I went to a round robin tonight, and did butt awful. Breaker and manual timings were off, and I had those dang butterflies in my stomach. Is it just exposure and repetition?
Learning to perform is one thing. Learning to perform in front of an audience is entirely different.
I imagine it’s probably the same with play KI as it is with playing guitar.
I have learned that I ALWAYS do worse with an audience. They’re often distracting, either with the noise they can bring or just by being in your thoughts knowing that they are there, seeing what you’re doing, and inherently judging you.
I always do worse when my brother enters the room to tell me something for all of the above. He’ll often comment on it. The irony is that he doesn’t have any real idea just how good I really am as a KI player (and he never plays against me to find out - he has no interest in the game whatsoever). When I mentioned that I would be featured, along with others, on the official KI Twitch stream, he simply stated “…but why you?” So, yeah, I don’t get much support there. 
Speaking of which, when I was featured on the official KI Twitch streams, even though I did well overall, I did worse than I normally do. For example, at 1 point I performed an opener-ender that got broken - I NEVER perform those! Furthermore, when I got a 2nd chance to fight CStyles45, the pressure of having to fight him again after beating him once by the skin of my teeth just became too great and I was crushed on stream. Still, beating him was a moment of pride because I was able to turn the tables at the last second - so at least I’ll always have that (no, literally - I saved it and it’s forever online). 
The scary thing is later today, I will, yet again, have an audience, not once, but twice over. My brother is hosting friends this weekend, who will be visiting the house, all of which will inevitably be wondering what I’m up to and will likely start asking questions to distract me: “what’s this?”, “how have you been?”, etc. Even worse is the fact that I will be taking part in another stream online. It won’t be as bad as the official KI Twitch stream, since there won’t be as many viewers, but they’ll still be there… Judging me.
So yes, it can be hard, but it’s not impossible. There are solutions. For a physical audience, you can wear headphones to block outside noise or lock the door to the room you play KI in so you won’t be disturbed by friends or family. For a virtual audience, it’s all about staying relaxed and forcing yourself not to think about them. Kind of an “out-of-sight, out-of-mind” kind of thing - simply pretend that they don’t exist.
I hope that helps! 
1 Like
Like anything, practice makes perfect. It is definitely different playing at a local with a crowd and playing online in the comfort of your home. The more you go out though, the better you’ll tend to play.
In terms of breaker and manual timing, can depend on how good your internet connection is to a certain extent. I can break some shadows online, for instance, but cannot break them offline. That slight online delay (3 frames) has been ingrained into my breaking habits and I’m liable to get a timing lockout because the visual queues I’m using online are slightly later than what you get in a local match. Good news with that is that you can just go into practice before you head out to the local and work on those things - the difference is incredibly subtle, so it’s not much of an effort to retrain yourself to hit the proper timings.
How well do you know the people there? If you are not too familiar then try and get there as early as possible and just talk with people before you play. You’ll eventually get more comfortable in the environment and it will feel less like a KI local and more just playing games with your friends and you’ll be able to relax more.
Just practice your combos and stuff in training before you go or play arcade mode a bit just so you can get a feel for offline timing just before you do it for real.
I’m definitely new to the people, but I’ve been there a few times before and tried to get match. Problem is, hardly anyone in my area plays. It’s tough to get 6 people together for a round robin.
Also, when I’ve gone, no one was playing KI. They were all on MKX, USF4, DOA5, and GGXrd. I even brought my Fightstick that I practice on, in addition to my controller, and only got a first to 5 with one of the TOs.
Imagine me, when Friends come over, I’m in the middle of the match, and my opponent is sponsored by Lipton!
LOL Friends be rowdy and loud XD
Are you playing on a lagless monitor at home?
Last time I went to a local, they had lagless monitors. I always discounted the difference as too small to be noticeable, but oh man- I hit everything way too early. I was used to compensating for the lag on my monitor at home and didn’t know it till I really experienced a more responsive monitor.
Of course, probably against my better judgment, I still prefer playing KI on my gargantuan lag-a-rific cheap TV as opposed to a small expensive gaming-only monitor 
Yeah. They have BenQ monitors, with 2ms. My TV is probably about 10-15ms. It’s strange how big a difference that makes, even though it’s not huge increments of time.
Q: Is there a standard option, setting, label, etc. that can basically tell me the ms lag of my TV? I’d like to know just how far behind my own TV is.
Thanks for the link, but my TV doesn’t appear to be listed.
It’s a Samsung UN32H5203AF model…