Burn Out – How to Keep from Becoming Extinguished

Ahoi,
An article that isn’t a Yomi tournament report, that’s a first.  Time to start posting on how to improve your game.

You know that feeling you get when no matter how hard you want something, impediments keep getting in the way and add to the frustration?  That’s where I was at trying to get into top 10 on the yomi leaderboard with Val as well as with SSF4 ae in general.  A week full of Sets/Jaina make any bad draws by Val into bad games and that any loss negates 2+ wins, makes it much more difficult to keep any gains more than a few games.

In SSF4 ae, playing against Ryu so much as Juri makes winning a difficult chore.  His better fireball, dp and more efficient damage output are all challenging to overcome.

So, how do I keep from raging and hulk smashing screens when winning just isn’t happening?

• Take a break:  If you want to throw everything out the window, take a break, can’t stress this one enough.  If you get to the point where all you feel is fustration/stress, any sort of learning you would be doing is going to be impaired and current playing will suffer.  Also any learning you’re doing will need some time to be absorbed and processed.  I just came back to SSF4 ae after taking a month off, my Adon has gone from trying to climb back to B after losing it  to currently maintaining a B rank two weeks after losing all my bp.
• Cross train:  If your windows are still intact, try cross training.  Just like in physical exercise where if you want a perfect body, all of it needs to be trained, not just a few specific muscles.  The same applies to becoming good at a game, you need to know all aspects of it, not just the options available to your choice of character, race, deck, etc.  While cross training, you’re also taking a break and letting what you have learned get processed.  Playing Juri for a while made me more aware of air games with her dive kick (I’m well aware of it not being that safe of a choice)  and this has translated to a better air jaguar kick game with Adon.  This also applies between games as my opening play awareness from Yomi has bettered both my SF4 and MtG play.
• Keep things in perspective:  Unless you are playing in a tournament, winning & losing are less important than just playing around with things to learn how they work.  Just tried out a few new blockstrings Adon.  Guess how many DP’s I ate figuring out which ones were useful, too many.  Easy to get fustrated here. but the DP’s were my opponents way of saying, “OBJECTION!!!!!!!!!!!” err, I mean, “Try something else, this will lose you a tournament”