New Online Exhibition Series - Devil's Landing

Sorry you stayed up so so late to watch me forget how to play :frowning:

Don’t lose faith. We all have our days. Keep your chin up and keep trucking forward. :grinning:

Heh. Don’t sweat it - I’ve stayed up later for worse reasons. :joy:

In all seriousness though, nerves are a real thing, and as much as you train for execution, setups, and resets, you should also train for nerves. Nerves aren’t something you can recreate in the lab, so small tournaments and stream sets are where you can begin to work on them. So you’re doing the right things, even if your results aren’t what you want them to be. The play you’re bringing to Devil’s Landing is something that will help build the foundation for your play, and something that will help raise your skill floor.

Fun fact: I got 2nd place at CEO 2017, beating players like ThrashHeavy, Valoraxe, and Thompxson, and losing only to Nicky all tournament. I also absolutely hated my play for that tournament. To this day I think I played like absolute crap in all but one of my sets (against Thompxson) that tournament, and nothing anyone says about how well I did will ever change that. I know how many combos I dropped, how many poor decisions I made and punishes I whiffed, how timidly I played the breaker game. I played badly at that CEO, full stop.

But I still got 2nd at CEO 2017. Not because I clutched anything out (I most assuredly did not), but because I’d played and trained to the point where, even when I played really poorly, I was still quite good. A lot of the training that you do isn’t necessarily about raising your skill ceiling - it’s about raising your skill floor. It’s about making sure that even if you’re playing demonstrably and unequivocally below what you’re capable of, that you’re still a dangerous opponent who can beat strong competition.

So don’t sweat not playing up to snuff in this past event. Even if you can never quite be “happy” about your play, it’s still a valuable exercise in playing with nerves and raising your skill floor. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Thanks, I read this last night, am feeling better today, and think I can move past it. It’s nice to know that this can even happen on a level way above me.

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We had great sets last night, check them out.
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