Dandy_here
Smash Journeyman
At a local a few days ago, I had been knocked out the tournament early(granted I went under a different tag and got seeded last on accident, but I won't discuss how seeding can screw you over), and I went to go play some friendlies. What I noticed was the best player there JesiahTEG practicing against a computer, and then the guy I destroyed in round 1 playing a computer. Now, I had the option to play with literally the best player there for hours, but instead chose to play with the scrub I beat in round 1. We went over various match ups and talked about why he kept losing and his bad habits. For example, he had a problem of approaching with nair as marth, so we had gone over why this is bad, where it should be applied, and why without intention this move is useless. With somewhat minor improvements, he was doing much better than before. The moral of this story is that training your local scrubs is important to increasing the general skill of your region and is beneficial for everyone in the long run. What I'm not saying is to only practice and train with scrubs, because by only doing that you don't give yourself the opportunity to improve and cap yourself. It's important to get practice with top players, which you should always do, but the lower level players just get bopped, leave, and the cycle repeats. They don't get the chance to play top players outside of bracket, and devoting even just a sliver of your time to play them goes a long way.
