Based on my opinion (so do not believe in what I have to say) one way that can help you greatly develop mindgames is recording your own matches on a VCR and watching them. Going over what you where thinking in a specific situation, what you did in the situation, and what you can do if the situation comes up again. I know there are too many things you may want to go over ,but you should try to focus on your main weak points so that you can have a better foundation on fighting a character or person that seems to beat you over and over. One example is a dash dancing fox that you can't hit ,but seems easy for the fox to hit you, or a fair crazy marth that never seems to stop swinging his sword witch may force you to go defensive. These are just some of the things you can do to get your mindgame better ,but you should also take your time on devloping your mindgames by taking a break on playing the game everyday so that your mind can be clear and process what to do in a situation faster to the point where it becomes an instinctive reaction. Also choknater has some good points that you should also follow to get better. I hope this information can help you out to get your mind games better peace.
This is excellent advice. I had the same problem before, and I think the cause is playing lazy. After the people in my group got technical skills and everything down, we never really payed attention to each other in our matches, and after just playing each other so much, we eventually got to play just one comfortable lazy way. It's kind of hard to explain, but it's like we weren't using mindgames at all. We always did the same things over and over, and had even matches. That's why whenever a new person came along, even if they weren't very competitive, they would be very disruptive to us, as in they disrupted our lazy way of playing, where none of us try anything new or look at what the opponent's doing. We never looked at what was going on in the matches, to see all the things we could do to exploit each other's patterns.
So you just have to really force yourself to get better. If the people in my group never played anyone else, we probably would have almost never changed, because we were pretty much even with each other, and we were too comfortable to try anything new. Probably the best thing to do like CopyCat said is watch videos of yourself and find all your patterns that are getting exploited. Anytime someone lands a hit or combo on you, it was either because you messed up with your fingers, or because you made the wrong decision. And any time that happens, find out what you did wrong. Look at it from their perspective to see what they were thinking when they were playing you.
Also if you have friends that play the same way with you like my group was, study them and find out all their patterns, and all the counters to those patterns; you have to look at the big picture, starting from the basics and looking at everything you can do different to counter what they'll do. I found that there were just so many habits and things that we expected each other to do that my friends and I would have never noticed if we never played someone else who didn't play the same way as us. An example is all the places where we would expect each other to attack, and there were so many places where if one of us could just anticipate ONE move ahead, we would find so many places where we could just stop, wait, and shield grab or something else to counter. Sometimes just standing still when I would normally subconsciously jump in with an aerial would completely throw my friends off guard, because it disrupts our happy little patterns. So if you're in this situation, start focusing on what you can do to win, not just have a close match. Find all of your friend's happy patterns and expectancies, and disrupt the crap out of him. You should be able to utterly destroy him every match, so from there he will either:
A. Quit because he's too lazy to figure out how he can get better
or
B. Keep playing and get back to the point where he can compete with you, which means he will have to see his bad habits for what they are, and change them.
So in other words he will be forced to get better, or quit. Or he might just be lazy but not want to quit, so he wont change and lose terribly every match. Which would be weird and probably not a good person to play against frequently.
