by MIOM|Tafokints

I remember very vividly going to my first tournament in High School. It was a doubles tournament that had me really excited. To top it off, they used the correct ruleset: 4 stocks, best of three sets, no items, and tournament stages. We were all very excited to play. During the first day of the tournament, we were fooling around and wave-dashing in friendlies. Immediately, a bunch of other bystanders were both impressed and intimidated by us. It was funny because, at the time, I had no idea how to use wave-dashing in actual matches, but it was just a fancy tool that for some reason made people think we were professional smashers.

When new players ask for help in Melee Social, Reddit, or Smashboards, we do an injustice by telling them to learn techniques such as wave-dashing and shield-dropping without any context. Furthermore, the community has instilled the idea that in order to be decent at the game, you need to learn a laundry list of techniques to survive. I’m not neglecting the importance of technical skill or the ability to perform moves on command, but I’d like to shift our paradigm in how we approach using advanced techniques.

Advanced Techniques allow for Better Movement

At the core of wave-dashing, it’s a movement tool that allows a person to move forward or backward in a quick manner. Certain characters such as Luigi can cover large horizontal distances in a small time window. Now ask yourself, why is this useful? I want newer players away to move away from the idea that learning a technique such as wave-dashing will automatically make a player significantly better. If you are a new player who is practicing technical skill, ask yourself in what situations would an advanced technique be useful? Write these down in a little notebook. Even if you’re more experienced, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how many useful situations you can apply a technique to if you brainstormed for 10 minutes. For me, here are some ways I find wave-dashing is useful:

1. The ability to move backwards, while still facing my opponent
2. As a bait tool, I can run towards my opponent and wave-dash back to bait an attack
3. As a defensive option, if my opponent does an aerial, I can wave-dash back into a tilt, grab, or run away
4. In shield, I can wave-dash out in order to move out of a poor position such as being stuck in front of a Falco’s laser
5. In shield, I can block and punish moves such as Marth’s Forward Smash or Peach’s Down Smash by wave-dashing out of shield and grabbing my opponent

There are countless other ways of using a wave-dash that go beyond this short list. Notice how this goes greatly beyond vague generalities that people give as “smash advice”.

Learning how to use advanced techniques

In my earlier days of watching Youtube videos, I only paid attention to the flashy combos and movement as my personal eye candy. I assumed that players such as Isai were good because they could do advanced techniques and flashy combos, and so that’s all I paid attention to. I was a very dumb player with very predictable habits in my early career. When you watch videos, ask yourself why certain players choose the moves they do. Try to understand the context and the situation from the player’s perspective and this will provoke you to begin to think about how you can implement techniques into your own game.

Experiment and Implement

The perfect time to test out new techniques is in friendlies! Too often, players play simply to win matches without learning anything new. If you’re not confident with where and when you should wave-dash for example, you should experiment via trial and error in specific situations. Think of specific situations that you saw other people use the technique and apply it. You’ll most likely have different results, but, as you implement the technique, you will begin to see why in certain situations that the technique works and why in others that it doesn’t. As you get more comfortable, you will be able to utilize these techniques in your tournament sets to help your overall gameplay in both the neutral game and punishment game.