As is becoming a common trend with my content, I promised that I would write this article a long time ago and never did. I set down an outline for a mentality guide back in December, but after a series of tournaments where I struggled heavily with anxiety and panic attacks, I questioned whether I was in a place to write a productive guide for others. Now that I’m ready to do that, I hope you find it helpful. I’m going to divide this write-up into a few sections, each focusing on a type of mentality problem that I’ve either experienced or watched a lot of people struggle with and my advice to keep in mind when dealing with that specific type of issue. Obviously all of the advice given in this write-up is based on my own experiences and perspective, but again I do hope that it’s useful or insightful in some way for others.

Section 1: Setting and Managing Expectations

I think it’s safe to say that I have a lot of experience failing to set appropriate expectations for myself, and subsequently I’ve had a lot of chances to learn what not to do. In my opinion, the unhealthy expectations that many players hold for themselves are based on a series of inaccurate, incomplete, or unrealistic assumptions that they want or believe to be true. These assumptions are:

You hold complete control over whether you win or lose a given set Your placing in bracket is directly tied to your performance and overall skill Improvement as a player is immediately reflected in your tournament performances Your overall skill and your performance on any given day are or should be the same There is a singular goal which will satisfy your drive to win

Collectively, these five assumptions often lead players to treat competing in Smash as if it is a one player game, where as they level up they will always be stronger and better able to defeat the other competitors until they have “beaten” the game by becoming the best player. While there is certainly a kernel of truth to each of those assumptions, they are not wholly accurate.

The first of these assumptions is certainly at least somewhat true; if you play well enough you are capable of winning any given game and if you walk off the stage 4 times you will almost certainly lose that same game. However, this belief fails to account for the fact that you are playing against another competitor. While it is easy to highlight the one, few, or several mistakes that may have been key to you losing a set, it also needs to be acknowledged that your opponent was there to capitalize on those mistakes and had already kept the game competitive enough for those few mistakes to make the difference. It sounds simple, but treating fellow competitors as NPCs in your quest to be the best player is an easy way to frustrate yourself, because those players won’t always act the same way — just as you have good and bad days, so will they. It is fully possible for you to lose while playing well or win while playing terribly, and understanding that is really important to breaking down the other four assumptions.

Along a similar line of thought, the next three assumptions all come together to create unrealistic expectations of linear improvement. In theory, as you keep playing you will improve, and as you improve you will be able to beat people you previously lost to, which will in turn lead to higher average placings. However, the other players at your locals are probably trying to improve, too, and every player has what I think of as a “range of skill” based on a million indistinct factors that can fluctuate on or during any given day. These two elements mean that comparing yourself to the people around you won’t necessarily indicate your own improvement (or lack thereof). Beating someone in bracket one week and then losing to them the next rarely means that you got worse — it could mean that you played well last week and they played badly last week; or that they played well this week and you played badly this week; or very likely some combination of all four that led to their gameplay being better than yours during that set but not the one prior. Add in the fact that you both may have improved between the two sets or have approached the second set differently based on how the first one went, and I hope you can see why measuring your improvement or skill by your performance in individual sets isn’t always accurate.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of trying to conceptualize your own skill level based on how you do in bracket, setting expectations that you “should” meet based on how good you think you are (and may well be), and then being upset when you don’t meet or exceed those expectations every single time. However, variability goes both ways. Just as you sometimes out-do your expectations by playing well one day, you may have another day where things just don’t go quite right. That’s both natural and part of the learning process. On a personal level, I know that my potential as a player is way above my average level of play in tournament, but one good tournament does not cause me to set my standards at doing that well every time; doing so would be mistakenly assuming that playing well one day represents an overall improvement in my gameplay that will carry forward into all of my future performances. Sometimes good days are just good days, nothing more. Just because I played well once doesn’t mean I’m an amazing player, just like playing badly once doesn’t make me terrible. How you perform in tournament is one snapshot of how good you were on that day, but none of those snapshots by themselves will necessarily represent your overall skill level very accurately, and believing that they all should do so is how you create over-burdensome expectations.

However, having expectations by themselves isn’t a bad thing, as they can often be great motivators for improvement. Assigning too much importance to those expectations, however, can be bad. I often see players put so much emphasis on meeting whatever expectations they’ve set, be it making PMRank, making their local PR, or placing top 8 at their local, that they 1) stress themselves out excessively over achieving their goal in a way that hurts their performance, and 2) care more about the goal than how they get there. Often, this goal is whatever the player perceives as the bar they must meet to be “good”, which is another moving target, and honestly, one that’s near impossible to hit. The better you get, the more you realize how much better someone else is and how far you have to go, and the target will move higher. I’ve watched this happen to countless people and been through it myself after finally reaching SoCal PR. This is a natural part of improving, but focusing more on the goal than on improving in a way that will eventually lead to you reaching it (especially by telling yourself that you need to do well this tournament to make PR, you need to win this set to make top 8, etc.) often leads to avoidable stress and negative pressure. Speaking from experience as someone who has already played what I believed to be my last tournament nearly two years ago and who failed spectacularly to meet my “final” goals at the time, you will have another chance to meet those goals, and as many chances after that as you need or want. You do not have to win this set, but telling yourself that you do will distract you from the things you have to do to actually win that set.

This section is more conceptual and less advice-heavy than the others will be, but the TLDR is just to be nice to yourself. Progress can be slow and often non-linear, especially with a game as hard as Smash, and setting unrealistic expectations is often detrimental to your own improvement as well as your enjoyment of the game.

Section 2: In-Game Mentality Problems

Both this section and the next are going to focus on specific things that I’ve either experienced or heard others talk about that are common problems relating to mentality, and how they can be approached constructively. There are three main types of problems that seem extremely common and fall into this category. Because I’m not sure how to better phrase them, I’ll describe them the way I would if I was experiencing that issue and explaining it to someone.

I do well until I realize that I’m potentially going to win, especially against a player I consider better than me, and then I choke. I struggle to make comebacks and not get steamrolled if my opponent establishes an early lead. Sometimes I just zone out and can’t get myself to stop doing X thing that I know is bad or keeps getting me punished.

In general, I think that realizing you’re on pace to win a game can have two negative effects on your gameplay. First, it can distract you from the game itself, especially if you start thinking about what happens if you win or if you lose, and secondly it can cause you to question or rethink a gameplan that is already working for you. In general, being distracted is usually a bad thing, and engaging your autopilot while you think about the implications of winning or losing the set is an easy way to make sure you do in fact lose.

If you’re playing someone you consider to be better than you, realizing that you’re winning and thinking about how good they are may also disrupt how you were playing because you start playing not to lose, rather than to win. The distinction between these two approaches is crucial. If you’re playing to win, your goal is to beat the other player, to extend the lead you already have, while playing not to lose focuses around just avoiding the other player and trying not to give them chances to close the % or stock gap between you two. In general, I think that most people with healthy mentalities will place their emphasis on playing to win, although that’s a whole other topic that lots of write-ups have explained better than I can, but more important to this issue you want to avoid drastically altering your game plan once you realize that you’re winning, because that’s the game plan which helped you attain a lead in the first place. I see a lot of players get small leads in a game, then focus on just getting chip damage or not dying, which is a perfectly reasonable approach when at high % with a stock lead, and then carry that approach into the rest of the game, cornering themselves and playing overly conservative at times where they maybe would have capitalized on openings earlier in the game. If you find yourself doing this, the best advice I can give is to try and focus on things one stock at a time, removing the context of any lead you may have or how the set overall is going, and just prioritize what you have to do to take the next stock. If you lose a stock and start to feel yourself getting distracted or worried by how the game is now going, take your time on the respawn platform and think about what’s been working for you this game, what led to you having a lead, and then try to continue doing that (unless you notice your opponent adapting to what you were doing, in which case obviously you want to think about what to do against their new strategy). Basically, you just don’t want to get thrown off course by realizing that you’re doing something right.Use this realization to your advantage and gain momentum, if you can; if you can’t, then try not to let it impact how you’re playing since what you’re doing is already working.

Most of that advice also applies if you feel as if you struggle to make comebacks or gain momentum when you’re currently losing a game, but with some obvious differences. The main difference is that instead of identifying what win conditions you’ve already been meeting to take the lead, you want to figure out both what win conditions you need to reach, and how to mitigate the strategy from your opponent that’s been working until this point. Conceptually, these are the same things that you want to do when you start any game, but a lot of people get thrown off if the start of a game goes badly, and shift way too hard towards either trying to force openings where they don’t exist in order to quickly even up the game or playing way too safe because they’ve already lost multiple interactions, and overcorrecting in either of those directions can just allow the opponent to steamroll you. The most important thing you can do when losing a game is to calmly take your time to evaluate what specifically has been working for your opponent or not working for you and subsequently what needs to change for you to win the game. Often it doesn’t need to be some huge change, and just making sure your head is in the game is all it takes to start making a comeback.

This brings me to the third problem a lot of people seem to have, which is actually maintaining focus mid-set and being able to not only identify what’s happening or needs to happen but actually make that change without going on autopilot. This is a problem that’s definitely associated with the other two, since if you know what you need to and can’t do it then that knowledge isn’t helping you very much. At least for me, the most important thing to do in these situations to to focus on one thing at a time, something tangible that you can change. Just saying to yourself that you’re playing badly, or need to stop approaching, etc. isn’t usually helpful because while that may tell you what’s wrong, it doesn’t provide a clear solution for you to implement, and especially if you’re feeling shook or like the set is going badly it’s helpful to keep your thoughts oriented towards issues with immediate solutions. When you’re trying to make a change to your gameplay mid-set, I try to answer three questions: What am I trying not to do, why was I doing that in the first place, and what should I be doing instead? The first one is obvious, it’s what you’re trying to change, but if you can figure out why you were consistently choosing that option then you can identify what situations you need to be looking out for, and it’s much easier to stop doing one thing if you have something else to do instead rather than the blanket idea “don’t do X”. So for example, if I’m playing Ivysaur vs GnW and I keep getting CC punished for using sour dtilt at close range, after identifying that as a problem I need to figure out why I’m doing that (it’s a good option if he’s further away, but I frequently mis-judge its range), and mentally check myself every time I do it. How you go about this probably changes a lot person to person, for me I literally tell myself mentally “that’s a dash attack” when I do that dtilt, and eventually I start to pre-emptively think “that’s a dash attack” when I see that situation come up so that I stop doing the bad option and replace it with something better. Over time you want to not do the same thing every time that situation arises, since that gets predictable, but for the short-term this is a helpful way to stop yourself from doing something bad or to get yourself doing something good mid-set.

Section 3: Frustration and Salt

Getting frustrated is what people usually think of when they talk about mentality, and not being able to keep those feelings in check is an easy way to not enjoy playing or competing in Smash. There are three main areas that I feel like are especially common sources of salt, and approaching each of them in a constructive fashion can help a lot with both your improvement and your enjoyment of playing PM.

Being frustrated with mechanics in the game or with aspects of matchups Being frustrated with your own gameplay Entertaining irrational solutions to fuel your frustration instead of letting it dissipate

I think of each of these three as being more distinct than the issues in the last two sections, so I’ll break them down in different sub-sections.

1: Frustration with game mechanics or matchups

Let’s be honest, nearly everyone has been through this at some point. Be it Falco’s/Wolf’s laser, GnW’s cc dtilt, being reaction tech chased seemingly forever, or something else, we’ve all experienced frustration after dealing with something that annoyed us in the game. In general, the initial response to anything that induces this kind of frustration is to try and write off what’s happening as being dumb or not how the game “should” be playing out. Sometimes it’s because you think the mechanic itself shouldn’t work the way it does, sometimes it’s because you don’t think you should be losing to it, but the resulting feeling is the same. Sometimes the salt will go away as you get more used to how that mechanic works and aren’t as surprised by how it can be used, but in a lot of cases it requires actual work to improve how you approach the situations that were frustrating you.

In my opinion, there are a few really important components to not being frustrated with a given mechanic. First, you can’t just play as if it doesn’t exist. I see that a lot, especially with lower-level players, where they try to play in a way that would work if that mechanic didn’t exist (running at GnW with weak moves he can cc, for example), and then get frustrated at losing to that mechanic because they aren’t succeeding in beating it. The problem is, you don’t get to play the game on an even footing until you can figure out how to beat or otherwise mitigate whatever it is that you’re struggling with. You can do as well as you want in other aspects of the game, but if there’s something that will beat or tilt you every time then you still won’t be able to win until you address that as a problem. Towards this end, you should be trying to recognize when “it” is going to happen, so that you’re ready for it and can at least attempt to respond rather than being caught off guard. The better you understand why your opponent is going to do something in a given situation, the more insight you have into what makes their strategy effective.

Second, learn what you should be doing to beat that mechanic if you don’t already know. For some things, like tech chasing, the answer is usually just to improve overall so that you lose neutral less often and are getting chased less, but for a lot of the strategies that make people salty there are specific things to do or not do that will help a lot in combating those strategies. If you aren’t sure what you should be doing, ask your character’s Discord or people who play the character you’re struggling against. Until you know what you should be doing, you won’t be able to move forward with actually beating whatever it is that’s giving you trouble.

Third, use your success at executing those strategies as your benchmark for short-term improvement, not how well you’re doing in terms of winning games. Every time you beat that thing that used to feel so infuriating, that’s a small victory. For me, it became immensely satisfying to do something as minor as powershield a Falco laser or pivot back air through a Samus missile because I made it my goal first and foremost to learn how to deal with those moves themselves before I focused on beating the players using them. Like I said, if you can’t deal with one specific strategy then you aren’t even engaging the other player on a level playing field, so focusing on winning games in the short term without resolving those underlying problems will at some point stunt your improvement and ability to handle those matchups. This is a concept that took me a long time to figure out, because my natural inclination was to dislike interacting with moves or mechanics that annoyed me even when I was beating them, but being able to take satisfaction in how you deal with something you don’t like can help a lot with mitigating or avoiding frustration.

This isn’t really part of the three components that I just outlined, but it’s similar in that it helped me a lot with my mentality in approaching matchups that I disliked, so I’ll include it here. Part of what I see a lot of people get frustrated by in matchups they dislike goes back to the idea that a character can do things they aren’t used to or don’t think should happen. Icies shouldn’t be able to kill you off a grab, Puff should be more comboable, Wolf’s lasers shouldn’t be so oppressive, etc. This is usually framed by the character you play, but generally we want the game to feel uniform, and that isn’t always the case in every matchup. The way I conceptualize this for myself is to think of it as if I’m fighting a video game boss. When we fight a video game boss, we often need to learn about their specific powers or characteristics and fight them in a different way. Some of them take a ton of hits to kill, and you have to grind them down. Some of them will kill you in two hits and you have to really prioritize not making a mistake against them. They all have their own win conditions unique to the characteristics of the boss you’re fighting, and it’s up to you to meet those conditions with the tools available to you.

Framing matchups through this lens helped me to stop making excuses when I lost to a character that I felt “broke the rules” by hitting harder than I could, living longer than I could, or otherwise doing things that my character wasn’t designed to do, because I knew that I could still beat each of those characters if I had a strong enough game plan and executed it well enough. This thought process put the onus on me to overcome whatever came my way, which proved to be a much healthier approach than trying to ignore what made each character different to fight.

2: Frustration with your own gameplay

The other side of salt surfaces when you’re frustrated with yourself and the way that you’re playing. It can be frustrating to play badly or to miss crucial pieces of tech skill, which is an experience that literally everyone will have at some point in their competitive career. Sometimes it feels completely outside your control whether you play well or badly, but thinking through how you respond to it can help a lot with not getting salty.

The most important thing that I can say about this topic is that in addition to developing your A game, the way you would ideally like to play in tournament if you are playing well, you also need to develop your B, C, and even D games for when things are not going so well. To use a simple analogy, if you are a Fox player who is heavily reliant on doubleshine-grab, but you keep side-b’ing off the stage instead of doing your doubleshine, you need to be able to play without that tool or risk throwing away the game by trying something which you can’t do at that moment, even if you usually can. If you don’t have a B game, then being unable to play well and consistently execute every aspect of your gameplan (AKA playing badly) will always lead you to lose, because you have no way to overcome the weaknesses that get exposed in how you play. Unless you’re relying on playing the best you’ve ever played in every tournament set, you need to be able to adapt to playing worse than you’d like and develop strategies on the fly to work around the weaknesses that you’re identifying in yourself. This goes for both tech skill and the more mental aspects of the game — if you find yourself dropping combos or making consistently bad decisions in neutral then you need to simplify what you’re doing to a level that you can process/execute at your current level of play. Being able to do this isn’t just an important part of improving your consistency as a player; it will help you avoid being frustrated because one part of your gameplay not quite clicking won’t make you feel as if your entire game plan has fallen apart and there’s no point in continuing to play.

If you think that you really are just playing irredeemably badly and find yourself getting frustrated, take a break. Playing while you’re upset will make you notice your own faults even more, which will further frustrate you and create a cycle that compounds upon itself. It’s okay that you won’t always play at or above your “normal” level of execution every day, and if you can develop your B game from those experiences then that’s still super valuable, but if not then don’t force yourself to continue playing when doing so will only make you more frustrated. Going back to section 1, at the end of the day you play Smash to have fun, and you’ll have a much easier time improving if you aren’t constantly frustrated by the game and how you’re playing it.

Something I’ve always done outside of practice sessions is use my bad days as motivation to practice, since practice can lead to more consistent tech skill and a reduced likelihood of messing things up when it matters. When I come home from a tournament where I underperformed according to my standards, I almost always either review my VODs or practice tech skill, which allows me to channel the emotion I’m feeling towards something productive and still game-related instead of being salty.

3: Entertaining irrational solutions

The last thing I notice a ton in others and previously in myself is that people start expressing their frustration in unproductive ways, most commonly by suggesting that they should either quit or switch mains because they just aren’t enjoying what they’re doing right now. It’s totally valid to not always enjoy yourself while you’re playing, although I encourage you to think about why that is, but specifically thinking about these ideas as a way out of whatever you’re struggling with right now is usually neither realistic nor productive. This is because they lead you to think about the problem as something unsolvable in your current situation, and generally allow you to overexaggerate the situation beyond what it is.

The first thing to realize, is that your frustration is almost always going to be impacting your judgement when you think about something like quitting or switching mains. You only think about the positives of doing either, and only of the negatives of continuing to play as you have, but there are plenty of negatives associated with doing either that you want to be able to consider with a clear head. If you genuinely think that you want to quit or switch mains, you don’t have to make that decision permanently at any point, try it out and see how you feel. Often, taking time away from the game or away from your main will make you realize how much you enjoy playing smash, and why your character suits you well, but if it doesn’t then maybe you do have a longer-term decision to make.

There are times when switching mains or quitting altogether are rational and healthy decisions, so I’m not saying that these thoughts are always counterproductive or salt-driven, but they often are. Entertaining these thoughts not only leads you to continue being frustrated while playing, but often makes the situation worse because you start noticing everything that frustrates you about continuing to play/play your main. Try to take the opportunity to evaluate what you enjoy or appreciate about playing, and turn your self-talk into something more positive if you can.

Section 4: Wrap-up and Reflection

Everything in this write-up is something I’ve learned the hard way, and something I don’t want you to struggle with if you don’t have to. I’m a firm believer that mentality is the hardest part of competing in Smash, and I’ve also learned firsthand how much more enjoyable playing is when you are able to take a healthy approach to the game. These are the tools that have helped me not only improve to a point where I can challenge SoCal’s best players, but do so in a way that reduced the amount of stress and frustration that I felt for a long time while playing. They won’t all be applicable to you at any given point in time, and maybe none of them are right now, but I hope this write-up is helpful for someone when they need it.

Most of these lessons were passed along by players far wiser than me, so thank you to the people who have mentored me through the long journey that’s been my PM career so far.