How long do you think it would take to close the knowledge gap? Beside theory, I only have my own little experience. I have been away for 4 years, it took me 3 months to catch up with the new meta (and I am nowhere near a genius, actually I found myself pretty bad). The most difficult was zvp. Rest is pretty much similar.
Sure, if you compare yourself from the past to yourself from the present, it would seem that way. But if you had imaginable friends who were your equals these 4 years ago and they continuosly played starcraft, you would have had 20% win rate against them now. With time, going up to 30% and slowly and slowly up towards 50%.
Anyways, perhaps I shouldnt have written my post in the first place, as I don't know it myself for sure, but if gaining that knowledge gap was so easy, wouldnt we see more foreigners near ASL level? I think the likes of Draco or Nony had the speed, multitasking, mechanics on top level, so what was really holding them from matching, or even touching, top korean level of play? Is it just that they were worse in the aspects above? Or was it more about game knowledge? (game knowledge = decisions that you make based on what you see and understanding what needs to be done to increase your odds for winning). I believe it's game knowledge and time they would have to invest to get to top kor level.
According to Nony, the reason he didn’t reach his full potential in Korea, was because all they did was grind games 12 hours a day. He didn’t really get to learn more from Koreans. So yes, it was game knowledge as far as I understand. Interestingly Idra thought it was good practice.
They talk about it around 30 minutes here:
I really don’t think consistently practicing anything 12 hours a day is a productive way to learn.
I’m quite certain that 6 hours a day with method and a fresh mindset would get anyone further than 12 hours being miserable and just binging games.
You are not accounting for time. Those were teenagers back then. You can work teenagers on sugar drinks alone. Today you cannot get them to play well with a bad sleep the night prior.
That’s not the point. What i mean is you don’t learn very efficiently by doing something 12 hours a day. Conscious, focused practice is infinitely superior as a way to improve. No one becomes a concert pianist but just playing mindlessly 12 hours a day. They do very conscious practice, scales, exercises, studies, practice slowly, etc.
Esports are a young discipline, and the way they are approached is very primitive imo. The simple fact that no one practices StarCraft slowly, for example, tells you all you need to know.
Practice Starcraft slowly, what does that mean? The fact stands there is a huge resemblance between how Jaedong and my camping coach started basketball. Jaedong survived the qualifiers, I forgot the name. My camping coach said they couldn't win a game for two years. His star youth team was put against two year older players as qualification.
If you want your brain to learn very fast, very well coordinated movements very well, you need to do them very slowly, very relaxed, very controlled at a very slow tempo, and increase progressively the speed. Every single musician knows that.
Playing starcraft is on a mechanical level not so different from playing a hard piece of piano.
If I were to coach someone, i would put the game settings on very slow, and play very clearly, with absolutely zero tension, and zero unnecessary movement.
I know for a fact it would bring better results in a fraction of the practice time, and prevent injuries later down the line.
Yes, but we are not learning to play the harmonica, or exercising to gain muscle mass without losing range of motion. This is Starcraft. It has a batch input structure with 0.5 second buffer. If you are not up to speed, you won't be able to dodge lurkers with marines. That is not smart, that is plain wrong. PS: also your idea of injury is wrong. These kinds of injuries are due to repetitive motion. You could say bad posture although I cannot verify, was never good at physiotherapy. I cannot tell what Flash has. If you tell me I can tell you how it develops. There are strength trainers who bash bricks. Apparently, every microfracture increases trabecular bone density. It doesn't come at first. You need to put in the hours like Howard Levy says 10000h is necessary for mastery of the instrument. I've heard it for swimming, too. It is not related to the speed of the motion. Carpal tunnel is also a strain injury you can treat with a vertical mouse that you click buttons to the palm of your hand instead of towards the ground. This is also how you can develop a knee injury at cycling if you use opposing muscle groups simultaneously if your saddle position is wrong. Some swimmers like Michael Phelps have better RoM because they have some form of laxity - their muscles don't work as hard. For normal people without laxity, we have carpal tunnel due to stronger wrist bands that can pinch the medial nerve in wrist extension. If you want to control the same mouse without the same effort, you need a lighter mouse AND a better posture. Your flexors and extensors are contracting simultaneously to lock your wrist which is not how it was meant to be used, like the cycling example. PS2: also, NSAID pain killers in the first 3 days of the injury inhibit healing process. That is what Flash did on occasion.
Mate, i have been playing the violin since i am four years old, and played professionally for 20 years. I did auditions and competitions all my life. And I can guarantee you that playing Tchaikovsky concerto is as at the extremely least as difficult as playing SK terran with perfect macro, flawless micro and insane multitasking. As a matter of fact, it’s so hard that it’s borderline impossible if you haven’t started playing as a small kid AND have practiced every single day of your life.
I know plenty of people who have practiced by just playing an absurd lot, very fast, with no method. They end up injured, and they end up not playing as well as people who have method in what they do. They are tense (hence the injuries), it’s messy, there are lots of unnecessary muscular activity. And that leads me to think what they were doing in those houses in Korea was absolutely stupid. They injured and made life absolutely miserable for a bunch of very talented kids.
I don’t think esports as an industry has had time to learn how to approach learning mechanically demanding games the most efficiently. And i think that will come off esports continues to exist.
I think you are trying to compare something that doesnt really compare to Starcraft tho. What do you mention are some skills that i guess could translate to a live performance of a starcraft match but apart from that there is very little to compare.
The method those people used is my opinion a Rushed way to get the most from the ''most talented players'' in a short amount of time. And find that Diamond player that can carry the team. What is the right way mecanically to practise a videogame profesionally is still very early to tell. New progamers from different games are getting recovery after practising for 8-9 hours daily etc. But Esports is still very young. Those teams arent investing millions when you compare it to real Sports.
In most of cases a progamer career ends at 26-28 years old So is not like they have the luxury either to no improve faster.
It happened in Starcraft and then in Starcraft 2 to the point Koreans were prohibited from SC2 international competitions.
So they for sure had a winning formule but at what cost ?
FlaSh injury who can tell if it is from too much practising. The way he put pressure while pressing the keyboard or just body posture or genetics. As far as i know is been 1 case of that kind of injury.
I can’t agree with you, i think it corresponds quite perfectly. You are trying to teach your body to do extremely precise movements, extremely quickly, in a totally seamless way.
Ideally in a Starcraft game, you don’t want to think about what your hands are doing. You are just letting them execute movements that have been practiced to the point they are perfectly automatic. That leaves you space to react, decide, etc.
It’s very similar to what, say, a pianist wants to achieve. You let your hands play the notes in as relaxed, automatic, and fluid way possible so you have space to listen, react, interpret.
So what this discussion is about is, how do you get that seamless motion. How do you teach your hands to play a hard bit in Rachmaninov, or to macro from 12 rax in a second?
And what i am saying is that if you learn those skills by just doing in a messy, fast and repetitive way, you will end up doing it with lots of tension, which will lead to injury, and in a rather inefficient way.
That’s why we don’t practice 12 hours a day in this business, and why we practice slowly, with extreme method. And i am certain that it would lead to results in StarCraft. Absolutely certain.
It’s not easy. I can tell you that most of my education as a musician has been to learn how to practice. And i truly got it at the end of my 20s. That’s hundreds of lessons and thousands of hours playing to understand what it means to do quality practice and to truly grasp what you are really looking for in the practice room.
A friend of mine and me had to do this in order to learn Zerg and Terran, and it worked very well. It was incredibly infuriating playing early game though since it was so slow that I felt like we wasted a lot of time just waiting for minerals. And that was infuriatingly boring so we stopped doing it.
Interestingly enough, I just picked up the guitar again and it feels so fucking impossible to get better. Can you give some quick insight into how you learned to practice? It’s very interesting and helpful to hear your insights
Call me crazy but playing the Piano is way more phisical than just touching keys on a keyboard. In fact you are using your legs too.
Progamers what they gather from these long sessions is not only the Mechanics of the game but get information from the strategies they are doing. Sometimes in 4 different positions in the map. For example when progamers are preparing one specific strategy for a map. It goes like this.
Progamer playout his strategy vs another pro. At some point in the game when the strategy reach his critical point. They both start talking about the issues he encontered. Or the advantages he is facing etc and talk about different situations then leave the game. And repeat that case for atleast 7-10 games. So in some ways they are very effective with practise.
But yeah. In starcraft is all about the feedback you are getting from the sessions. And then recaliber based on that feedback.
I imagine if there was a proper AI in BroodWar that could help like in chess the playing time could be reduce a lot.
Playing Piano is something extremely hard to do and there are many areas do be great at. But Trying to apply it to videogames. Atleast for me it doesnt translate too well. The discipline part for sure. But yeah i just dont see it. + like i said before progamer careers go very quick. You cant really expect any org to wait so long to expect results in a healthy way.
To be perfectly clear im not saying i support the method or anything.
+ If i learn something about Koreans is that they tend to exagerate a lot. What they call a 12hours training session could be in reality a 6 hours with many breaks. So who knows.
Rain is known for being someone that play 5-10 games then the rest over analzying games and gathering intel.
So there is for sure a middle ground. FlaSH said he will train over the mandatory hours of practise ( 8 hours )
When i was in Korea i told Firebathero that i was playing from 8AM to 1pm then from 2pm to 7pm. The first thing he said to me was that i was playing too much. So that means that even for a former progamer like him i was putting too many hours.
There is one area where playing a metric fuckton of games will help, and that’s things like decision making very quickly, and things like which engagements to take and how to take them. And I suppose how to prioritise. At a glance, and make the right call more often than not.
I could have the most efficient practice possible and improve rapidly, but it’s going to take me an insane amount of games to be as good as a Kespa graduate in being able to just look at two armies and know ‘army x should win this engagement’. They’ll know what should happen in innumerable interaction, and what that means and how you should respond because they’ve encountered almost every possible interaction in the game many, many times
Playing a ton will give you that mental muscle memory.
Most other things Biff is right (btw do you have any videos, wow I didn’t realise you were such an accomplished musician l!) Or not just Biff, it’s pretty much the common consensus that just grinding activities after a a certain point isn’t best practice.
Granted I’m guilty of practicing guitar often by playing as fast as possible and cleaning it up after repetition so I’m not a paragon of virtue :p Although only really when a specific mechanical technique is kinda needed to hit a certain speed, while sacrificing some articulation . Times when it’s not a case of just doing your slower technique, but faster, you need a subtlety different mechanical technique anyway, so no point practicing it slow in that case
I think it’s a matter of embedding other activities into your practice, thinking about your approach, experimenting.
If I was a Kespa coach and got some new raw talent recruit in, that’s probably the best time to look at what they’re doing mechanically that isn’t maybe optimal, and put a bunch of time into that. You gotta put the hours in at some point for sure.
Past a certain point, a veteran’s mechanics are going to be pretty much as good as they’ll get and it’s a matter of maintenance, unless you think of new ways to optimise things. So you work a bit differently in terms of practice regimens.
Elite footballers aren’t spending most of their training time on basic technique, they’ve developed most of that in their formative years.
You wanna be an elite footballer, yeah you’ve gotta kick a lot of ball around from when you’re a kid, but if you’ve already got those chops it’s diminishing returns to keep grinding hours a day, and so you work on other things. Tactical shape and ideas, specific drills etc
How long do you think it would take to close the knowledge gap? Beside theory, I only have my own little experience. I have been away for 4 years, it took me 3 months to catch up with the new meta (and I am nowhere near a genius, actually I found myself pretty bad). The most difficult was zvp. Rest is pretty much similar.
Sure, if you compare yourself from the past to yourself from the present, it would seem that way. But if you had imaginable friends who were your equals these 4 years ago and they continuosly played starcraft, you would have had 20% win rate against them now. With time, going up to 30% and slowly and slowly up towards 50%.
Anyways, perhaps I shouldnt have written my post in the first place, as I don't know it myself for sure, but if gaining that knowledge gap was so easy, wouldnt we see more foreigners near ASL level? I think the likes of Draco or Nony had the speed, multitasking, mechanics on top level, so what was really holding them from matching, or even touching, top korean level of play? Is it just that they were worse in the aspects above? Or was it more about game knowledge? (game knowledge = decisions that you make based on what you see and understanding what needs to be done to increase your odds for winning). I believe it's game knowledge and time they would have to invest to get to top kor level.
According to Nony, the reason he didn’t reach his full potential in Korea, was because all they did was grind games 12 hours a day. He didn’t really get to learn more from Koreans. So yes, it was game knowledge as far as I understand. Interestingly Idra thought it was good practice.
I really don’t think consistently practicing anything 12 hours a day is a productive way to learn.
I’m quite certain that 6 hours a day with method and a fresh mindset would get anyone further than 12 hours being miserable and just binging games.
You are not accounting for time. Those were teenagers back then. You can work teenagers on sugar drinks alone. Today you cannot get them to play well with a bad sleep the night prior.
That’s not the point. What i mean is you don’t learn very efficiently by doing something 12 hours a day. Conscious, focused practice is infinitely superior as a way to improve. No one becomes a concert pianist but just playing mindlessly 12 hours a day. They do very conscious practice, scales, exercises, studies, practice slowly, etc.
Esports are a young discipline, and the way they are approached is very primitive imo. The simple fact that no one practices StarCraft slowly, for example, tells you all you need to know.
Practice Starcraft slowly, what does that mean? The fact stands there is a huge resemblance between how Jaedong and my camping coach started basketball. Jaedong survived the qualifiers, I forgot the name. My camping coach said they couldn't win a game for two years. His star youth team was put against two year older players as qualification.
If you want your brain to learn very fast, very well coordinated movements very well, you need to do them very slowly, very relaxed, very controlled at a very slow tempo, and increase progressively the speed. Every single musician knows that.
Playing starcraft is on a mechanical level not so different from playing a hard piece of piano.
If I were to coach someone, i would put the game settings on very slow, and play very clearly, with absolutely zero tension, and zero unnecessary movement.
I know for a fact it would bring better results in a fraction of the practice time, and prevent injuries later down the line.
Yes, but we are not learning to play the harmonica, or exercising to gain muscle mass without losing range of motion. This is Starcraft. It has a batch input structure with 0.5 second buffer. If you are not up to speed, you won't be able to dodge lurkers with marines. That is not smart, that is plain wrong. PS: also your idea of injury is wrong. These kinds of injuries are due to repetitive motion. You could say bad posture although I cannot verify, was never good at physiotherapy. I cannot tell what Flash has. If you tell me I can tell you how it develops. There are strength trainers who bash bricks. Apparently, every microfracture increases trabecular bone density. It doesn't come at first. You need to put in the hours like Howard Levy says 10000h is necessary for mastery of the instrument. I've heard it for swimming, too. It is not related to the speed of the motion. Carpal tunnel is also a strain injury you can treat with a vertical mouse that you click buttons to the palm of your hand instead of towards the ground. This is also how you can develop a knee injury at cycling if you use opposing muscle groups simultaneously if your saddle position is wrong. Some swimmers like Michael Phelps have better RoM because they have some form of laxity - their muscles don't work as hard. For normal people without laxity, we have carpal tunnel due to stronger wrist bands that can pinch the medial nerve in wrist extension. If you want to control the same mouse without the same effort, you need a lighter mouse AND a better posture. Your flexors and extensors are contracting simultaneously to lock your wrist which is not how it was meant to be used, like the cycling example. PS2: also, NSAID pain killers in the first 3 days of the injury inhibit healing process. That is what Flash did on occasion.
Mate, i have been playing the violin since i am four years old, and played professionally for 20 years. I did auditions and competitions all my life. And I can guarantee you that playing Tchaikovsky concerto is as at the extremely least as difficult as playing SK terran with perfect macro, flawless micro and insane multitasking. As a matter of fact, it’s so hard that it’s borderline impossible if you haven’t started playing as a small kid AND have practiced every single day of your life.
I know plenty of people who have practiced by just playing an absurd lot, very fast, with no method. They end up injured, and they end up not playing as well as people who have method in what they do. They are tense (hence the injuries), it’s messy, there are lots of unnecessary muscular activity. And that leads me to think what they were doing in those houses in Korea was absolutely stupid. They injured and made life absolutely miserable for a bunch of very talented kids.
I don’t think esports as an industry has had time to learn how to approach learning mechanically demanding games the most efficiently. And i think that will come off esports continues to exist.
But that is very disingenuous. You were suggesting they should practice slow, insinuating fast is the same as playing without a method while switching the goalpost, you doing it fast, but with a method, too. I'm really sorry about your violinist friends. I hope they get their literary vertical mouse, too. PS: I get the wrong assumption in your reasoning. You think suffering is meaningful. It is not. Success is meaningful. That is why your friends and our pros play. Not because they can blame it on your misfortune of playing. Starcraft is a thrill. The fact that some pros have taken unprofessional medical advice and ruined their careers by administering the wrong kind of painkillers is their problem - funny enough my basketball playing camping coach has also suffered a career ending knee injury. PS2: also there is a lot of misunderstanding pros need our sympathy, they don't. They are well compensated for their skills. If there is anything they need, it is better pro coaching. I am also in disbelief about the disarray between your presumption and Korean culture. These people live in strict social hierachies. A musical teacher mentoring fine honed skills in the pupils is very much how they spend their waking hours. It is not like they ask themselves what to do in the morning. Also, what you say slow practice is very much like setting the core motion into memory without errors, so afterwards you repetitively try to make it faster without error as well. The core skill only needs to be learned once, but if they need to practice a new skill they might go back to it, but that is still a tedious retraining process.
in league of legends pro scene we have developed more healthy practice regiments within the European scene. We had performance coaches employed with teams, and hired sport psychologists, and physical therapists for additional guideance and healthy and time efficient practice and coping methods. Korean and Chinese teams have also grown beyond the "just grind" culture of improvement. Kespa team houses were largely grind fests and being obedient to authority. Most korean players I talked to still has very little knowledge about injury prevention.
In flash's case there is very likely genetic predisposition for Hereditary Neuropathy with Liability to Pressure Palsies involved, because we usually see his ulnar nerve pathology in individuals with the genetic predisposition for it. It is possible to occur without, but it is less likely.
It would make sense that the pro scene would develop better practice methods overtime while being as efficient if not more. It always starts with the brute force approach anyway. Just look at the evolution of rugby.
On June 08 2025 18:12 iFU.pauline wrote: It would make sense that the pro scene would develop better practice methods overtime while being as efficient if not more. It always starts with the brute force approach anyway. Just look at the evolution of rugby.
Can you elaborate on the evolution of rugby? I’d be quite interested, not a huge rugby fan but went to one of Ireland’s premier ‘rugby schools’ and do enjoy the 6 Nations, but that’s the limit of my knowledge
On June 08 2025 02:33 Timebon3s wrote: A friend of mine and me had to do this in order to learn Zerg and Terran, and it worked very well. It was incredibly infuriating playing early game though since it was so slow that I felt like we wasted a lot of time just waiting for minerals. And that was infuriatingly boring so we stopped doing it.
Interestingly enough, I just picked up the guitar again and it feels so fucking impossible to get better. Can you give some quick insight into how you learned to practice? It’s very interesting and helpful to hear your insights
I can make a very detailed post or blog later if people are still interested but to summarize enormously:
- I ALWAYS know why i am playing. I never play single a note aimlessly when i practice. I might be checking something, trying something out, cleaning something out or consolidating something new. But if i play a passage, there is always a reason, i am always looking for something.
- I ALWAYS look for the least muscular effort, the easiest, most seamless way to play anything. Practicing essentially means, transforming things that are hard into things that are easy. Ideally, after you have practiced something it has to be automatic, easy and effortless. That’s what quality is. How little effort can you make to achieve an optimal result.
- I always teach my brain complex movements by starting to do them slowly, with no effort and ramping up the speed progressively. I also apply compoubd rhythm (fast slow fast or slow fast slow or fast fast fast slow etc) to build up speed and fluidity faster in continuous series of fast moments.
- When something doesn’t work, i take it apart. First i ISOLATE it, then i identify why it is difficult. Then i break it into isolated single movements that i practice slowly, in isolation, one by one. Then, step by step i put things back together. Think of it like cleaning a clock. You disassrmble it, clean the small pieces one by one, then reassemble it.
- I am constantly listening with extreme attention to what i play, AND scanning my body for tensions. Maybe your butt cheek is tensing up. You think that’s trivial but that will have a gigantic impact on what your hands are doing. I have years of experience with the Alexander Technique so i know how not to lose the floor, what not to do with my neck, hope to keep my shoulders free, how to avoid ending up my lower back etc.
- I use tools for when my awareness fails me. I know that no matter how attentive i am, my sense of rhythm might fail me, so i use the metronome when necessary. I know sometimes my awareness of my sound quality let’s lowers, so i record myself and check. Etc.
The idea is that you should never do anything that is hard. What’s hard is what is done with tension. If something is hard you need to practice it until it’s easy (ie, done well). If you do hard things over and over you build bad habits and tension. When someone ask me if what i play is hard i always say no. Otherwise i don’t play it. I practice instead.
What people do when they “practice” 9 hours a day mindlessly is that they just build up those tensions and those bad habits. They plateau, and they get injured.
It’s an extreme summary. But i claim that all of that could be applied to StarCraft, or in fact anything you might want to do in life that is based on movement. If you want a god like muta micro, i am absolutely certain that you could acquire it in weeks using intelligent practice methods, while you might never get there playing 9 hours a day for years.
On June 08 2025 18:12 iFU.pauline wrote: It would make sense that the pro scene would develop better practice methods overtime while being as efficient if not more. It always starts with the brute force approach anyway. Just look at the evolution of rugby.
Can you elaborate on the evolution of rugby? I’d be quite interested, not a huge rugby fan but went to one of Ireland’s premier ‘rugby schools’ and do enjoy the 6 Nations, but that’s the limit of my knowledge
You had jersey finger and chronic traumatic encephalopathy with american football. Rugby is even harder since you don't have any protection. According to rjbtv Flash has an ulnar pathology, likely cubital tunnel syndrome. Great, I'm finding out a lot about the proscene in this topic. PS: forgot to say ulnar entrapment is found mostly in patients with frequent hand vibration. We find out Flash could also benefit from a silent & low vibration switch mouse.
On June 08 2025 02:33 Timebon3s wrote: A friend of mine and me had to do this in order to learn Zerg and Terran, and it worked very well. It was incredibly infuriating playing early game though since it was so slow that I felt like we wasted a lot of time just waiting for minerals. And that was infuriatingly boring so we stopped doing it.
Interestingly enough, I just picked up the guitar again and it feels so fucking impossible to get better. Can you give some quick insight into how you learned to practice? It’s very interesting and helpful to hear your insights
I can make a very detailed post or blog later if people are still interested but to summarize enormously:
- I ALWAYS know why i am playing. I never play single a note aimlessly when i practice. I might be checking something, trying something out, cleaning something out or consolidating something new. But if i play a passage, there is always a reason, i am always looking for something.
- I ALWAYS look for the least muscular effort, the easiest, most seamless way to play anything. Practicing essentially means, transforming things that are hard into things that are easy. Ideally, after you have practiced something it has to be automatic, easy and effortless. That’s what quality is. How little effort can you make to achieve an optimal result.
- I always teach my brain complex movements by starting to do them slowly, with no effort and ramping up the speed progressively. I also apply compoubd rhythm (fast slow fast or slow fast slow or fast fast fast slow etc) to build up speed and fluidity faster in continuous series of fast moments.
- When something doesn’t work, i take it apart. First i ISOLATE it, then i identify why it is difficult. Then i break it into isolated single movements that i practice slowly, in isolation, one by one. Then, step by step i put things back together. Think of it like cleaning a clock. You disassrmble it, clean the small pieces one by one, then reassemble it.
- I am constantly listening with extreme attention to what i play, AND scanning my body for tensions. Maybe your butt cheek is tensing up. You think that’s trivial but that will have a gigantic impact on what your hands are doing. I have years of experience with the Alexander Technique so i know how not to lose the floor, what not to do with my neck, hope to keep my shoulders free, how to avoid ending up my lower back etc.
- I use tools for when my awareness fails me. I know that no matter how attentive i am, my sense of rhythm might fail me, so i use the metronome when necessary. I know sometimes my awareness of my sound quality let’s lowers, so i record myself and check. Etc.
The idea is that you should never do anything that is hard. What’s hard is what is done with tension. If something is hard you need to practice it until it’s easy (ie, done well). If you do hard things over and over you build bad habits and tension. When someone ask me if what i play is hard i always say no. Otherwise i don’t play it. I practice instead.
What people do when they “practice” 9 hours a day mindlessly is that they just build up those tensions and those bad habits. They plateau, and they get injured.
It’s an extreme summary. But i claim that all of that could be applied to StarCraft, or in fact anything you might want to do in life that is based on movement. If you want a god like muta micro, i am absolutely certain that you could acquire it in weeks using intelligent practice methods, while you might never get there playing 9 hours a day for years.
I don't get your grift. You say starcraft club houses grind 16 hours a day, then say that is not how you get muta micro for years. You would come to think these club houses don't train pros efficiently. There is also a hilarious historical anectode when Schumann in large part due to overdeveloping of hand flexion muscles in comparison to hand extension muscles developed a spring loaded system to aid hand extensor muscles. However in the end he totally atrophied his extensor muscles and couldn't open his hands and play any more. What I'm saying is this is a professional field. People should NEVER make an attempt at self medication and instead reach out to a professional MD.
On June 08 2025 02:33 Timebon3s wrote: A friend of mine and me had to do this in order to learn Zerg and Terran, and it worked very well. It was incredibly infuriating playing early game though since it was so slow that I felt like we wasted a lot of time just waiting for minerals. And that was infuriatingly boring so we stopped doing it.
Interestingly enough, I just picked up the guitar again and it feels so fucking impossible to get better. Can you give some quick insight into how you learned to practice? It’s very interesting and helpful to hear your insights
I can make a very detailed post or blog later if people are still interested but to summarize enormously:
- I ALWAYS know why i am playing. I never play single a note aimlessly when i practice. I might be checking something, trying something out, cleaning something out or consolidating something new. But if i play a passage, there is always a reason, i am always looking for something.
- I ALWAYS look for the least muscular effort, the easiest, most seamless way to play anything. Practicing essentially means, transforming things that are hard into things that are easy. Ideally, after you have practiced something it has to be automatic, easy and effortless. That’s what quality is. How little effort can you make to achieve an optimal result.
- I always teach my brain complex movements by starting to do them slowly, with no effort and ramping up the speed progressively. I also apply compoubd rhythm (fast slow fast or slow fast slow or fast fast fast slow etc) to build up speed and fluidity faster in continuous series of fast moments.
- When something doesn’t work, i take it apart. First i ISOLATE it, then i identify why it is difficult. Then i break it into isolated single movements that i practice slowly, in isolation, one by one. Then, step by step i put things back together. Think of it like cleaning a clock. You disassrmble it, clean the small pieces one by one, then reassemble it.
- I am constantly listening with extreme attention to what i play, AND scanning my body for tensions. Maybe your butt cheek is tensing up. You think that’s trivial but that will have a gigantic impact on what your hands are doing. I have years of experience with the Alexander Technique so i know how not to lose the floor, what not to do with my neck, hope to keep my shoulders free, how to avoid ending up my lower back etc.
- I use tools for when my awareness fails me. I know that no matter how attentive i am, my sense of rhythm might fail me, so i use the metronome when necessary. I know sometimes my awareness of my sound quality let’s lowers, so i record myself and check. Etc.
The idea is that you should never do anything that is hard. What’s hard is what is done with tension. If something is hard you need to practice it until it’s easy (ie, done well). If you do hard things over and over you build bad habits and tension. When someone ask me if what i play is hard i always say no. Otherwise i don’t play it. I practice instead.
What people do when they “practice” 9 hours a day mindlessly is that they just build up those tensions and those bad habits. They plateau, and they get injured.
It’s an extreme summary. But i claim that all of that could be applied to StarCraft, or in fact anything you might want to do in life that is based on movement. If you want a god like muta micro, i am absolutely certain that you could acquire it in weeks using intelligent practice methods, while you might never get there playing 9 hours a day for years.
I don't get your grift. You say starcraft club houses grind 16 hours a day, then say that is not how you get muta micro for years. You would come to think these club houses don't train pros efficiently. There is also a hilarious historical anectode when Schumann in large part due to overdeveloping of hand flexion muscles in comparison to hand extension muscles developed a spring loaded system to aid hand extensor muscles. However in the end he totally atrophied his extensor muscles and couldn't open his hands and play any more. What I'm saying is this is a professional field. People should NEVER make an attempt at self medication and instead reach out to a professional MD.
Mate, everytime you post, on any subject, i have to wonder if you actually read what you answer to.
It’s like, you ALWAYS answer something that is either unrelated, or it seems that you don’t understand what people write, or you go on weird tangeant. You talk with authority to people who have done things all their lives that you clearly don’t have a clue about.
Just stop. You are polluting thread after thread after thread. You are everywhere, and everywhere you turn conversations into a shitshow.
I don’t say that to be hostile. But take time to read what you answer to and think a bit before posting. We all have a place here, but let’s take care of each other and of the flow of discussions. Cheers!
On June 08 2025 02:33 Timebon3s wrote: A friend of mine and me had to do this in order to learn Zerg and Terran, and it worked very well. It was incredibly infuriating playing early game though since it was so slow that I felt like we wasted a lot of time just waiting for minerals. And that was infuriatingly boring so we stopped doing it.
Interestingly enough, I just picked up the guitar again and it feels so fucking impossible to get better. Can you give some quick insight into how you learned to practice? It’s very interesting and helpful to hear your insights
I can make a very detailed post or blog later if people are still interested but to summarize enormously:
- I ALWAYS know why i am playing. I never play single a note aimlessly when i practice. I might be checking something, trying something out, cleaning something out or consolidating something new. But if i play a passage, there is always a reason, i am always looking for something.
- I ALWAYS look for the least muscular effort, the easiest, most seamless way to play anything. Practicing essentially means, transforming things that are hard into things that are easy. Ideally, after you have practiced something it has to be automatic, easy and effortless. That’s what quality is. How little effort can you make to achieve an optimal result.
- I always teach my brain complex movements by starting to do them slowly, with no effort and ramping up the speed progressively. I also apply compoubd rhythm (fast slow fast or slow fast slow or fast fast fast slow etc) to build up speed and fluidity faster in continuous series of fast moments.
- When something doesn’t work, i take it apart. First i ISOLATE it, then i identify why it is difficult. Then i break it into isolated single movements that i practice slowly, in isolation, one by one. Then, step by step i put things back together. Think of it like cleaning a clock. You disassrmble it, clean the small pieces one by one, then reassemble it.
- I am constantly listening with extreme attention to what i play, AND scanning my body for tensions. Maybe your butt cheek is tensing up. You think that’s trivial but that will have a gigantic impact on what your hands are doing. I have years of experience with the Alexander Technique so i know how not to lose the floor, what not to do with my neck, hope to keep my shoulders free, how to avoid ending up my lower back etc.
- I use tools for when my awareness fails me. I know that no matter how attentive i am, my sense of rhythm might fail me, so i use the metronome when necessary. I know sometimes my awareness of my sound quality let’s lowers, so i record myself and check. Etc.
The idea is that you should never do anything that is hard. What’s hard is what is done with tension. If something is hard you need to practice it until it’s easy (ie, done well). If you do hard things over and over you build bad habits and tension. When someone ask me if what i play is hard i always say no. Otherwise i don’t play it. I practice instead.
What people do when they “practice” 9 hours a day mindlessly is that they just build up those tensions and those bad habits. They plateau, and they get injured.
It’s an extreme summary. But i claim that all of that could be applied to StarCraft, or in fact anything you might want to do in life that is based on movement. If you want a god like muta micro, i am absolutely certain that you could acquire it in weeks using intelligent practice methods, while you might never get there playing 9 hours a day for years.
As anyone who has seen my blog posts here of my guitar playing will attest, I’m definitely not remotely as accomplished as you! But yeah this tracks
I was only able to fix a few things by either playing in front of an angled mirror aimed at my picking hand, or recording and re-watching some stuff.
You probably know the term I’m currently forgetting, but there are idiosyncrasies in music dictated by the form of one’s instrument and how you play it. For example you don’t really need to learn specific chords and scales on guitar, you learn the shape or pattern and move it around. Whereas on piano you gotta learn em individually. It’s way easier to play fast arpeggios over giant intervals on a piano than a guitar, but it’s way easier to rapidly play a single note repeatedly, or a chord repetition on guitar.
Feeding back into the idea of grinding versus considered practice in this context, just from noodling a lot (I’d frequently just sit around and play whatever I fancied), I got pretty good at a specific thing. Straight alternate picked 3 notes per string runs. Not something I intentionally worked on. But I got pretty decent at it, then I quite enjoyed being decent at it, so I’d grind it a lot, or even write stuff around it.
For those unfamiliar alternate picking is simply you pick away from you, the downstroke, and back up with the upstroke, and you repeat that pattern.
It just so happens that in terms of transitioning up or down a string for a scalar run, you maintain the most efficient movement for string transitions with a combination of straight alternate picking, if it’s 3 notes per string. So say I wanna play an ascending 9 note phrase across 3 strings, the picking direction is down-up-down, your last stroke is a downpick so you’re already moving in the direction of the lower string, so it’s more efficient to down pick the next string, then up, then down, and repeat. Reverse for a descending run.
Just from noodling and grinding I was quite good at that.
I’ll call this a simple technique in lieu of a better term. Not necessarily simple technically, but in terms of thought. Sweep picking is in a similar vein, although it’s quite flashy. With that technique you need good left/right coordination with your hands and muting and stuff, but the picking is very simple in terms of the brain. You ‘sweep’ the pick in an ascending or descending direction depending on where the arpeggio is going. You can add flourishes but the general idea is you pick down while going up, up while you’re descending
They’re both pretty grindable techniques. But they do cap out in terms of phrasing and efficiency.
If you want to play a phrase with a bunch of movement up and across the neck, with a lot of variance on how many notes are on a particular string, both of these techniques have big drawbacks.
The efficient way is kinda a hybrid approach known as economy picking, where you mix alternate picking with a sweep transition depending on how the transitions will work.
But it’s not really an intuitive technique, if someone ‘naturally’ does it I’ve yet to meet them, and I know some bloody good players.
It takes a lot of considered practice with various patterns to start to ingrain it. And, if you’re me anyway but I assume most who try this will take a passage and first figure out how to pick optimally, and then practice it.
If I never considered ‘why is this fucking awkward to play, I can play other stuff way faster?’ and really thought about it, I wouldn’t have stumbled on alternatives. And the alternatives required a different practice regimen to my usual, but they did work.
If I just kept grinding alternate picked 3 note per string things, which I love playing and am quite good at, I might get slightly better at that but I’m neglecting more efficient ways to play other things. Or in writing one may be trapped by the limitations of one’s technique.
On June 08 2025 02:33 Timebon3s wrote: A friend of mine and me had to do this in order to learn Zerg and Terran, and it worked very well. It was incredibly infuriating playing early game though since it was so slow that I felt like we wasted a lot of time just waiting for minerals. And that was infuriatingly boring so we stopped doing it.
Interestingly enough, I just picked up the guitar again and it feels so fucking impossible to get better. Can you give some quick insight into how you learned to practice? It’s very interesting and helpful to hear your insights
I can make a very detailed post or blog later if people are still interested but to summarize enormously:
- I ALWAYS know why i am playing. I never play single a note aimlessly when i practice. I might be checking something, trying something out, cleaning something out or consolidating something new. But if i play a passage, there is always a reason, i am always looking for something.
- I ALWAYS look for the least muscular effort, the easiest, most seamless way to play anything. Practicing essentially means, transforming things that are hard into things that are easy. Ideally, after you have practiced something it has to be automatic, easy and effortless. That’s what quality is. How little effort can you make to achieve an optimal result.
- I always teach my brain complex movements by starting to do them slowly, with no effort and ramping up the speed progressively. I also apply compoubd rhythm (fast slow fast or slow fast slow or fast fast fast slow etc) to build up speed and fluidity faster in continuous series of fast moments.
- When something doesn’t work, i take it apart. First i ISOLATE it, then i identify why it is difficult. Then i break it into isolated single movements that i practice slowly, in isolation, one by one. Then, step by step i put things back together. Think of it like cleaning a clock. You disassrmble it, clean the small pieces one by one, then reassemble it.
- I am constantly listening with extreme attention to what i play, AND scanning my body for tensions. Maybe your butt cheek is tensing up. You think that’s trivial but that will have a gigantic impact on what your hands are doing. I have years of experience with the Alexander Technique so i know how not to lose the floor, what not to do with my neck, hope to keep my shoulders free, how to avoid ending up my lower back etc.
- I use tools for when my awareness fails me. I know that no matter how attentive i am, my sense of rhythm might fail me, so i use the metronome when necessary. I know sometimes my awareness of my sound quality let’s lowers, so i record myself and check. Etc.
The idea is that you should never do anything that is hard. What’s hard is what is done with tension. If something is hard you need to practice it until it’s easy (ie, done well). If you do hard things over and over you build bad habits and tension. When someone ask me if what i play is hard i always say no. Otherwise i don’t play it. I practice instead.
What people do when they “practice” 9 hours a day mindlessly is that they just build up those tensions and those bad habits. They plateau, and they get injured.
It’s an extreme summary. But i claim that all of that could be applied to StarCraft, or in fact anything you might want to do in life that is based on movement. If you want a god like muta micro, i am absolutely certain that you could acquire it in weeks using intelligent practice methods, while you might never get there playing 9 hours a day for years.
I don't get your grift. You say starcraft club houses grind 16 hours a day, then say that is not how you get muta micro for years. You would come to think these club houses don't train pros efficiently. There is also a hilarious historical anectode when Schumann in large part due to overdeveloping of hand flexion muscles in comparison to hand extension muscles developed a spring loaded system to aid hand extensor muscles. However in the end he totally atrophied his extensor muscles and couldn't open his hands and play any more. What I'm saying is this is a professional field. People should NEVER make an attempt at self medication and instead reach out to a professional MD.
There’s no comparison in BW. It’s Kespa and actual professionals, and everyone else.
So even if the Kespa regime isn’t optimal, it’s still going to deliver better results
In SC2 you’ve got actual progamers from the West as some point of comparison. And from what I understand that Serral guy is pretty good despite a very different practice style
On June 08 2025 02:33 Timebon3s wrote: A friend of mine and me had to do this in order to learn Zerg and Terran, and it worked very well. It was incredibly infuriating playing early game though since it was so slow that I felt like we wasted a lot of time just waiting for minerals. And that was infuriatingly boring so we stopped doing it.
Interestingly enough, I just picked up the guitar again and it feels so fucking impossible to get better. Can you give some quick insight into how you learned to practice? It’s very interesting and helpful to hear your insights
I can make a very detailed post or blog later if people are still interested but to summarize enormously:
- I ALWAYS know why i am playing. I never play single a note aimlessly when i practice. I might be checking something, trying something out, cleaning something out or consolidating something new. But if i play a passage, there is always a reason, i am always looking for something.
- I ALWAYS look for the least muscular effort, the easiest, most seamless way to play anything. Practicing essentially means, transforming things that are hard into things that are easy. Ideally, after you have practiced something it has to be automatic, easy and effortless. That’s what quality is. How little effort can you make to achieve an optimal result.
- I always teach my brain complex movements by starting to do them slowly, with no effort and ramping up the speed progressively. I also apply compoubd rhythm (fast slow fast or slow fast slow or fast fast fast slow etc) to build up speed and fluidity faster in continuous series of fast moments.
- When something doesn’t work, i take it apart. First i ISOLATE it, then i identify why it is difficult. Then i break it into isolated single movements that i practice slowly, in isolation, one by one. Then, step by step i put things back together. Think of it like cleaning a clock. You disassrmble it, clean the small pieces one by one, then reassemble it.
- I am constantly listening with extreme attention to what i play, AND scanning my body for tensions. Maybe your butt cheek is tensing up. You think that’s trivial but that will have a gigantic impact on what your hands are doing. I have years of experience with the Alexander Technique so i know how not to lose the floor, what not to do with my neck, hope to keep my shoulders free, how to avoid ending up my lower back etc.
- I use tools for when my awareness fails me. I know that no matter how attentive i am, my sense of rhythm might fail me, so i use the metronome when necessary. I know sometimes my awareness of my sound quality let’s lowers, so i record myself and check. Etc.
The idea is that you should never do anything that is hard. What’s hard is what is done with tension. If something is hard you need to practice it until it’s easy (ie, done well). If you do hard things over and over you build bad habits and tension. When someone ask me if what i play is hard i always say no. Otherwise i don’t play it. I practice instead.
What people do when they “practice” 9 hours a day mindlessly is that they just build up those tensions and those bad habits. They plateau, and they get injured.
It’s an extreme summary. But i claim that all of that could be applied to StarCraft, or in fact anything you might want to do in life that is based on movement. If you want a god like muta micro, i am absolutely certain that you could acquire it in weeks using intelligent practice methods, while you might never get there playing 9 hours a day for years.
I don't get your grift. You say starcraft club houses grind 16 hours a day, then say that is not how you get muta micro for years. You would come to think these club houses don't train pros efficiently. There is also a hilarious historical anectode when Schumann in large part due to overdeveloping of hand flexion muscles in comparison to hand extension muscles developed a spring loaded system to aid hand extensor muscles. However in the end he totally atrophied his extensor muscles and couldn't open his hands and play any more. What I'm saying is this is a professional field. People should NEVER make an attempt at self medication and instead reach out to a professional MD.
There’s no comparison in BW. It’s Kespa and actual professionals, and everyone else.
So even if the Kespa regime isn’t optimal, it’s still going to deliver better results
In SC2 you’ve got actual progamers from the West as some point of comparison. And from what I understand that Serral guy is pretty good despite a very different practice style
Exactly. Kespa brute force their way and it showed for the most talented pool. Serral is proof that the same method is not optimal for every player. But we are doing a disservice claiming that Kespa just put those players your play brainless for hours.
This however may have been the case for Idra and Nony if they didnt have an interpreter to do their coaching in the team houses. This is especulation ofc. But from the documentaries i have seen. They made specific training for matchups. Situations and they have game analyzis too. Not only that but they would practise with outside team players so these players dont build the habit of only playing vs in house teammates. Look at Horang2. This guy literally had to play vs the computer to practise for his games cuz his teammates didnt like his playstyle.lol. So while the grind is hard. There is also brain put into it. In fact i remember FlaSh saying that he didnt really play many games cuz his games were really long and he needed rest lol. While in Jaedong team those guys truly destroyed their wrist training. It paid off for few Seasons but that team imploded later on.
Ok, as an avid amateur pianist and avid BW fan, I pretty much completely agree with what Biff said. But here is my 5 cents:
Slow and mindful practice is kinda like exponential growth. While the brute force method is more like logrythmic with a peak, which you reach just before suffering injury. Basically a ticking time bomb that ruined many progamers' wrists. And then there's just winging it which more or less looks like lineair growth until you hit your natural plateau. (Good luck winning anything meaningful using this method unless you're insanely talented.)
The reason why slow practice fucking sucks, is because when you're just starting out progress seems like literally 0. You feel like you're wasting your fucking time. Then - if you managed to not get bored during that phase of near 0 progress - follows a phase of lineair growth, and only after that you get that sweet sweet logaritmic boost. Slow practice is like making an investment.
To visualize what I'm saying, it KIND OF looks like this:
Now imagine you're running a BW team in KeSPA days with investors wanting to see results asap, which method will you choose, not knowing the dangers of brute forcing? By now we know the real answer is like a combination of those 3 where you both avoid plateauing and injury.
Also when you learn to walk and talk like a kid and many other skills in life you obviously don't use the slow practice method. It's hard to endure slow practice because getting results seemingly takes forever. It's unnatural and requires sick discipline. Having taught piano to both kids and adults in my experience there is no fucking way you get a kid to stick to slow practice long enough unless the parents already disciplined the fuck out of the kid. Any gamer with a competitive spirit will not fucking slow practice just like a kid won't, not until they hit their plateau or get injured from brute forcing and realize it.
Slow practicing done right is easy yes, but it's also boring af if you can't "fool" yourself that it's an investment worth making. For me slow practice is always a fight with myself wanting quick results. It's easy to say, hard to execute. To me it's a life long endeavour to get more disciplined about slow practice. I can attest that it fucking works though. It helped me get down those impossible passages to play while winging it numerous times now. But the reason it sucks is because it also means you have to swallow your pride and admit when something is too difficult for you to just wing or brute force, and that you need a baby steps approach to learn it properly. This is also why real pros can have tremendous amounts of respect for their peers. They fucking know what it took to get there, those moments of self-humiliation going back to the basics just to fix or hone that one aspect in your skill. Even the most talented had to work on weaknesses.
Whenever I think about applying slow practice to BW, I think of that time I saw a FPVOD of FBH where he just casually, seemingly effortlessly, macroes 9 barracks with a camera hotkey, in the blink of an eye! There is no doubt in my mind: he devoted slow and mindfull practice to get to that level of precision, speed and consistency. Macroing a set buildings in formation is like the equivalent of playing a scale on your instrument. You don't really realize how bad you're at playing scales, until you start to slow practice them.
On June 08 2025 02:33 Timebon3s wrote: A friend of mine and me had to do this in order to learn Zerg and Terran, and it worked very well. It was incredibly infuriating playing early game though since it was so slow that I felt like we wasted a lot of time just waiting for minerals. And that was infuriatingly boring so we stopped doing it.
Interestingly enough, I just picked up the guitar again and it feels so fucking impossible to get better. Can you give some quick insight into how you learned to practice? It’s very interesting and helpful to hear your insights
I can make a very detailed post or blog later if people are still interested but to summarize enormously:
- I ALWAYS know why i am playing. I never play single a note aimlessly when i practice. I might be checking something, trying something out, cleaning something out or consolidating something new. But if i play a passage, there is always a reason, i am always looking for something.
- I ALWAYS look for the least muscular effort, the easiest, most seamless way to play anything. Practicing essentially means, transforming things that are hard into things that are easy. Ideally, after you have practiced something it has to be automatic, easy and effortless. That’s what quality is. How little effort can you make to achieve an optimal result.
- I always teach my brain complex movements by starting to do them slowly, with no effort and ramping up the speed progressively. I also apply compoubd rhythm (fast slow fast or slow fast slow or fast fast fast slow etc) to build up speed and fluidity faster in continuous series of fast moments.
- When something doesn’t work, i take it apart. First i ISOLATE it, then i identify why it is difficult. Then i break it into isolated single movements that i practice slowly, in isolation, one by one. Then, step by step i put things back together. Think of it like cleaning a clock. You disassrmble it, clean the small pieces one by one, then reassemble it.
- I am constantly listening with extreme attention to what i play, AND scanning my body for tensions. Maybe your butt cheek is tensing up. You think that’s trivial but that will have a gigantic impact on what your hands are doing. I have years of experience with the Alexander Technique so i know how not to lose the floor, what not to do with my neck, hope to keep my shoulders free, how to avoid ending up my lower back etc.
- I use tools for when my awareness fails me. I know that no matter how attentive i am, my sense of rhythm might fail me, so i use the metronome when necessary. I know sometimes my awareness of my sound quality let’s lowers, so i record myself and check. Etc.
The idea is that you should never do anything that is hard. What’s hard is what is done with tension. If something is hard you need to practice it until it’s easy (ie, done well). If you do hard things over and over you build bad habits and tension. When someone ask me if what i play is hard i always say no. Otherwise i don’t play it. I practice instead.
What people do when they “practice” 9 hours a day mindlessly is that they just build up those tensions and those bad habits. They plateau, and they get injured.
It’s an extreme summary. But i claim that all of that could be applied to StarCraft, or in fact anything you might want to do in life that is based on movement. If you want a god like muta micro, i am absolutely certain that you could acquire it in weeks using intelligent practice methods, while you might never get there playing 9 hours a day for years.
I don't get your grift. You say starcraft club houses grind 16 hours a day, then say that is not how you get muta micro for years. You would come to think these club houses don't train pros efficiently. There is also a hilarious historical anectode when Schumann in large part due to overdeveloping of hand flexion muscles in comparison to hand extension muscles developed a spring loaded system to aid hand extensor muscles. However in the end he totally atrophied his extensor muscles and couldn't open his hands and play any more. What I'm saying is this is a professional field. People should NEVER make an attempt at self medication and instead reach out to a professional MD.
Mate, everytime you post, on any subject, i have to wonder if you actually read what you answer to.
It’s like, you ALWAYS answer something that is either unrelated, or it seems that you don’t understand what people write, or you go on weird tangeant. You talk with authority to people who have done things all their lives that you clearly don’t have a clue about.
Just stop. You are polluting thread after thread after thread. You are everywhere, and everywhere you turn conversations into a shitshow.
I don’t say that to be hostile. But take time to read what you answer to and think a bit before posting. We all have a place here, but let’s take care of each other and of the flow of discussions. Cheers!
On June 08 2025 22:21 Peeano wrote: Ok, as an avid amateur pianist and avid BW fan, I pretty much completely agree with what Biff said. But here is my 5 cents:
Slow and mindful practice is kinda like exponential growth. While the brute force method is more like logrythmic with a peak, which you reach just before suffering injury. Basically a ticking time bomb that ruined many progamers' wrists. And then there's just winging it which more or less looks like lineair growth until you hit your natural plateau. (Good luck winning anything meaningful using this method unless you're insanely talented.)
The reason why slow practice fucking sucks, is because when you're just starting out progress seems like literally 0. You feel like you're wasting your fucking time. Then - if you managed to not get bored during that phase of near 0 progress - follows a phase of lineair growth, and only after that you get that sweet sweet logaritmic boost. Slow practice is like making an investment.
To visualize what I'm saying, it KIND OF looks like this:
Now imagine you're running a BW team in KeSPA days with investors wanting to see results asap, which method will you choose, not knowing the dangers of brute forcing? By now we know the real answer is like a combination of those 3 where you both avoid plateauing and injury.
Also when you learn to walk and talk like a kid and many other skills in life you obviously don't use the slow practice method. It's hard to endure slow practice because getting results seemingly takes forever. It's unnatural and requires sick discipline. Having taught piano to both kids and adults in my experience there is no fucking way you get a kid to stick to slow practice long enough unless the parents already disciplined the fuck out of the kid. Any gamer with a competitive spirit will not fucking slow practice just like a kid won't, not until they hit their plateau or get injured from brute forcing and realize it.
Slow practicing done right is easy yes, but it's also boring af if you can't "fool" yourself that it's an investment worth making. For me slow practice is always a fight with myself wanting quick results. It's easy to say, hard to execute. To me it's a life long endeavour to get more disciplined about slow practice. I can attest that it fucking works though. It helped me get down those impossible passages to play while winging it numerous times now. But the reason it sucks is because it also means you have to swallow your pride and admit when something is too difficult for you to just wing or brute force, and that you need a baby steps approach to learn it properly. This is also why real pros can have tremendous amounts of respect for their peers. They fucking know what it took to get there, those moments of self-humiliation going back to the basics just to fix or hone that one aspect in your skill. Even the most talented had to work on weaknesses.
Whenever I think about applying slow practice to BW, I think of that time I saw a FPVOD of FBH where he just casually, seemingly effortlessly, macroes 9 barracks with a camera hotkey, in the blink of an eye! There is no doubt in my mind: he devoted slow and mindfull practice to get to that level of precision, speed and consistency. Macroing a set buildings in formation is like the equivalent of playing a scale on your instrument. You don't really realize how bad you're at playing scales, until you start to slow practice them.
I think there are physical and material limits to performance arts. Like the Schumann example, your extensors will not develop in proportion to your flexor muscles no matter what you do. Also like Flash, the harder your switches trigger, you are more likely to get ulnar entrapment issues. Good thing is science is moving. Unless we wanted the full classical grand piano experience, there are lighter and faster returning piano key technologies as there are vertical mice and lighter key switches. The onus is on Flash to break new ground into new pc peripherals, rather than us devolving the thread into a zero sum game. He championed random, so he can champion cutting edge RSI beating tech, too. He had more than one comebacks, this could be one of the many.
EPT
![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/A9yotoB.png)
