There’s been a decent demand for mindset related questions. So here’s five tips from me on how to improve your mindset.

1. Focus on the match at hand

Often times, I see people beat themselves mentally by thinking about their possible place in the bracket based on things that haven’t happened yet.

“If I beat _____, then I have to play ______ and I might get top 5!”

“Ugh, if I lose, then I have to play my rival and I might do terribly”

To give a geeky analogy, our brains are like RAM. It can only handle so much information before it begins to forget things. By wasting resources on things that don’t matter, you’re spending fewer resources on the actual match itself. When you’re playing your match, nothing should matter besides the two characters on the screen and the stage itself. I see people frequently do worse in a tournament set because they are so preoccupied with how they will place or what other people think of them.

2. Preparation

This comes with time, but I truly believe that practicing and understanding the game goes a long way in tournament performance. A person with less experience and game knowledge will have to adjust on the fly and figure out things. This is truly difficult with how fast the gameplay is in Melee. In contrast, knowing what your character and your opponent’s characters are capable of in different situations will give you mental relief, since you already know the possibly outcomes and decisions you need to make. Think of it as preparing for a long and difficult test. If you aren’t prepared, chances are you’ll panic on problems that you don’t know how to tackle. If you’re prepared and know the problems beforehand, you will have a much calmer time dealing with the problems.

3. Have a back-up plan for when things don’t go well
Sometimes our technical skill or performance isn’t at its maximum potential. Ideally, we would love to hit our 1-frame links and multi-shines every time. No matter how good your technical skill is in practice, you will mess up in tournament. People miss L-Cancels and make movement mistakes even at the top level. In the old school game, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, people who play teams such as Magneto/Storm/Psylocke (MSP for short) would execute simpler combos to “warm-up” at the beginning of sets and build into larger, more difficult combos as their confidence level goes up. Likewise, for more technical characters, it is advantageous to forego slightly bigger punishes for smaller, but more guaranteed combos during those days in which your technical skill isn’t up to par.

To give another example, in my match against Tian, there were several instances where I was not sure of where Tian’s aerial trajectory was going to land, so instead of going for a throw, I went with the safer choice, down-smash, to cover his space, maintain my momentum, and win the set.

4. Have Confidence
I’m a huge advocate of the approach, “Fake it until you make it”. Confidence can tend to be its own self-fulfilling prophecy. By going into a set and having the mindset that you’re going to do bad, chances are you’ll perform according to your self-perception. Even if you have to play the best player at the tournament, go in and play your best. Again and again, I see countless players beat themselves before the match has even started

“Ugh, I’m awful against Sheik”

“I have to play M2K? I’m going to get 4 stocked!”

“He’s beaten me so many times already. I have no chance”

Sound familiar? That negative mindset is easy to spot in many and more so will break a player apart when small things aren’t going their way.

5. Breath! Use the invulnerability to refocus!

This is something I struggle with frequently.  The excitement and adrenaline of a high-intensity match make me tunnel vision and forget about certain strategies in the match I play. In between stocks, I like to quickly recap some of the reads and habits I’ve gathered to adjust my game in the set. If things aren’t going well, I’ll stay in the invulnerability phase to take a quick breath and refocus.

I hope this article helps everyone!

MIOM | Tafokints