well, and on the opposite end of the spectrum is m2k, who admitted himself that he had no natural talent for the game at first and was the biggest scrub in the world when he started (and continued to be for awhile then on)
I really don't think you can take M2K's word at that, because he said within the year he started playing (and I mean the calendar year, not actually 12 months -- iirc it was like 8 months; he posted this on his My Space blog so you can prolly read it yourself) he was beating Wes, who is obviously an incredible smasher.
Honestly, you can't get at the top of anything without a
lot of natural talent. I'm sure a ton of people could do exactly what M2K did -- learn every single thing about the game down to the frames, practicing hundreds of hours in the process -- and still not be even close to as good as he is. Genetics -- and therefore natural talent -- hold a lot more weight than you're giving. It's science.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200506/the-grandmaster-experiment
A neuroscientist in Switzerland, Amidzic once aspired to become a professional chess player. He had the "rage to master" and even moved to Russia as a teenager to study intensively with grandmasters. But he reached a plateau at age 23 and had to quit. Reeling from his wrecked dreams, Amidzic went into cognitive science to understand what went wrong. Through the use of brain scans, he discovered a marked difference between grandmasters and highly trained amateur chess players like himself: When grandmasters play chess, the areas responsible for long-term memory and higher-level processing are activated.
Chess titans have anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000 configurations of pieces, or patterns, committed to memory. They are able to quickly pull relevant information from this mammoth database. With a mere glance, a grandmaster can then figure out how the configuration in front of him is likely to play itself out.
Amateurs, by contrast, use short-term memory while playing chess. When they take in new information, it stays in the "small hard drive" of working memory without passing over into the "zip drive" of long-term memory. "Amateurs are overwriting things they've already learned," says Amidzic. "Can you imagine how frustrating that is!"
Just look at the greats in any specific area of life. I can't remember where I read it, but you need thousands of hours to give yourself the potential to be the best at something. Do you really think KDJ, Azen, Mango, etc. practiced for hundreds of hours to be the best? No, that's natural talent. It implies two things: one, that smash isn't as complicated as the players like to think, and two, natural talent wins out. Roughly everyone plays the game for the same amount of time; very few people practice in the way you're supposed to practice, i.e. individually targeting deficiencies in your game. For example, I was playing basketball with my brother, and he ran me through a bunch of drills designed to improve different parts of your game.
That's what practice is. How many smashers you think do that?
Exactly, zero. So what floats to the top? Those who pick up on it quickest, i.e. natural talent. I can know more about this game than 99% of anyone who ever picks it up, but unless I practice for hundreds of hours specifically attacking my weaknesses, it's not going to matter, and even if I do, I may
still lack the genetic disposition to ever surpass what comes so naturally to the top talents of the game. That's just how it is.
