1. Mechanics are way more important than Strategy

Chances are, you spend too much time thinking about this game rather than playing it. The primary reason why mechanics are so important is simple. All good strategy comes from how easily and efficiently you execute it. Here’s an example: The opponent is attacking with three marines and you have a single stalker. With good micromechanics, a stalker will easily take on those three marines without losing health. With bad micro, the stalker can die to the three marines. If you are consistently losing that stalker, then you may start making two stalkers. Now you are playing inefficiently because a player who only needs to make one stalker has more resources to invest in their future. If these two players were playing against each other, the second player would be further along in their strategy. Seconds mean everything in this game and being quicker at going through a strategy almost always means you will be in a better situation to win a game. There is a reason you see a lot of professional players able to win with a less strategically favorable situation simply because they are further along in their game plan and it almost always comes from mechanics. So start focusing on your mechanics. You don’t even need to necessarily play ladder matches for this. On the arcade, there are a few games that help extensively. “LOTV Multitasking Trainer” is a great one for training your screens per minute & effective actions per minute. My personal favorite is, Printf’s “Minute Micro” because it has a vast variety of micro situations you will need experience with for your ladder games. Another great idea is to go into “LOTV Unit Tester” (with a friend ideally) and test unit composition or simulate potential battles you may face. Lastly, going into a custom game and playing out each of your strategies over and over again so that you get quicker with them is extremely helpful. A great way to know how good you are executing your strategy is to compare your times versus the same strategy being performed by a professional. Spend at least 15 minutes before each ladder session doing a suggestion above and I guarantee you will improve quicker than just playing ladder every day.

2. Consistency is key and is how you evaluate improvement

I use to be the person to tell players that they should not focus on their rating in the game. This makes sense from the human and mindset perspective. You want to avoid anything that can negatively affect your overall mood and confidence. However, the real issue is recognizing what the rating even stands for in the first place. Having a higher rating then a player means that you have a higher consistency at your rating then that player. It is important to understand that just because you are at 5000 rating, you still have a good chance of beating 5200 players or losing to 4800 players. Quite a lot of players get angry when they win versus a much higher rated player and then lose to a much lower rated player in the next game. Rating does not equal skill or potential. It only equals consistency. This will naturally have its ups and downs and some days you will be more consistent. As a player, you should use a tool like Ranked For Teh Win and track your average rating over the last thirty days instead of looking at the personal rating in the present. If you are improving, your bottom trough of the graph should slowly increase in rating over time. This is how we should track improvement. Understanding all the above is how you gain any confidence when you are playing ladder. If there was one improvement I wished Blizzard to bring to the score-screen, it would be a private average rating over the last thirty days.

3. The one strategy per match-up rule

Too many players practice too many strategies. I’m not about you tell you that it's necessarily bad. I understand the need for diversity and to keep things interesting in each match. However if your goal is to truly get better, it is almost always a good idea to stick with a single build. The idea is to reinforce your previous learning and mechanics. Even if your build is out of meta, it can still be a useful source for learning. If you consistently change what you do, you won’t reinforce anything you learn. Cheese is not any lesser of a strategy than macro when it comes to winning a game. However, it is a much lesser source for overall mechanics. Playing short games may limit the amount you use a mechanic and how many you use. However, playing too long of games also has its negatives. You want to focus on a few mechanics at a time and ideally, they all help each other in some way. This is why I believe two base or mid-game all-ins are some of the best strategies for working on mechanics. Let's compare it against a cannon rush. When you cannon rush, you are generally improving building placement, probe micro, spending efficiency, and reactionary mechanics. You also learn and get a feel for the capability of your opponent in those situations. Probe micro and building placement mechanics are much more minor than the other three. Ideally, we focus on major mechanics first and therefore let's find a build that makes all five mechanics major. The 2 base Soul Train in PvZ is a build that fulfills these requirements. What is critical is that there are not many major adjustments to make in the overall build. The games last long enough to see diversity from the opposing player all while keeping the same mechanics in play. With this build, we learn spending efficiency, building placement, scouting, timing, and multitasking. We also learn a bunch of minor micromechanics but we do not have any other major mechanics in play. We don’t generally need to understand army positioning outside of main battles, timings, mid game scouting, effective harassment, teching, etcetera. Focus on those first mechanics, and then choose a build that includes a couple more major ones. Progress only when extremely confident in the previous mechanics.

4. Keep to the meta and listen to the pros

You are not a special snowflake able to innovate or change the game of Starcraft. This can be a controversial statement and it comes from anecdotal experience but the chances you come up with a strategy or an improvement to a strategy is extremely low. Remember what I said earlier? Mechanics are everything! You can not come up with a strategy that’s any better than the current meta without having amazing mechanics. It will become inefficient or have false positives. You may be able to mass gateway units in PvP and rekt newbs at 5500 rating but you are going to run into a player who simply starts to wall off major areas, throw down a ton of shield batteries and focus all their money into colossus, archons, disruptors that are much more cost effective against gateway units. They will get to the point where they have 100 supply of colossus immortal archon against your 150 supply of blink stalker charge-lot. Let's just say, this will not go in your favor without really good harassment. Anything that requires “luck” or for the other player not to scout it will generally not be a good strategy. Many strategies that players come up with have surprise factors. These strategies work once but are not consistent against the same player or higher rated players. This is not ideal for improving and is a terrible thing to keep focused on. Do yourself a favor and go onto Olimoley’s Patreon and become a patron to receive the gold mine of Korean replays from her tournaments. These players play this game full time and are much more likely to find small improvements or reasons to change meta than you. Watch these replays and choose a strategy that is used commonly per match up. It has to be common or it may be very specific to the map or opponent. Simply put, learn the meta and don’t try to change it.

5. Start having more fun and follow the flow principle

The flow concept is commonly used in martial arts and weight lifting. Its also something I really try to stress to people in Starcraft. Playing “try hard” every single game is not the way to improve at this game. It will give you anxiety and apathy about every single game. You do not want to set bars too high for yourself and you also do not want to give yourself unnecessary challenge way above the norm. Playing better players than you is important but playing them all the time will cause problems. When I mentioned you should have one build per match-up. I really meant one primary build per match-up. You want to have fun builds mixed in and you want to keep the game fun. Playing team games in-between ladder matches or arcade games is a great way to do that. Trust me, your North American hopes play a lot more casual games then you might think! Embrace this concept and it will help more than everything else on this list.