Hello everyone. Allow me to preface the lengthy post by introducing myself. My name is Locke Ramsey, and my current tag is Locke Robster. I main Ganondorf in Super Smash Bros. Melee, and I have been playing the game competitively for 2 years as of today. I am from Charlotte, NC, and I am writing this thread today as a way to reflect upon myself and as a guide for every newcomer to read so that they might understand that struggles and accomplishments you can encounter in the first 2 years of competitive play, as well as some major hurdles you will have to overcome. Some of these issues may only pertain to me, and some might be applicable to everyone. This isn't going to be the most organized piece of writing that I've done, so apologies ahead of time if it seems like I'm rambling about certain things, as I have the tendency to do that.



Without further adieu, let's get started.

Choose Your Character

This was a very difficult lesson for me to learn overtime. When I first got into this game competitively back on April 10th, 2013, I was a huge fan of The Legend of Zelda series, and I wanted to main Link and Young Link. I stuck with this character choice for a few months until the summer when I had a serious conversation with a few of my smash friends at the time about choosing a better character. Still wanting only to play a Zelda character, I wanted to choose between Ganondorf and Sheik, since they are higher on the tier list than Link is. I didn't feel like playing Sheik because, at the time, I felt like she would have been too easy to play, and that I would get bored of her. Ganondorf appealed to me though because he is my favorite video game villain ever, and being able to play as him would be really cool. A huge struggle that I would have had to endure if I continued to play Link and Young Link would be that there weren't any Link mains in NC that could have given me guidance to help me, and there was only one Young Link main, but I didn't think to ask him since Young Link isn't that good of a character. When I proposed that I should choose Ganondorf, I was immediately suggested to talk to the most recent Ganondorf main of NC, Bl@ckChris. Although he had recently switched to Fox just after Apex 2013, he could still give good beginning advice on how to play Ganondorf, and that is what ultimately lead to this character choice.



How do you know when the character you've chosen is the one for you? It's simple really. You have to pretty much be obsessed with the character. You have to like literally everything about the character. From the sounds that they make when they do attacks, to the way they feel when you control them. If you find yourself obsessing over frame data of your character and really trying to figure out how things work, then you've found your character to play as and it should stop there.



But for me it didn't. After a period of time, in fact on the drive up to The Big House 3, I was told by Slasher King and clowsui that Ganondorf is a bad character and I should really pick a top tier. At the time I was still really against the idea, as I still really liked playing a lot as Ganon, but after some in depth discussion, they convinced me to start picking up Marth, as that is the character that I said I would go the highest tier to play as, as he seemed a bit interesting to me. I didn't want to play a space animal, because I never really wanted to just play the best character in the game. It felt cheap to just cop out to something like that, and to this day I've never really tried practicing anything with the space animals, so you can guess that my Fox and Falco are pretty fraudulent, as neither of them shine hahaha. Anyway, at Big House 3, I went back and forth between playing Ganondorf and Marth in the RR pools to see what I felt like I would win better with. I never won a set with Marth, and took a set and a few games off of other people in my pool with Ganondorf. Despite this, I dedicated myself to maining Marth for the next month or so. It wasn't until early November that I decided I really missed playing Ganondorf, and when I went back to him I had a sense of joy playing him again. But this wasn't the last time that I tried to completely switch mains. I could tell you about the time that I went Link just for the week of Apex 2014, or the numerous times I tried to switch to Falcon, but that would make this post rather lengthy and it would take me forever to get to the point.



The point is this: I honestly wish I wasn't so stubborn when people told me to play Falcon instead of Ganondorf because Falcon is just an overall better character than Ganon. I never really gave into this idea because I couldn't mentally agree with what people were telling me, as I found that I was good with Ganon and I liked playing as him, and I felt like my Falcon was very inconsistent and I felt uncomfortable playing as him. I didn't like losing at the time either, and I didn't want to lose when it was me not playing Ganon. It wasn't until many months later of people telling me to switch that I really understood why Ganon is such a bad character in the first place. I had a mentality block that made me think that I really couldn't switch mains entirely, and I felt like I would betray my Ganon friends that I made if I were to completely switch from Ganon. When I say that I had realized too late about switching mains, it was when I realized that when I legitimately tried to switch mains, I found that I could only play as that character enthusiastically for a week, and then resort back to Ganondorf because I didn't really know what I wanted from the game. I thought I wanted fun. I thought I wanted to be kind of good, or to be the best Ganondorf. My goals and mentality weren't set in stone and I suffered for the better part of a year and a half because of this mentality, so I only improved slightly during this time. So my advice to you is when someone advises you to pick a better character, you should probably do it. Not because "that character is just better and you should play them", but because you'll realize way later down the line when your understanding of fundamentals and how the game really works comes to light, that you'll really see the flaws in your character, and this is where I imagine people start to break down because they cannot accept the weaknesses about their character, and then they feel trapped. I kept on wanting to choose different characters based on outside factors, and I never had a stable goal that I could work on a character to achieve that goal. I couldn't decide on whether I wanted to play the game purely to have fun or to really be the best.



Don't keep switching characters like I did. Once you realize that you've spent a certain large amount of time with a particular character and you feel differently towards that character than any other character, and your understanding of that character is better than any other character, then it's probably best that you stick with that character, unless it's a character that you'll realize later down the line will not be successful at the highest level, and so then you work on a different character because it is dependent on your goals. Geez, I don't know why this was so hard for me to understand over the course of the first 17 months of me playing, but I'm glad I've gotten a much better understanding of my character choice now. As of now, I still main Ganondorf in Melee, but I am also working on a Marth secondary main for those really difficult matchups for when I reach the highest level. I thoroughly believe that Lucky, Zhu, and Kirbykaze will never lose to a Ganondorf player, no matter how good that Ganon player is. Also, as time goes by and the understanding of the game increases for me, I am starting to definitely lean more towards dual-maining Falcon and Marth in the future, but that's a bit too far out for me to really decide yet, as I have not reached a level of play where I can really make that decision.

Mentality

This one is especially a big one for myself, as it is something that I had been struggling with for nearly the entire two year period that I have been playing this game competitively. For pretty much the first 17 months of me playing this game, I had a really bad mentality for me to improve with. I was told numerous times during this 17 month period that I had a bad mentality and that I would play much better if I just had a better mentality on the game. I never really understood what this truly meant during the time, and I ignored it for the majority of the time. Whenever I would lose, I would get really upset at myself. There were numerous occasions where I would either get so infuriated with the game that I threw my controller, or I would get so upset with myself that I would start to cry and wish that I never started playing this game competitively and I wanted to quit. I had this happen to me countless times and it was through my sheer love for the game that I never actually gave up on the game and wanted to keep playing and keep getting better, as I was already so engrossed in the community to begin with. There would be times where I would think to myself "Why do I even try? I feel like I'm going nowhere. I feel like all of this practice is for nothing. I shouldn't have lost to that guy! How could I lose to this person?" and other similar thoughts. I would go into a spiral of mental stigmas that it became overwhelming and I wanted it to stop. But as much as this would occur, I never really actually worked on improving my mentality in the game until September 20, 2014. The first day of Tipped Off 10.



This tournament was really important in terms of my mentality because it was the first time that I had gone out of state by myself to a tournament, and I had lost again in pools like I had before and I got really upset. Again. But it was when I lost in this moment, this moment of being upset, that I had someone reach out to me and hit me with some real advice: That the way I feel now is not the worst I can possibly feel with this game. I can feel so much worse when I lose and that this isn't the end of it all. He told me that I didn't properly respect the opponent. I said that I thought I could beat him, but in that moment, in that set that I just played with him, I didn't. Right then and there I was taught a valuable lesson to not underestimate your opponent and to respect them properly, and if they beat you then they have beaten you in that moment and that's just the fact. It doesn't matter if you could have played better or if you made a technical error that you shouldn't have and that was the difference between winning or losing, what matters is that you didn't nail that piece of tech, you didn't keep a calm mind and you didn't clutch it out. He told me that I had to accept my losses and move on. It was so hard for me to move on, and after he was done telling me everything he had to say, I had to go sit by myself and wait for myself to feel better. Man that sucked. I had been down this hole again. I would feel like crap for the entire rest of the day and unmotivated to play. I would let my emotions overtake me and it would affect how I played and interacted with people to the point where I wasn't pleasant to be around. I finally truly recognized this at Tipped Off 10 and I wanted to change my mentality, and it became then and there that my goal was to change my mentality so that I could actually be good at the game.



This is where SleepyK comes in, as he has been a huge help in the past 7 months. The night that I had lost, I went out to eat with SleepyK and Siglemic, as well as another relatively new smasher that also had some mentality issues that he wanted to work out. Talking with SleepyK really made me realize just how flawed my thinking was. I used to think that I wanted to only be good enough to be PRed in my state, or to just make it out of pools at a national. I only wanted to be kind of good at the game, and that was the wrong mentality to have. Not only that, I would say that I wanted to get good and not actually put in the work to get good. I would hardly make any actual effort to understanding the game and playing it to where I can actually improve. I thought that I could just put in a really easy amount of minimal effort and still get good at the game. Boy, was that a wake-up call. SleepyK was hard on me and for a good reason. The mentality that I had at the time was something that a lot of people had, and it frustrated SleepyK to no end. As much as he came off being harsh, he was doing it with good intentions. He was being completely real and down to earth with me when it came to how I was thinking about the game and he wasn't going to sugar-coat anything. He was telling me like it is and I had a hard time believing it at first. I was almost in denial that my mentality was that bad, but SleepyK showed me through just talking to him and asking me questions about my goals that showed all of the flaws in my thinking. It showed that I had no real clear goal with the game, and I struggled to come up with a decision. I came up with a lot of stupid excuses to why I haven't been getting better and why I think a certain way. SleepyK helped shut all of that down and made me realize why I really wanted to play the game. I thought about being only kind of good. I thought about being recognized and popular within the community for my skill. I even thought about just having fun with the game, but again, I just had an excuse for everything. Looking back at all of this now, I wish that when I was at SleepyK's place playing with Siglemic, that I would have played more to try and understand the game and for SleepyK to continue telling me what I'm doing wrong and help fix me, but we only played for fun, as I had felt worn out at the time and was still contemplating what I wanted to do.



Distraught from learning all of this, the Monday morning after TO10 was finished, I played FlaminRoy for a good bit at FullMetal's place and he showed me just how complicated Melee can be. It was a short training session that I had honestly long craved, and it helped me to learn and see the game for what it really is, even if at the time I didn't truly understand, I was starting to see, and on the Megabus back to Charlotte, I had wrote several notes down about my mentality lessons that I had learned over the past weekend.



It was from that point on that I made it an effort to really work out what I wanted from the game. SleepyK made his "smad" video (now titled "Why do you lie about wanting to be good at Super Smash Brothers Melee for the Nintendo Gamecube?") to vent about the bad mentalities that I and many others had at the time. Just watching the video alone made me realize what he was really trying to convey to me when I was at Tipped Off 10. I definitely wanted to take when he said in that video into consideration, and I used the ideas that he stated in the video and adapted them for myself. I continued to struggle with my mentality all the way to the end of the year, but with me being more and more aware of how I was thinking, I was starting to understand myself more and more, and I was working to adjust my thinking for the next tournament and focus on how to overcome the mentality problem, as well as what I really wanted from the game. I discussed this mentality problem a lot with PPMD, and he suggested to me numerous times to get the book "The Inner Game of Tennis". I didn't acquire the book until months after TO10, but once I had it in my possession, I wish I had the book from the beginning to start with. I read through the whole thing and saw just how useful it was and how much I could relate to it. I kept reading the book and attended tournaments and playing the game. It took many tournaments, trials, and tribulations for me to finally have a good tournament mentality. It wasn't until Olympus on February 28th of this year that I feel like I had finally achieved the tournament mentality that I had long been seeking. Before Olympus, I had entered a local tournament in mid January that I got really upset at again, and I was wondering why I was back at square one, and felt like I really needed a break. So I took a one month break from entering any tournaments, to see if this would help with my mentality. I entered a local a week before Olympus to see if my mentality had been fixed. It hadn't. Again, I was distraught thinking that I had wasted my time. But then I realized that when I went to this local, I had thought the same way about playing as I had before, and I made mo effort to change my train of thought. I was thinking I should bring my book to the next tournament and read "The Inner Game of Tennis" yet again so that I can understand what I should be thinking. During that next week leading up to Olympus, I thought really hard about what I wanted my mentality to be like at the tournament. By the time the actual tournament came around, I started to get nervous when pools started getting called, but when I was told to play my first match, I just went in with a clear mind and I played very well. Eventually I have to play FlaminRoy in tournament, which I lost to, but he told me that I had improved from the last time that I played him just after Tipped Off 10, so I was happy to hear that. In losers I eventually had to play GCS, a Falcon main from my area. Though the seeding wasn't very good for the tournament and I shouldn't have played him, we ironically had not played each other in tournament at all before and this was our first time clashing in tournament. I ended up almost winning the set, but I threw it away by being too thirsty and trying to down-b spike him instead of going for the safer option. The point of this isn't that I lost in a really dumb way it's how my mentality was after I had lost that match that I probably should have won. I accepted my loss. I accepted that I made a stupid mistake and that I wouldn't make it again in tournament. I got over my loss and I continued to just enjoy myself at the tournament. That proved to me right then and there that I was at a good place mentality-wise, because if I hadn't put effort to fix my mentality, I would have probably gotten really upset with myself after I lost to GCS and had a crappy time for the rest of the tournament. But I had learned a valuable lesson in that when I play, I should be playing to learn and not necessarily playing to win.



Playing to learn was such a huge concept that took me so long to really understand. Reading "The Inner Game of Tennis" definitely helped me realize this, and I know it helps greatly that if you're just starting out that you should always be playing to learn. That's easy to do when playing the game at first, since you're brand new and learning things comes at you all the time, but it becomes harder to grasp when you start to reach mid-level play as you can easily veer off of the learning path and start caring too much about winning. I went down that path, I would strongly advise you not go down that path either. Even just this past few weeks playing at Bad Moon Rising I realized that my mentality was still pretty good as a competitor and I played really well because of it. Of course, my mentality isn't full where I want it to be. Just this past weekend I learned a valuable lesson at a big Charlotte tournament that I helped to TO that I really shouldn't enter tournaments that I'm helping run, and if I'm trying to be the best at this game, I should focus more on playing the game and getting better, than trying to run a tournament efficiently.



I thoroughly believe that if you have a mentality problem, no matter what level you are you, that you should work to fix it, because once you fix that mentality problem, your growth can only continue as a player, and it becomes a matter of putting in the work and effort, studying videos, entering tournaments, taking a lot of notes, continue asking for advice and talking about the game, etc. in order for you to get better and better. I believe mentality is 50% of getting good at the game and that it has a huge affect on how you perform at any point in time. It's great to see players like Gravy really trying to fix their mentality now rather than later.



Understanding The Game

This is a concept that I haven't really tried to familiarize myself with until early February of this year. It's really important to understand how the game really works so that you can explain why certain things work and others don't. What I mean by understanding the game is really seeing how it functions when you play it, how your inputs should be optimized, really getting down to understanding what to do in certain situations and really looking at all of your options. This means looking at your hitboxes and understanding each and every frame of them, analyzing videos extremely in depth and really trying to discover what makes the game work, practicing by yourself and moving by yourself so that you really understand all there is about your character and how he/she functions. Understanding the game is where most of your effort should be going into when you're trying to put work into the game and getting good, as the more you understand the game, the easier it is to align the pieces in your head and things will start to make more sense to you. And when things start to make sense to you, you can start to apply that in the game when you play and improve because of it. For myself, I've been looking intensely at Kadano's thread on Marth since I really want to put in the effort to learn Marth well, as well as studying a lot of the matchups with Marth that I want to learn.



This concept can be applied at any level really, you just have to be passionate to keep at it months and even years after you start, as well as you're willing to put in the time and the effort to really understand how the game works and to also keep your goals in mind. I would start looking at more situations on why I got here or there and really think about what leads up to that moment. Also, if you ever have a thought like "Oh dang I should have baired there" or "Why didn't I just jump over him?" it's not necessarily bad to have these kinds of thoughts, as they are useful for helping to solve problem, but a problem that I can easily see people getting stuck in is they think like this and then they don't actually think about how to solve the problem that they just thought about and do the thing they said they wanted to do. It's important to recognize what the situation looks like before it happens so that you can think to use a particular option over another before you have to actually do it. It's really easy to see mistakes after they happen, it's not so easy to call out mistakes before they even happen, and this is where understanding habits and looking for patterns really comes in handy. Sometimes instead of trying to keep playing the game, you should stop yourself and ask your opponent why the thing you keep trying doesn't work, or why your approach keeps getting stuffed. A smart player will be able to tell you why you are getting hit and what you are doing that leads to his decision making. If you can't have a player tell you directly, you can just play more slowly and patiently and wait for your opponent to react to something, and keep it in your head and apply it. It's a common mistake for people to notice something happening yet they don't actually change anything about it. This is a surefire way to know if you're auto-piloting or not. It's really easy to think about the game from an analysis point of view when you're not playing it, and it totally changes when you are playing it, so you have to figure out the differences by playing the game a lot and thinking about it a lot. Going to tournaments and playing as many different people as possible is usually a really good idea, cause then you get a good variety on what kind of players you can play versus. I personally like to sit down at a setup and play a best of 5 of sorts to see how I play vs that person. Of course it's friendlies, so I'm probably going to experiment a lot and try to understand why certain things happen, so I'm not gonna take it too seriously if I beat my opponent. The time to be serious is in tournament. Definitely don't be afraid to try new things in tournament as well, as getting out of your comfort zone helps you to expand your knowledge of the game, but it's generally a good idea to not do anything rash as it could cost you. Make your decisions wisely.



Something that I see a lot of lower level players try to do is that they will try to explain a concept that they don't fully understand themselves to another player. This is a bad idea to begin with, as you really shouldn't talk about things that you really don't fully understand, and this is also why it's imperative that you really listen to the higher level players, as they know what they are talking about. You can definitely talk about the game and see if what you understand is the correct way of understanding, or if it's on the right track, but I advise against giving others advice as though your word is the absolute final word on anything. It can lead the player receiving the advice in the wrong direction and mess up their development. If I'm able to have a good conversation with you about applications in game and theories, then I respect you a lot for that. It's definitely important to ask good questions, as SleepyK states in his video.



Don't get overwhelmed if you feel like you got stuck. If you feel like you've gotten stuck, you can work your way out to get unstuck, and through the experience you learn something about the game and potentially the game as well. Just be patient with yourself and remember that it takes a long time to learn some things in this game. You might learn some cool new trick in solo practice and not be able to implement it into your tournament play until 6 months down the line. That's okay. As long as you don't give up halfway through you will make it. There's nothing I dislike more when someone becomes complacent with their understanding of the game and just decide to give up because it's not worth it. They might come up with the excuse that it's just a game and it doesn't matter. I feel like personally for me, getting good at Melee is a great way to test myself to see if I really can do it and overcome obstacles to achieve that goal. If you're able to get good by going through all these struggles, then that is a precedent for the rest of your life. If you can do it in Melee you can do it for literally anything. If you give up half-way through, you're more likely than not going to struggle with other points in your life like a job or a spouse. I like to think that I can prove to myself that I really can do it, no matter how long it takes.

Closing Thoughts