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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.
Here is the thing: soooome people will go much further than other with brute force. That’s usually what we call talent. Some people will get away with just doing a lot without tensing up a lot, and will over time get a better organized, more fluid, more seamless movement.
My experience is that:
If everyone brute forces everything, they will absolutely dominate. I believe that’s what happens mostly with Starcraft. You see that in music schools with teenagers. Everyone is practicing super badly, but some get away with it better than others and can even become very good.
If they brute force and someone normal practices very well very consistently, the average person will catch up over time and eventually play better.
If they practice well, they become exponentially better than everyone. Those are the Yo-Yo Ma, the Federer and so on, that just leave everyone behind. They naturally tend to do everything seamlessly AND practice in a very structured way.
I am 100% the normal type that had practiced very well. I have no natural talent for precise movement, and if i had just played 8 hours a day with no structure i would aaaabsolutely suck.
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not sure why the thread ended up in this place, but Biff is making a lot of valid points
there is a point to slow practice, same as there is a point to aimed practice. the parallel to playing an instrument holds in regards to the mechanical aspects of brood war - this is not about decision making or interacting with your opponent during a battle.
think of muta micro. there is an optimal angle for mutalisks to shoot from (because muta range is not circular). there is an optimal, minimal amount of clicks required to perform the shoot-and-turn manoeuvre.
you can either brute-force this knowledge by playing hundreds of ZvT, or
you can learn this by playing muta micro maps exclusively, or
you can learn this if someone who knows how to do it stands behind you and gives you feedback.
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On June 08 2025 19:48 Biff The Understudy wrote:Show nested quote +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.
Thank you very much for your reply!! This is very helpful and interesting. I would love to read a blog about this kind of thing.
Everyone who tries to learn an instrument knows how hard it is. Reading about someone who «cracked the code» is both useful and gives hope in something that feels impossible to do, even if you’re not a super-duper important MD
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On June 09 2025 03:55 Timebon3s wrote:Show nested quote +On June 08 2025 19:48 Biff The Understudy wrote: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. Thank you very much for your reply!! This is very helpful and interesting. I would love to read a blog about this kind of thing. Everyone who tries to learn an instrument knows how hard it is. Reading about someone who «cracked the code» is both useful and gives hope in something that feels impossible to do, even if you’re not a super-duper important MD
Jason Ricci learned to play from the best with a custom harp. While I admire the passion, I really want to correct on the casual progress myth. Yes, if you are Paul Butterfield and you have just been disowned by your family, maybe you can pull enough mental strings to pull yourself by the bootstraps and sustain yourself with your art.
For regular people, don't harm yourself by self medicating like Flash did. There are medications that work without harming the body, however every medication is poison unless the dose is correct. All that to say, there are stuff even MDs don't self administer.
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Northern Ireland25342 Posts
On June 09 2025 00:55 Biff The Understudy wrote:Show nested quote +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. Here is the thing: soooome people will go much further than other with brute force. That’s usually what we call talent. Some people will get away with just doing a lot without tensing up a lot, and will over time get a better organized, more fluid, more seamless movement. My experience is that: If everyone brute forces everything, they will absolutely dominate. I believe that’s what happens mostly with Starcraft. You see that in music schools with teenagers. Everyone is practicing super badly, but some get away with it better than others and can even become very good. If they brute force and someone normal practices very well very consistently, the average person will catch up over time and eventually play better. If they practice well, they become exponentially better than everyone. Those are the Yo-Yo Ma, the Federer and so on, that just leave everyone behind. They naturally tend to do everything seamlessly AND practice in a very structured way. I am 100% the normal type that had practiced very well. I have no natural talent for precise movement, and if i had just played 8 hours a day with no structure i would aaaabsolutely suck.
Pretty much. I have something of a natural mechanical aptitude for instruments, way less of an intuitive ear for music than some, I’ve known some where that’s flipped.
If we both just kept grinding and practicing badly, whatever you’re naturally good at, you’re going to improve at even if it’s unstructured. Also as you’ve already a certain aptitude, you’re seeing more progress there, there’s a natural tendency to keep pushing what you’re already doing alright in.
Depends on your goals of course. Probably related to me being quite mechanically proficient at instruments (minus the musicality part), I was always a fast typist. About twice as quick as anyone in my peer group as a teen, I think part a certain natural dexterity, plenty of passive practice. My technique is bloody ropey, mostly influenced by typing a lot in chat while actually playing games, so the right hand was often on the mouse. Over time folks with more conventional techniques, more economic etc caught up.
Very hard to change now, and as I don’t intend to be a competitive typist or anything, I couldn’t be bothered. But I could be considerably faster now if I’d put in the effort to practice in a more considered way.
Unless you’re some kind of genuine physical freak, and they do exist, eventually even someone with an innate aptitude for something will get caught up, or even overtaken if they do things the wrong way, or sub-optimally by the person who doesn’t have that, but has correct technique, or practices judiciously
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Literally everything Biff says about practice is accurate, and I'd make the argument that it's at least 95% applicable to SC.
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On June 09 2025 04:31 mtcn77 wrote:Show nested quote +On June 09 2025 03:55 Timebon3s wrote:On June 08 2025 19:48 Biff The Understudy wrote: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. Thank you very much for your reply!! This is very helpful and interesting. I would love to read a blog about this kind of thing. Everyone who tries to learn an instrument knows how hard it is. Reading about someone who «cracked the code» is both useful and gives hope in something that feels impossible to do, even if you’re not a super-duper important MD Jason Ricci learned to play from the best with a custom harp. While I admire the passion, I really want to correct on the casual progress myth. Yes, if you are Paul Butterfield and you have just been disowned by your family, maybe you can pull enough mental strings to pull yourself by the bootstraps and sustain yourself with your art. For regular people, don't harm yourself by self medicating like Flash did. There are medications that work without harming the body, however every medication is poison unless the dose is correct. All that to say, there are stuff even MDs don't self administer.
Yeah and Ole Gunnar Soldskjaer had a great career as a forward on Manchester United.
Those results didn’t necessarily translate into him being a great manager. Sure, at first the team had a great winning streak, but that’s not uncommon for a team with a new manager.
At least not when your previous manager was José Mourinho.
He was salty as fuck and pulled the moral of the entire team down the shitter.
Because of that, it’s always best to tighten your wheels a bit too much, instead of risking having them fall out mid flight and sink to the bottom of the ocean.
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On June 09 2025 06:11 Timebon3s wrote:Show nested quote +On June 09 2025 04:31 mtcn77 wrote:On June 09 2025 03:55 Timebon3s wrote:On June 08 2025 19:48 Biff The Understudy wrote: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. Thank you very much for your reply!! This is very helpful and interesting. I would love to read a blog about this kind of thing. Everyone who tries to learn an instrument knows how hard it is. Reading about someone who «cracked the code» is both useful and gives hope in something that feels impossible to do, even if you’re not a super-duper important MD Jason Ricci learned to play from the best with a custom harp. While I admire the passion, I really want to correct on the casual progress myth. Yes, if you are Paul Butterfield and you have just been disowned by your family, maybe you can pull enough mental strings to pull yourself by the bootstraps and sustain yourself with your art. For regular people, don't harm yourself by self medicating like Flash did. There are medications that work without harming the body, however every medication is poison unless the dose is correct. All that to say, there are stuff even MDs don't self administer. Yeah and Ole Gunnar Soldskjaer had a great career as a forward on Manchester United. Those results didn’t necessarily translate into him being a great manager. Sure, at first the team had a great winning streak, but that’s not uncommon for a team with a new manager. At least not when your previous manager was José Mourinho. He was salty as fuck and pulled the moral of the entire team down the shitter. Because of that, it’s always best to tighten your wheels a bit too much, instead of risking having them fall out mid flight and sink to the bottom of the ocean.
You are literally comparing a coach to a player "performance artist". That is what I'm trying to warn against.
The medical side is an entirely different career. Just because your friend Biff here who only plays the major scale on the violin, that is a joke, is a good performer does not qualify his teaching skills.
Medical is scary stuff. I really find offense to him slighting Korean club culture and question why nobody else has noticed his remarks as offensive to our esports.
These kids had prepared meals and study regimens to follow through. Just because Flash busted his wrists like so many other performance arts performers does not give credence to your friend's wild theories on how you should do things low and slow and club houses are bad.
Flash had inherent physical advantages to his physique. You can see his slim wrists. That is a recent variation to the carpal tunnel with a weaker ligament. I think those people also lack a muscle inside the carpal ligament with no loss of function.
Whether he squandered his chances, or put his good genetics to good use is not the topic. He doesn't need our sympathy. He is a pro in pro scene. If he wants to develop, it is his responsibility to put in the work and with luck he won't blow it with ill medical opinion.
Literally, I don't understand why folk treat him like he just lost his plot armor due to his wrist injury and totally neglect the greater issue at large. He did something harmful to his health. It could happen to anybody. He isn't immune, although that one mistake does not make him a bad apple. Stuff goes wrong all the time. It is better to say it isn't Flash's responsibility to fix it as is the case with biff who can have no injuries due to slow practice. That is just wrong. It is not about just speed, it is also bad equipment.
I don't know, do you guys think these pros REALLY play live with those off the shelf parts they post on the screen before each game in ASL? You guys that naive? Because I really think they have tweaked it down to the atoms. You can see Flash pull out the ruler to measure the screen distance. Once you accept that, what is to stop you from believing maybe he measured his keyboard ergonomics, or mouse selection wrong? Well, I do.
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Northern Ireland25342 Posts
On June 09 2025 06:03 Magic Powers wrote:
Literally everything Biff says about practice is accurate, and I'd make the argument that it's at least 95% applicable to SC.
Absolutely, about the only semi-consistent resistance to what is widely, widely considered best practice when it comes to practice and improving I ever really encounter is on SC boards.
And even then, I’m unsure about the regimens of Korean team houses in SC2, but quite a lot of the foreign scene have made a conscious effort to practice more intelligently from forever and many have talked through their thought processes there.
Sure it wasn’t enough to close the gap to Korea for quite some time. Maybe that first generation of foreign pros didn’t quite have the same natural talent, or maybe some of them were a bit old when SC2 started out.
When you started to see youngsters who’d grown up with StarCraft, who had that raw speed and who also practiced efficiently, that gap evaporated.
I also don’t think it’s coincidence that cats like Reynor and Clem had fathers who played SC. I dunno if Reynor’s da was any good, IIRC Clem’s is quite decent. Reynor’s brother isn’t half bad anyway!
Sure, it’s not remotely comparable to a Korean team house, but it really accelerates the onboarding to have someone available most of the time to show you the ropes.
At the highest level too, the little optimisations do add up over time. Which is part of improvement too, and something one can do just by thinking about the game.
I can’t get better at picking on guitar past at a certain point by just ‘picking better’, I gotta figure out what the roadblocks are, what’s holding me back from levelling up, and then figure a way to circumvent that.
It’s a small thing, it’s certainly not why Serral is well, Serral but he moves the camera via the mouse scroll button, a fair few other pros do nowadays. I personally think it’s just the better way to do things than screen scrolling, outside of stutter stepping aggressively/defensively. You can keep your cursor centred and minimise movement, versus going to the edge of the monitor and back. It’s just a bit more efficient, and also a bit more predictable.
A lot of other players screen scroll as that’s what they’re used to, or they saw that’s the way others did it, or they just found it more intuitive. And it works too. And individually it’s not gonna make a big difference, or overcome a talent gap. But if there is no talent gap, and instead of one minor optimisation, it’s 4 or 5 they have over you, it does start to add up.
I mean Flash was good enough to win a Premier in SC2 using some BW hotkeys like M for marines, but he is bloomin Flash.
Thinking alone is quite a core component of improvement too. Knowing what’s optimal helps, knowing why helps even more. But it needs some thinking time, either alone or collaboratively. As the old adage goes, you need to know the rules to break them.
It’s a bit of an extreme example but say some newcomer to the game is inspired by Flash, and is a huge fan so just copies his hotkeys. Well, they’re not good hotkeys ergonomically. They 100% make sense for Flash as I’d be almost certain he weighed up how difficult it would be to try to revert all his BW muscle memory and thought the trade off not worth it. Yeah he had success with it, but that doesn’t mean it’s something worth copying.
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Northern Ireland25342 Posts
On June 09 2025 06:48 mtcn77 wrote:Show nested quote +On June 09 2025 06:11 Timebon3s wrote:On June 09 2025 04:31 mtcn77 wrote:On June 09 2025 03:55 Timebon3s wrote:On June 08 2025 19:48 Biff The Understudy wrote: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. Thank you very much for your reply!! This is very helpful and interesting. I would love to read a blog about this kind of thing. Everyone who tries to learn an instrument knows how hard it is. Reading about someone who «cracked the code» is both useful and gives hope in something that feels impossible to do, even if you’re not a super-duper important MD Jason Ricci learned to play from the best with a custom harp. While I admire the passion, I really want to correct on the casual progress myth. Yes, if you are Paul Butterfield and you have just been disowned by your family, maybe you can pull enough mental strings to pull yourself by the bootstraps and sustain yourself with your art. For regular people, don't harm yourself by self medicating like Flash did. There are medications that work without harming the body, however every medication is poison unless the dose is correct. All that to say, there are stuff even MDs don't self administer. Yeah and Ole Gunnar Soldskjaer had a great career as a forward on Manchester United. Those results didn’t necessarily translate into him being a great manager. Sure, at first the team had a great winning streak, but that’s not uncommon for a team with a new manager. At least not when your previous manager was José Mourinho. He was salty as fuck and pulled the moral of the entire team down the shitter. Because of that, it’s always best to tighten your wheels a bit too much, instead of risking having them fall out mid flight and sink to the bottom of the ocean. You are literally comparing a coach to a player "performance artist". That is what I'm trying to warn against. The medical side is an entirely different career. Just because your friend Biff here who only plays the major scale on the violin, that is a joke, is a good performer does not qualify his teaching skills. Medical is scary stuff. I really find offense to him slighting Korean club culture and question why nobody else has noticed his remarks as offensive to our esports.These kids had prepared meals and study regimens to follow through. Just because Flash busted his wrists like so many other performance arts performers does not give credence to your friend's wild theories on how you should do things low and slow and club houses are bad. Flash had inherent physical advantages to his physique. You can see his slim wrists. That is a recent variation to the carpal tunnel with a weaker ligament. I think those people also lack a muscle inside the carpal ligament with no loss of function. Whether he squandered his chances, or put his good genetics to good use is not the topic. He doesn't need our sympathy. He is a pro in pro scene. If he wants to develop, it is his responsibility to put in the work and with luck he won't blow it with ill medical opinion. Literally, I don't understand why folk treat him like he just lost his plot armor due to his wrist injury and totally neglect the greater issue at large. He did something harmful to his health. It could happen to anybody. He isn't immune, although that one mistake does not make him a bad apple. Stuff goes wrong all the time. It is better to say it isn't Flash's responsibility to fix it as is the case with biff who can have no injuries due to slow practice. That is just wrong. It is not about just speed, it is also bad equipment. I don't know, do you guys think these pros REALLY play live with those off the shelf parts they post on the screen before each game in ASL? You guys that naive? Because I really think they have tweaked it down to the atoms. You can see Flash pull out the ruler to measure the screen distance. Once you accept that, what is to stop you from believing maybe he measured his keyboard ergonomics, or mouse selection wrong? Well, I do.
What? :S
Some progamers themselves have made the observation that their practice conditions could have been more time and effort efficient.
I’d indeed say it’s somewhat more disrespectful to blame players for getting injuries and getting bad medical opinions.
Flash is a rather wealthy man and his fingers, wrists etc are his money maker. Of course he’s going to seek medical advice to maintain that, unless he’s a total idiot. Hell it wouldn’t surprise me if his famous ruler was as much about injury prevention after consulting medical advice as it were to keep a consistent setup for reasons of familiarity.
I dunno if it’s a language barrier or what, you seem to be misunderstanding what Biff is saying. He’s not advocating practicing slowly, he’s advocating starting slowly until you have something perfect, and then speed it up.
And injuries are an unfortunate byproduct of over practice, bad technique or just genetic bad luck. But avoiding them through better regimens is just a nice bonus. The main reason to have better practice habits is you get better, faster and increase your potential ceiling.
Obviously the Kespa teams produced phenomenal StarCraft players. But could they have produced even better ones? Absolutely IMO. And with the additional benefit of fewer injuries.
Hell the Kespa teams themselves learned this over time and altered some of their methods.
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On June 09 2025 06:48 mtcn77 wrote:Show nested quote +On June 09 2025 06:11 Timebon3s wrote:On June 09 2025 04:31 mtcn77 wrote:On June 09 2025 03:55 Timebon3s wrote:On June 08 2025 19:48 Biff The Understudy wrote: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. Thank you very much for your reply!! This is very helpful and interesting. I would love to read a blog about this kind of thing. Everyone who tries to learn an instrument knows how hard it is. Reading about someone who «cracked the code» is both useful and gives hope in something that feels impossible to do, even if you’re not a super-duper important MD Jason Ricci learned to play from the best with a custom harp. While I admire the passion, I really want to correct on the casual progress myth. Yes, if you are Paul Butterfield and you have just been disowned by your family, maybe you can pull enough mental strings to pull yourself by the bootstraps and sustain yourself with your art. For regular people, don't harm yourself by self medicating like Flash did. There are medications that work without harming the body, however every medication is poison unless the dose is correct. All that to say, there are stuff even MDs don't self administer. Yeah and Ole Gunnar Soldskjaer had a great career as a forward on Manchester United. Those results didn’t necessarily translate into him being a great manager. Sure, at first the team had a great winning streak, but that’s not uncommon for a team with a new manager. At least not when your previous manager was José Mourinho. He was salty as fuck and pulled the moral of the entire team down the shitter. Because of that, it’s always best to tighten your wheels a bit too much, instead of risking having them fall out mid flight and sink to the bottom of the ocean. You are literally comparing a coach to a player "performance artist". That is what I'm trying to warn against. The medical side is an entirely different career. Just because your friend Biff here who only plays the major scale on the violin, that is a joke, is a good performer does not qualify his teaching skills. Medical is scary stuff. I really find offense to him slighting Korean club culture and question why nobody else has noticed his remarks as offensive to our esports. These kids had prepared meals and study regimens to follow through. Just because Flash busted his wrists like so many other performance arts performers does not give credence to your friend's wild theories on how you should do things low and slow and club houses are bad. Flash had inherent physical advantages to his physique. You can see his slim wrists. That is a recent variation to the carpal tunnel with a weaker ligament. I think those people also lack a muscle inside the carpal ligament with no loss of function. Whether he squandered his chances, or put his good genetics to good use is not the topic. He doesn't need our sympathy. He is a pro in pro scene. If he wants to develop, it is his responsibility to put in the work and with luck he won't blow it with ill medical opinion. Literally, I don't understand why folk treat him like he just lost his plot armor due to his wrist injury and totally neglect the greater issue at large. He did something harmful to his health. It could happen to anybody. He isn't immune, although that one mistake does not make him a bad apple. Stuff goes wrong all the time. It is better to say it isn't Flash's responsibility to fix it as is the case with biff who can have no injuries due to slow practice. That is just wrong. It is not about just speed, it is also bad equipment. I don't know, do you guys think these pros REALLY play live with those off the shelf parts they post on the screen before each game in ASL? You guys that naive? Because I really think they have tweaked it down to the atoms. You can see Flash pull out the ruler to measure the screen distance. Once you accept that, what is to stop you from believing maybe he measured his keyboard ergonomics, or mouse selection wrong? Well, I do.
You need a special kind of beaver if you want to build a better dam. The same goes for the taxi driver that has to work overtime due to unexpected accidents or other problems.
So I don’t agree that waffles aren’t good for you since the body requires carbohydrates even though it doesn’t need to it should. So why not? Otherwise you should really not use bear traps in my opinion since it’s barbaric and unusually cruel towards animals.
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On June 09 2025 07:42 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On June 09 2025 06:48 mtcn77 wrote:On June 09 2025 06:11 Timebon3s wrote:On June 09 2025 04:31 mtcn77 wrote:On June 09 2025 03:55 Timebon3s wrote:On June 08 2025 19:48 Biff The Understudy wrote: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. Thank you very much for your reply!! This is very helpful and interesting. I would love to read a blog about this kind of thing. Everyone who tries to learn an instrument knows how hard it is. Reading about someone who «cracked the code» is both useful and gives hope in something that feels impossible to do, even if you’re not a super-duper important MD Jason Ricci learned to play from the best with a custom harp. While I admire the passion, I really want to correct on the casual progress myth. Yes, if you are Paul Butterfield and you have just been disowned by your family, maybe you can pull enough mental strings to pull yourself by the bootstraps and sustain yourself with your art. For regular people, don't harm yourself by self medicating like Flash did. There are medications that work without harming the body, however every medication is poison unless the dose is correct. All that to say, there are stuff even MDs don't self administer. Yeah and Ole Gunnar Soldskjaer had a great career as a forward on Manchester United. Those results didn’t necessarily translate into him being a great manager. Sure, at first the team had a great winning streak, but that’s not uncommon for a team with a new manager. At least not when your previous manager was José Mourinho. He was salty as fuck and pulled the moral of the entire team down the shitter. Because of that, it’s always best to tighten your wheels a bit too much, instead of risking having them fall out mid flight and sink to the bottom of the ocean. You are literally comparing a coach to a player "performance artist". That is what I'm trying to warn against. The medical side is an entirely different career. Just because your friend Biff here who only plays the major scale on the violin, that is a joke, is a good performer does not qualify his teaching skills. Medical is scary stuff. I really find offense to him slighting Korean club culture and question why nobody else has noticed his remarks as offensive to our esports.These kids had prepared meals and study regimens to follow through. Just because Flash busted his wrists like so many other performance arts performers does not give credence to your friend's wild theories on how you should do things low and slow and club houses are bad. Flash had inherent physical advantages to his physique. You can see his slim wrists. That is a recent variation to the carpal tunnel with a weaker ligament. I think those people also lack a muscle inside the carpal ligament with no loss of function. Whether he squandered his chances, or put his good genetics to good use is not the topic. He doesn't need our sympathy. He is a pro in pro scene. If he wants to develop, it is his responsibility to put in the work and with luck he won't blow it with ill medical opinion. Literally, I don't understand why folk treat him like he just lost his plot armor due to his wrist injury and totally neglect the greater issue at large. He did something harmful to his health. It could happen to anybody. He isn't immune, although that one mistake does not make him a bad apple. Stuff goes wrong all the time. It is better to say it isn't Flash's responsibility to fix it as is the case with biff who can have no injuries due to slow practice. That is just wrong. It is not about just speed, it is also bad equipment. I don't know, do you guys think these pros REALLY play live with those off the shelf parts they post on the screen before each game in ASL? You guys that naive? Because I really think they have tweaked it down to the atoms. You can see Flash pull out the ruler to measure the screen distance. Once you accept that, what is to stop you from believing maybe he measured his keyboard ergonomics, or mouse selection wrong? Well, I do. What? :S Some progamers themselves have made the observation that their practice conditions could have been more time and effort efficient. I’d indeed say it’s somewhat more disrespectful to blame players for getting injuries and getting bad medical opinions. Flash is a rather wealthy man and his fingers, wrists etc are his money maker. Of course he’s going to seek medical advice to maintain that, unless he’s a total idiot. Hell it wouldn’t surprise me if his famous ruler was as much about injury prevention after consulting medical advice as it were to keep a consistent setup for reasons of familiarity. I dunno if it’s a language barrier or what, you seem to be misunderstanding what Biff is saying. He’s not advocating practicing slowly, he’s advocating starting slowly until you have something perfect, and then speed it up.
I'm saying it is basic and gross oversimplification. I don't mean it in a bad way. There are stuff you cannot just train at, or treat yourself with your own self.
On June 09 2025 07:42 WombaT wrote:
And injuries are an unfortunate byproduct of over practice, bad technique or just genetic bad luck. But avoiding them through better regimens is just a nice bonus. The main reason to have better practice habits is you get better, faster and increase your potential ceiling.
That is for big muscle groups. You cannot develop a trait that is genetic like I gave Flash's likely wrists. You deal with what you have. You need to have strict warm up regimens in order to avoid busting any of it.
On June 09 2025 07:42 WombaT wrote:
Obviously the Kespa teams produced phenomenal StarCraft players. But could they have produced even better ones? Absolutely IMO. And with the additional benefit of fewer injuries.
That is the poisoned fruit idea. You cannot have your cake and eat it, too. Wrists are very mechanical. The reason we have them is not locking them in place for fine finger dexterity. That is how they get stressed. Going down this path to increase player performance will lead to more injuries like Schumann. You cannot develop your wrists. You can develop your bones, but not moving joints(I'm not being scientifically accurate, but stick with me here). You can develop your bones, but not cartilage. Your collagen which also makes up your cartilage, is also genetic. High range of motion individuals have collagen disorders that give them an increased range of motion. That is not trainable.
On June 09 2025 07:42 WombaT wrote:
Hell the Kespa teams themselves learned this over time and altered some of their methods.
I doubt that. You can at best hope to give talented players a few more years and I'm being generous here with facts. Not all professionals are judicious with their time at rehabilitation as they are with practice. Look at Flash. That is the crazy part. There are things you need to learn without playing - that takes coaching. It veers very close to the fine line of actually what they are not doing at the high end. Flash tried to reintroduce his goliath rushes due to his wrist injury.
I think it is such humility that gets people accustomed to peer pressure at the top. You can scoff at Soulkey's first title. At fourth, people take heed. Nothing has changed, except for the results. It is not through sheer brute force. It is like the Oxford Method vs De-Lorme training regimens. You have to consult in order to find the right intensity cycle for your skill level. It isn't just up, sometimes it is down that is better for where you are at. I wouldn't think pros would leave it to chance and are good at their craft picking which is best.
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Northern Ireland25342 Posts
On June 09 2025 08:28 mtcn77 wrote:Show nested quote +On June 09 2025 07:42 WombaT wrote:On June 09 2025 06:48 mtcn77 wrote:On June 09 2025 06:11 Timebon3s wrote:On June 09 2025 04:31 mtcn77 wrote:On June 09 2025 03:55 Timebon3s wrote:On June 08 2025 19:48 Biff The Understudy wrote: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. Thank you very much for your reply!! This is very helpful and interesting. I would love to read a blog about this kind of thing. Everyone who tries to learn an instrument knows how hard it is. Reading about someone who «cracked the code» is both useful and gives hope in something that feels impossible to do, even if you’re not a super-duper important MD Jason Ricci learned to play from the best with a custom harp. While I admire the passion, I really want to correct on the casual progress myth. Yes, if you are Paul Butterfield and you have just been disowned by your family, maybe you can pull enough mental strings to pull yourself by the bootstraps and sustain yourself with your art. For regular people, don't harm yourself by self medicating like Flash did. There are medications that work without harming the body, however every medication is poison unless the dose is correct. All that to say, there are stuff even MDs don't self administer. Yeah and Ole Gunnar Soldskjaer had a great career as a forward on Manchester United. Those results didn’t necessarily translate into him being a great manager. Sure, at first the team had a great winning streak, but that’s not uncommon for a team with a new manager. At least not when your previous manager was José Mourinho. He was salty as fuck and pulled the moral of the entire team down the shitter. Because of that, it’s always best to tighten your wheels a bit too much, instead of risking having them fall out mid flight and sink to the bottom of the ocean. You are literally comparing a coach to a player "performance artist". That is what I'm trying to warn against. The medical side is an entirely different career. Just because your friend Biff here who only plays the major scale on the violin, that is a joke, is a good performer does not qualify his teaching skills. Medical is scary stuff. I really find offense to him slighting Korean club culture and question why nobody else has noticed his remarks as offensive to our esports.These kids had prepared meals and study regimens to follow through. Just because Flash busted his wrists like so many other performance arts performers does not give credence to your friend's wild theories on how you should do things low and slow and club houses are bad. Flash had inherent physical advantages to his physique. You can see his slim wrists. That is a recent variation to the carpal tunnel with a weaker ligament. I think those people also lack a muscle inside the carpal ligament with no loss of function. Whether he squandered his chances, or put his good genetics to good use is not the topic. He doesn't need our sympathy. He is a pro in pro scene. If he wants to develop, it is his responsibility to put in the work and with luck he won't blow it with ill medical opinion. Literally, I don't understand why folk treat him like he just lost his plot armor due to his wrist injury and totally neglect the greater issue at large. He did something harmful to his health. It could happen to anybody. He isn't immune, although that one mistake does not make him a bad apple. Stuff goes wrong all the time. It is better to say it isn't Flash's responsibility to fix it as is the case with biff who can have no injuries due to slow practice. That is just wrong. It is not about just speed, it is also bad equipment. I don't know, do you guys think these pros REALLY play live with those off the shelf parts they post on the screen before each game in ASL? You guys that naive? Because I really think they have tweaked it down to the atoms. You can see Flash pull out the ruler to measure the screen distance. Once you accept that, what is to stop you from believing maybe he measured his keyboard ergonomics, or mouse selection wrong? Well, I do. What? :S Some progamers themselves have made the observation that their practice conditions could have been more time and effort efficient. I’d indeed say it’s somewhat more disrespectful to blame players for getting injuries and getting bad medical opinions. Flash is a rather wealthy man and his fingers, wrists etc are his money maker. Of course he’s going to seek medical advice to maintain that, unless he’s a total idiot. Hell it wouldn’t surprise me if his famous ruler was as much about injury prevention after consulting medical advice as it were to keep a consistent setup for reasons of familiarity. I dunno if it’s a language barrier or what, you seem to be misunderstanding what Biff is saying. He’s not advocating practicing slowly, he’s advocating starting slowly until you have something perfect, and then speed it up. I'm saying it is basic and gross oversimplification. I don't mean it in a bad way. There are stuff you cannot just train at, or treat yourself with your own self. Show nested quote +On June 09 2025 07:42 WombaT wrote:
And injuries are an unfortunate byproduct of over practice, bad technique or just genetic bad luck. But avoiding them through better regimens is just a nice bonus. The main reason to have better practice habits is you get better, faster and increase your potential ceiling. That is for big muscle groups. You cannot develop a trait that is genetic like I gave Flash's likely wrists. You deal with what you have. You need to have strict warm up regimens in order to avoid busting any of it. Show nested quote +On June 09 2025 07:42 WombaT wrote:
Obviously the Kespa teams produced phenomenal StarCraft players. But could they have produced even better ones? Absolutely IMO. And with the additional benefit of fewer injuries.
That is the poisoned fruit idea. You cannot have your cake and eat it, too. Wrists are very mechanical. The reason we have them is not locking them in place for fine finger dexterity. That is how they get stressed. Going down this path to increase player performance will lead to more injuries like Schumann. You cannot develop your wrists. You can develop your bones, but not moving joints(I'm not being scientifically accurate, but stick with me here). You can develop your bones, but not cartilage. Your collagen which also makes up your cartilage, is also genetic. High range of motion individuals have collagen disorders that give them an increased range of motion. That is not trainable. Show nested quote +On June 09 2025 07:42 WombaT wrote:
Hell the Kespa teams themselves learned this over time and altered some of their methods. I doubt that. You can at best hope to give talented players a few more years and I'm being generous here with facts. Not all professionals are judicious with their time at rehabilitation as they are with practice. Look at Flash. That is the crazy part. There are things you need to learn without playing - that takes coaching. It veers very close to the fine line of actually what they are not doing at the high end. Flash tried to reintroduce his goliath rushes due to his wrist injury. I think it is such humility that gets people accustomed to peer pressure at the top. You can scoff at Soulkey's first title. At fourth, people take heed. Nothing has changed, except for the results. It is not through sheer brute force. It is like the Oxford Method vs De-Lorme training regimens. You have to consult in order to find the right intensity cycle for your skill level. It isn't just up, sometimes it is down that is better for where you are at. I wouldn't think pros would leave it to chance and are good at their craft picking which is best.
But these pros didn’t pick their training regime. Or how much time they got to rehab.
Yeah maybe if you’re latter day Flash you have some leverage to say to KT look I gotta take care of my body and I’m Flash. Maybe he did, I don’t know.
Most players I’d imagine didn’t have that luxury, were subject to inefficient practice that in some cases caused injury.
I find it odd that, given you seem to know your shit medically you’re blaming players for not taking care of themselves, and taking offence at people for attacking Korean ‘club culture’ which put them in that position in the first place.
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On June 09 2025 09:07 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On June 09 2025 08:28 mtcn77 wrote:On June 09 2025 07:42 WombaT wrote:On June 09 2025 06:48 mtcn77 wrote:On June 09 2025 06:11 Timebon3s wrote:On June 09 2025 04:31 mtcn77 wrote:On June 09 2025 03:55 Timebon3s wrote:On June 08 2025 19:48 Biff The Understudy wrote: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. Thank you very much for your reply!! This is very helpful and interesting. I would love to read a blog about this kind of thing. Everyone who tries to learn an instrument knows how hard it is. Reading about someone who «cracked the code» is both useful and gives hope in something that feels impossible to do, even if you’re not a super-duper important MD Jason Ricci learned to play from the best with a custom harp. While I admire the passion, I really want to correct on the casual progress myth. Yes, if you are Paul Butterfield and you have just been disowned by your family, maybe you can pull enough mental strings to pull yourself by the bootstraps and sustain yourself with your art. For regular people, don't harm yourself by self medicating like Flash did. There are medications that work without harming the body, however every medication is poison unless the dose is correct. All that to say, there are stuff even MDs don't self administer. Yeah and Ole Gunnar Soldskjaer had a great career as a forward on Manchester United. Those results didn’t necessarily translate into him being a great manager. Sure, at first the team had a great winning streak, but that’s not uncommon for a team with a new manager. At least not when your previous manager was José Mourinho. He was salty as fuck and pulled the moral of the entire team down the shitter. Because of that, it’s always best to tighten your wheels a bit too much, instead of risking having them fall out mid flight and sink to the bottom of the ocean. You are literally comparing a coach to a player "performance artist". That is what I'm trying to warn against. The medical side is an entirely different career. Just because your friend Biff here who only plays the major scale on the violin, that is a joke, is a good performer does not qualify his teaching skills. Medical is scary stuff. I really find offense to him slighting Korean club culture and question why nobody else has noticed his remarks as offensive to our esports.These kids had prepared meals and study regimens to follow through. Just because Flash busted his wrists like so many other performance arts performers does not give credence to your friend's wild theories on how you should do things low and slow and club houses are bad. Flash had inherent physical advantages to his physique. You can see his slim wrists. That is a recent variation to the carpal tunnel with a weaker ligament. I think those people also lack a muscle inside the carpal ligament with no loss of function. Whether he squandered his chances, or put his good genetics to good use is not the topic. He doesn't need our sympathy. He is a pro in pro scene. If he wants to develop, it is his responsibility to put in the work and with luck he won't blow it with ill medical opinion. Literally, I don't understand why folk treat him like he just lost his plot armor due to his wrist injury and totally neglect the greater issue at large. He did something harmful to his health. It could happen to anybody. He isn't immune, although that one mistake does not make him a bad apple. Stuff goes wrong all the time. It is better to say it isn't Flash's responsibility to fix it as is the case with biff who can have no injuries due to slow practice. That is just wrong. It is not about just speed, it is also bad equipment. I don't know, do you guys think these pros REALLY play live with those off the shelf parts they post on the screen before each game in ASL? You guys that naive? Because I really think they have tweaked it down to the atoms. You can see Flash pull out the ruler to measure the screen distance. Once you accept that, what is to stop you from believing maybe he measured his keyboard ergonomics, or mouse selection wrong? Well, I do. What? :S Some progamers themselves have made the observation that their practice conditions could have been more time and effort efficient. I’d indeed say it’s somewhat more disrespectful to blame players for getting injuries and getting bad medical opinions. Flash is a rather wealthy man and his fingers, wrists etc are his money maker. Of course he’s going to seek medical advice to maintain that, unless he’s a total idiot. Hell it wouldn’t surprise me if his famous ruler was as much about injury prevention after consulting medical advice as it were to keep a consistent setup for reasons of familiarity. I dunno if it’s a language barrier or what, you seem to be misunderstanding what Biff is saying. He’s not advocating practicing slowly, he’s advocating starting slowly until you have something perfect, and then speed it up. I'm saying it is basic and gross oversimplification. I don't mean it in a bad way. There are stuff you cannot just train at, or treat yourself with your own self. On June 09 2025 07:42 WombaT wrote:
And injuries are an unfortunate byproduct of over practice, bad technique or just genetic bad luck. But avoiding them through better regimens is just a nice bonus. The main reason to have better practice habits is you get better, faster and increase your potential ceiling. That is for big muscle groups. You cannot develop a trait that is genetic like I gave Flash's likely wrists. You deal with what you have. You need to have strict warm up regimens in order to avoid busting any of it. On June 09 2025 07:42 WombaT wrote:
Obviously the Kespa teams produced phenomenal StarCraft players. But could they have produced even better ones? Absolutely IMO. And with the additional benefit of fewer injuries.
That is the poisoned fruit idea. You cannot have your cake and eat it, too. Wrists are very mechanical. The reason we have them is not locking them in place for fine finger dexterity. That is how they get stressed. Going down this path to increase player performance will lead to more injuries like Schumann. You cannot develop your wrists. You can develop your bones, but not moving joints(I'm not being scientifically accurate, but stick with me here). You can develop your bones, but not cartilage. Your collagen which also makes up your cartilage, is also genetic. High range of motion individuals have collagen disorders that give them an increased range of motion. That is not trainable. On June 09 2025 07:42 WombaT wrote:
Hell the Kespa teams themselves learned this over time and altered some of their methods. I doubt that. You can at best hope to give talented players a few more years and I'm being generous here with facts. Not all professionals are judicious with their time at rehabilitation as they are with practice. Look at Flash. That is the crazy part. There are things you need to learn without playing - that takes coaching. It veers very close to the fine line of actually what they are not doing at the high end. Flash tried to reintroduce his goliath rushes due to his wrist injury. I think it is such humility that gets people accustomed to peer pressure at the top. You can scoff at Soulkey's first title. At fourth, people take heed. Nothing has changed, except for the results. It is not through sheer brute force. It is like the Oxford Method vs De-Lorme training regimens. You have to consult in order to find the right intensity cycle for your skill level. It isn't just up, sometimes it is down that is better for where you are at. I wouldn't think pros would leave it to chance and are good at their craft picking which is best. But these pros didn’t pick their training regime. Or how much time they got to rehab. Yeah maybe if you’re latter day Flash you have some leverage to say to KT look I gotta take care of my body and I’m Flash. Maybe he did, I don’t know. Most players I’d imagine didn’t have that luxury, were subject to inefficient practice that in some cases caused injury. I find it odd that, given you seem to know your shit medically you’re blaming players for not taking care of themselves, and taking offence at people for attacking Korean ‘club culture’ which put them in that position in the first place.
Yes, as I do any performance artist. My physical therapy and rehabilitation professor said and I quote, "Performance artists have shorter lives. Medical is also a performance field". You come to expect you would extend lives. Wouldn't you be irked? This isn't stuff I know, it is alien to me. I looked up just in case there were important stuff I missed back in the day.
Of course, I blame the players. They are performers themselves, if they want to go deep into their field they have to have this information and like I said the need comes before the necessity. It might be too late trying to do things on your own.
That is why I upheld the Korean club culture. You have a coach and a chef. That isn't wrong, although you might educate me on that if those side parties pushed players in the wrong direction. Korean culture seemed healthy to me per se what youth do on their own.
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What EXACTLY are you in disagreement with mtcn? I'm asking this sincerely because, to me, you seem to be writing an entire paper not because you disagree with literally anyone here, but because you feel a desire to get attention from people.
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On June 09 2025 16:02 Magic Powers wrote:
What EXACTLY are you in disagreement with mtcn? I'm asking this sincerely because, to me, you seem to be writing an entire paper not because you disagree with literally anyone here, but because you feel a desire to get attention from people.
I find offense to some remarks about Korean club houses. They aren't the reason we aren't in this situation.
I told you there is an entire FTR career on that and there is untapped potential. I think this needs better recognition. You might be in the AI age, but I'm not. When I feel the need for some information I respect that I will only find it in a professional, or a library like Edward Bernays does.
I could go on about how some players never take their puffy coat off. Healing requires a certain body temperature. Sure you might like Flash, it is just that I never recall seeing him like that.
PS: some people are whitewashing Flash's own doings unto a whole esports culture.
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I honestly think it’s better to ignore that guy at that point. He does that in every thread.
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Netherlands4990 Posts
He's a troll in my book, and his MD English can't be read fluently without wondering wth he's actually trying to say.
His use of vocabulary only make his posts more abstract and thus don't enrich the reader.
It's as if every other sentence he writes contain at least some contradicting words. Also he loves to stretch whatever topic is discussed out of its proportions.
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United Kingdom1689 Posts
We gotta ignore mtcn. I'm sorry mtcn if you're genuinely trying to contribute but what you're saying generally is derailing at best and at worst just baffling and frustrating.
My two pence as someone who played guitar for many years and only ever got to the point where I could play very hard pieces to an okay level, and never better than that, I have definitely experienced the ceiling of the brute force approach when it comes to an instrument. I got to the point where I couldn't practice more, was incurring injuries, and barely improving at all. I was ever more aware of how far I was from being any of the players whom I looked up to, with their clean, incredible technique, completely at ease with the instrument. I was tense, bent, stretched. I had hit the absolute limit of what the brute force approach could do for me, with whatever my level of talent is.
I've returned now to learning a new style on the same instrument, and have been doing it the right way (i.e. more or less as Biff lays out) for about a year and a half now. I can already see that many of the weaknesses that plagued my end-stage playing before, are being ironed out now, early on, and I would already class myself as a better player for my level than I ever was before. My feel, tone, expression, everything is much, much better. I'm far less mistake-prone, far less injury-prone, and can trust my technique. Once I get something right, it stays right - I'm not throwing a dart at a dartboard over my shoulder.
All this to say, I believe this absolutely would apply to SC as well. It's not a 1:1 analogy, nothing is, but I could never advocate the brute force approach for reaching the optimal performance of any individual. I believe the optimum will always be a long way beyond that, even if that individual can achieve something great with suboptimal practice. That's not evidence of a successful approach.
I don't know how far current Korean SC culture is now from the ideal set of practices, but to practice right is better for everyone, players and spectators alike, I'm sure of that, and we should not fantasise about a time which was built on the burning of people's mental and physical health.
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EPT![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/A9yotoB.png)
