Hey everyone! It’s another fantastic Friday. I wanted to share a little modified form of practicing with you guys.
Requirements: Two Players
In sports, it is very common for teams to practice specific situations repeatedly. For example, basketball players will do fast break drills to understand what to do in different situations (3 vs 2, 2 vs 1). In football, the team may run certain plays repeatedly to learn how to properly execute it. In Melee, there are situations that come up repeatedly in a tournament that you can practice with a friend. I call this drill, “Position Battles”
Highly underrated by newer players, stage position and control are one of the key skills that you need to learn to improve in Melee. The objective of this drill is to learn how to keep your stage advantage against an opponent that’s cornered or, alternatively, escape these situations if you’re cornered.
We start the drill by doing the following:
1. Pick Battlefield (technically you can modify this for any stage) and have you and a friend set yourselves up in the following position (1 = Player 1 and 2 = Player 2)
2. From here, both players will have a specific objective.
Player 1: Prevent Player 2 from taking center stage or getting a safe advantageous position. As you prevent player 2 from getting position, rack up as much damage as possible.
Player 2: Obtain center stage with momentum (can’t be in shield or in an unsafe position) or kill player 1
3. The round is over when…
Player 2 obtains center stage and is mobile (not shielding) and safe
Either player takes a stock
Player 1 loses control of stage
When this happens, go ahead and reset positions and start again. Also experiment with different percentages and see how your options change at these given positions.
4. Alternate Position Battles
5. Debrief
I’m not going to tell you specifically what are typical options in these situations, but you should discuss the following things with your training partner:
- What are some common options that people do in the corner
- What are counter-options to #1
- How does the corner change based on a character’s percentages
- How does the corner change based on character matchups
- What are ways to threaten your opponent while not having the risk of losing stage position
5. Good examples of seeing this in pro players
In this battle, look and observe to see how Lord tries to keep Shroomed in pressure when Shroomed is in the corner/shielding. Watch how Shroomed adapts to these situations and escapes these positions.
MIOM | Tafokints
Cool stuff. Would love to hear what kind of training methods most of the pros use. Do they mostly practice by themselves? Do they watch videos?
Different people do different things. M2K focused initially on frame data and hitboxes to understand how he can combo better. Mango would play, make subtle discoveries, and ask himself how he can implement certain techniques in different contexts.
All of the big players will watch their own videos to understand what they should do differently.
A key component of improving is scrutinizing every detail, asking “why?”, and finding answers.