EPTThe ladder will place you where you need to be
During one of Day[9]’s daily shows he started to rant about the ladder. He said that people were delusional when they said, “Yeah I’m in gold but I play like a Plat”. He responded to this saying “No! You are gold, if you played like a plat you would be in plat.” This concept is hard for people to grasp. Most people playing Starcraft want to improve, and they think that is shown by their rank on the ladder. I would say that the ladder is not where you show your skill, its just a rough ranking system. If you want to improve in Starcraft, improve your mechanics, and your win rate will go up naturally. If you are only worried about grabbing ladder points, you wont focus in matches and you will lose a lot of games due to poor mindset. My advice to you is to just forget about your ranking. Try not to check your opponent’s rank after each match, instead just focus on each game.
Learn from each ladder match
When people are laddering they think each game is just a one off experience. You want to move past losses as a fluke and each win was due to you completely out-skilling your opponent. More than likely, this is not the case. You are making mistakes over and over again, and if you don’t take the time to analyze your games, you are missing out on correcting them and they are slowly becoming habit. I suggest that you keep a notebook or word document, and, after every (yes EVERY) ladder match, you write down what you did wrong, what you need to improve, and what you did well. This notebook will slowly show your habits you need to break, what your strengths and weaknesses are, and what you might need to do more research on.
Ladder is for practice, not your end goal
This was one of the best mentalities to have, and few people do. People think they need to get into masters or higher to start competing in tournaments. Because of this, people think that the ladder is their highest goal. This puts so much pressure on every ladder game that basically, you are giving yourself tournament nerves every time you play on ladder. Instead, you should start competing in small online tournaments, and make those your degree of measurement of success. If your goal for the week is to improve your ladder ranking, every loss will feel like you are failing yourself, and you may quit playing early because you think you are just losing your position on the ladder. I have had that feeling before where I think I am only hurting myself if I keep playing, so I quit early and don’t practice as much as I should. What you should be thinking is that you need to use the ladder to practice because you got a tournament coming up that you want to place highly in. Each win or loss on the ladder will only be seen as experience to you. You will start to think “well, I lost to that strategy, at least I will know how to beat it if it happens during my tournament matches”.
Overall, if you take the pressure off of ladder, not only will you win more, but your time spent on the ladder will be used more efficiently. You will start actually improving, instead of just playing. If you have any other mental hacks to get past ladder frustration I would love to see them in the comments.
This post is also on my blog http://bit.ly/nbwWpk
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