Friday, December 21, 2012

User Participation Day, Number One!




Enough dallying!  Here is the question:






    Playing a card game? Do some practice hands over breakfast.

    Board game? Do some problems.


  2. Go on Youtube and look up any 100 meter race; this illustrates my point very well. Before the start, there are two commands: on your marks, and set. On your marks just means "start to get lined up" whereas set is actually "the gun's about to go off, get ready and hold position". They'll look exactly the same after "Set," but watch when "On your marks" gets called. They never just drop a squat and put their feet in the blocks; they'll jump around, take a few quick steps, back into the blocks in some peculiar way. Each runner has his/her own ritual which takes them all the way from standing up to on their knees with their feet in the blocks and their hands behind the line.

    The idea is to have a warm-up routine which prepares you well for whatever activity you're about to do and to do it EXACTLY the same way every time. It keeps the competitor from feeling nervous because the routine is familiar, and the familiar is reassuring. For these runners, it may be a high school dual meet, or it may be the Olympics, but these routines remind them that it's the same competition they've always run: a straightaway and a finish line. I think that idea holds for any competition with a standard set of rules.

  3. I'm the type of guy that get's nervous when you play someone that you haven't played before, so much that it makes me really nervous, to the point where basic things like l-canceling starts to become alien. This is normal for many people, especially if they are new to competitve melee.

    What i do when i face a new player is i try to imagine them as a cpu, now of course i'm well aware that this "cpu" is much smarter, and can react to anything that i do, but it helps alot in the thinking process (well for me) as to what to do, so i play the match as if i was traning, or simply put, it makes me confident that i can beat him, there's also no fear of the unknown when you have this kind of mindset.

    This has really worked for me, especially considering how nervous i would get, even though i'm extremly sure i'm better than them.