Practicing

This once again will be a slightly more theoretical post.

I want to address a thought for some, and a burning question for others. To some, the answer may be obvious, but it wasn't always that clear for me.

What exactly separates someone like you or I from one of the higher level players in the scene. I'm not talking about the Korean progamers, since if you want to know how they play so great, take a look at their 15 hour a day practice schedule. I'm actually talking about the great foreign players around, namely people like Shauni, Oystein, Nony, JF, and others. I've listed these particular players because they are my favourite foreigners. I always wanted to know how they were able to reach high ranks on the ladders and become starcraft powerhouses without a corporate sponsorship backing them up.

The first piece of the puzzle is one which I located in a few interviews of people such as these. I noticed that just about all of them had ample time to practice, i.e. most of them started playing competitively at least before 2004. The only exception to this rule was a player named mouz.kolll or something, who apparently reached B- on iccup in 5 months. He went on to do great in WCG I believe, making it to fourth place behind Jaedong, Bisu, and Stork. Although he was without a doubt a very strong player for a foreigner, he likely got very lucky with his bracket placement, and despite not playing starcraft until very late, he did have experience with other rts, point being he also had a decent amount of time to practice.

Hopefully you are starting to see what I'm getting at, but I'll continue regardless. The next thing which I noticed, is all of these players played incredulous amounts of games. Don't believe me? Download one of their replay packs. The replay programs automatically sort them by number, and each account for these guys can rack up a few thousand replays. This is often known as mass gaming, and it's something which just about every strong player has done.

I needn't go further with the puzzle analogy. That's it. Time and Practice. If you want to get good at starcraft, you need time and practice. Don't make the mistake I did and focus most of your attention on watching replays of great players rather than playing. Of course you must always be up to date on the latest builds, but if you spend most of your time watching rather than playing, you'll find it difficult to execute any of these strategies you've learned about. In my case, I got very good with the strategy part, but it took me two years have dicking around to figure out that what I needed to do was put my nose to the grindstone and start playing a ton of games. Unfortunately a few months after I actually started doing that, I had to quit in favour of school grades. I'm going to help all of you now.

TL;DR UNTIL HERE:
1. You won't become a great player quickly. It takes time, no matter how talented you are. Don't let that discourage, instead let it enlighten you that you'll need to put effort into it.
2. Watching replays and studying is important, very important, but don't make the same mistake I did and spend most of your time on that. You might be able to think like bisu, but until you can play half as good as he can, you're still going to get manhandled by everyone from D+ on in iccup.
3. If you have several hours a week (or day for that matter) free, then you are a prime candidate to become great a starcraft player, whether it be Brood War or SC2. Don't let it govern your life though. The moment it adversely affects your schoolwork or employment is the moment when you need to stop. If there was a time when you actually could make a living from playing Starcraft Broodwar, it's gone now with the demographic shift to SC2.
4. The best thing you can do to practice extensively is to get some friends interested in Starcraft. I've been very fortunate to have a brother that was once as interested in Starcraft as I was, and while we've both alt+qq starcraft for the most part, we had a great deal of fun playing against each other, and the competitive nature of our rivalry was largely responsible for me getting anywhere at all in SCBW.

gl hf
Rad301