How would you go about increasing your observational skills? Would you record a match of yourself and watch it a total of five times, each time focusing on only one aspect? Let's say the first time you watch, you focus sorely on your opponent and when he air dodges, how he recovers and when he shields, the second time, you watch for his landings and how he gets punished for landing and whatnot. Third time, you focus on yourself and watch your habits.
Watch what you do when the opponent is offstage, when you get knocked offstage, and when you get shielded or airdodge. Fourth time, same dealio, watching for jumping, landing, and punishment. The fifth and final time you watch your match, try to remember what you were doing while playing. Did you have trouble due to matchup knowledge? When did the match turn in the opponent's favor? How did you handle momentum?
Pros are pros because they know which move to use at the right time, and have the ability to mix it up when their opponent catches on. Lesser players use less ineffective tactics, which only work some of the time, depending on which opponent they are playing and how much experience either player has. If you have the ability to observe, you have the ability to critique yourself and notice your own mistakes as well as your opponent's. Once you can do that by watching videos, you can simply start doing the same thing in real matches as well.
The more matches you play, the more you observe, the better you get at doing it. And with enough experience, you may be able to overcome a lot of obstacles that you never would have noticed beforehand. Hence the skill plateaus. If you always improve your ability to observe, you will never hit a skill plateau or at least not be on one for very long. My question is, do you believe this is a good practice to do? To watch your own videos and videos of pros playing your character, and try to increase your observation ability? Obviously this won't be the only thing you will be doing to improve, but at least it's a start.
What other methods would you recommend in improving observational skills? If you can't even see what you are doing wrong by yourself, how are you supposed to fix your problems? Critique by others is good for a different point of view, which reveals insights you don't notice yourself, but the ability to critique yourself is a worthwhile skill. I'm sure that even people at really high levels still mess up and make mistakes, albeit fewer, right?
