Okay, so I feel like writing something and am kinda bored lol. I think I'll write about how I learned to be confident and why it's so important in smash(you guys told me to write my stuff here so I will lol).
I've always viewed Melee and my improvement in smash as my own personal little life journey. Confidence was something I always wanted and knew I needed but I never knew how to get it. This aided me early in my smash career actually since I always set conservative, realistic goals and always pushed myself for validation from others to give me a semblance of the real confidence I needed in life. Despite improving, my early Falco style was extremely defensive because I never felt very confident in my approach. I always overwhelmed myself with what the opponent COULD do rather than what they WERE doing(a problem I struggle with in theory and in practice to a much less degree these days lol). I would never really figure out how to be confident on my own turns out. I needed to be shown how to do it. Lambchops was a huuuge factor in my push towards self-confidence. Everyone knows how raw that guy plays haha. Well, he came to HERB 2(big NC regional a couple of weeks after genesis) while he was staying in GA and I decided that I at least had to learn to aggro spacies(the matches I saw of him vs Jman were nasty so this helped convince me as well as me getting whupped by him too lol).
As I watched Chops, Mango, and Shiz play, my style naturally became influenced by them. I began to think of this game/character in terms of opportunities made and when they were capitalized upon. Shiz seems solid to me still because he takes the "correct" openings and always takes them(taking them so much gets him punished but people still succumb to the pressure so it tends to work out for him if his tech is on point lol). I made up my own rules for what openings I wanted to make and how I wanted to punish them(character/player dependent) and my style gradually became more aggressive the better I became. My struggle to get combos down was largely influenced by my confidence, and it's part of the reason why you can see me end combos early with a smash instead of dair tech chasing on a platform and continuing the combo a little farther to get that better damage to hit someone offstage with(sometimes I still advocate this but that's not the point lol).
I lost my set to Armada in WFs at Pound 5, and went off on my own to think about why I lost. A lot of old doubts started to creep in on me, and I found myself fighting a familiar fight. However, I was fortunately able to maintain control of my situation that time, and began to tell myself that Armada wasn't better than me necessarily. I re-watched a couple moments of the match where I felt stuck in my head, and realized that Armada was okay with me slowing the game down a lot because that let him cut me off stage-wise and get all of the trades he wanted. I felt like I lost confidence, and I knew that if I wanted to stand a chance, that I would have to believe in myself. I told myself I'd do it, but I hadn't finished working up the courage to keep the plan going when I was told I had to play Hungrybox. Fortunately, I was able to pull that set out so I could try my hand vs Armada again.
My strategy didn't really work more than usual, as I was down 2-1 in GFs quickly. That's when Hbox helped me find the drive to push. He told me I was having lapses in my play where I lost momentum, and he said that he wanted me to think of "someone who had wronged you" in order to keep my spirit going. Anyone that knows what my past year was like knows that this made it all too easy to get my fire started.
I was finally able to remain unphased by Armada's triumphs mid-game and felt myself controlling the match once again. Using my personal struggle for my benefit, as well as allowing the crowd to boost me gave me all the confidence I finally needed to turn the tides of our matches. The feeling after Pound didn't compare to taking control of myself and the set while it was going on. It really was a personal landmark for me.
...............
So why do you guys care? Well, I believe that, no matter who you are or what style you play, you have to be confident when you do execute. Even a bad read/play can be recovered from easier if you don't freak out and lose control of yourself after you execute. Learning to be a more competent smasher involves having faith in your own matchup knowledge/experience and then sticking to your ideas once a given match has started. If I think laser grab is a good idea vs Sheik, but that particular strategy doesn't work on someone like, say, Kirbykaze, then I have to re-evaluate my spacing and timing decisions regarding this tactic, not necessarily the tactic itself. If you're flip-flopping the whole match then you're taking away from time you could be spending to understand your opponent and learn how to build on what you already know about a matchup. Chances are, if you thought an idea was good in the first place, it probably is. Sometimes player habits and/or your own habits get in the way of its effectiveness though, and that's something you have to adapt to, not change all of your ideas/playstyle for it.
You can be a confident camper I believe. You just have to keep yourself from getting frustrated when you get booed or when your strategy isn't immediately effective/fails at times. Everyone gets figured out/punished sometimes, and it's important to remember that you don't have to fully change your style to an offensive/approaching one(unless you just enjoy the mixup) when you're losing.
Conversely, being punished for foolish approaches if you feel like being an aggro player will make your life frustrating as well. Resorting to angrily camping or simply trying to push harder are rarely effective options. Even if you're offensive-minded, there needs to be some way you allow for reading your opponent so that you can adapt and continue your comfortable onslaught as you see fit. There are different ways to allow for this as well, so one should never feel locked into a narrow mindset when adapting or solving a particular matchup. The higher you go in skill, the more flexible you have to be. You have to remember that your opponents will all be trying to change up on you as well, and this is only made harder by the fact that you have videos out so your habits will be even more identifiable. That gets into a much bigger topic that I may write about later though lol.
Anwyay, there are many ways to play this game well, and every style can be effective. You just have to be confident in your own way of doing things. =)
ps: sorry if I got too personal with this stuff. I'm a flowery-thinking guy and enjoy deeper meanings of things, especially writing, so I hope you guys can look past that stuff when responding to this and see the smash elements haha.
<333 if I get decent feedback from this I could start taking requests for topics or something lol. I have more I want to write about on my own so it doesn't matter to me either way lol.
at so much of this
