. And as I said it's way out of the normal style and order of things. And yes I know it's a huge wall of text. There was just some stuff I wanted to get out.
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