In light of a recent discussion on Facebook I felt the need to properly address this issue (again).



What I’m against is this:

Anyone analyzing habits, weaknesses and/or tactics and giving detailed advice to a player during a tournament set in an attempt to influence the outcome.



When competing in a tournament it’s obvious that contestants should only rely on their own abilities in order to win. I don’t think there is any person who thinks it should be legal to pass your controller to a friend and have him win a match for you. Well, I’m here to argue that coaching is the mental equivalent of handing your controller to someone else.



To understand why that is we must first answer a simple question. What makes a good player?



Adaptability

Everyone makes mistakes. We all get tricked by our opponents. We all get hit. We all make choices that lead to unfavorable outcomes. This includes top players. We’re all human after all.



So why are they so much better than everyone else? The difference lies primarily in their ability to recognize, especially under stress, their own mistakes as well as that of their opponents.



Adaptability is by far the most important factor in a match between two people with at least consistent tech-skill (which practically everyone has at this point).



A perfect example of this is Armada. Someone can dominate Armada the first game of a set and seemingly outsmart him at every turn for an entire game, only to see Armada win the next two games. We’ve seen it happen plenty of times.



The reason it happens so often is because Armada understands why he lost and adapts his spacing, timing and overall decisions accordingly. He generally doesn’t fall for the same trick twice. So when his opponents try a similar tactic on him in game two, they usually get punished for it. And if they’re stubborn enough to try it again a third time, there’s a 50% chance they’ll get 4 stocked.



So why is coaching a problem?

When you coach someone during a game, you’re helping them adapt. If people did this during chess it would be obvious why it’s a problem. Chess is a game of decision making. It’s a mental contest, so if someone’s helping you with decisions, they are playing for you.



Though execution is clearly an important factor in Smash, decision making is also a crucial part of the game. So if someone is helping you in that aspect, they are playing for you. It's essentially 2 vs 1 at that point.



If you’re losing because you don’t know how to beat a certain tactic, you should lose. Whether or not your friends know how to beat that tactic should be as irrelevant as whether or not your friends would have hit that Ken-Combo that cost you the set. They’re not the one’s playing.



Conclusion

If we as a community value fair-play and want our tournament results to reflect the skill level of individual players as accurately as possible, we cannot allow them to rely on a crutch during tournament sets.



I encourage TO's to adopt a complete ban on coaching as part of their official ruleset from here on out.





Lastly, I want to preemptively address a few common arguments I’ve seen.



If you ban coaching, you should ban the crowd too!

This is a red herring. There’s a significant difference between having a player calmly and directly explaining to you why you’re losing and how to adjust, opposed to trying to filter out good pieces of advice from a roaring crowd. It’s incomparable.



We can argue about the crowd some other time, but don’t bring it up here because it has nothing to do with this issue.



Coaching creates better matches!

So do steroids. That doesn’t mean it’s fair or desirable.



Another analogy would be that a student mentor during exams would improve grades.

Sure, it would. But the purpose of exams is to measure the knowledge and skillset of the individual students. Allowing students to rely on someone else’s knowledge rather than their own flies in the face of why we have exams in the first place. Grades would become meaningless.



What if both players have coaches? That would be fair, right?

For it to be fair, every player would have to register with their coach before the start of the tournament. Coaches cannot enter singles. One coach per player and vice versa. This is impractical if not outright impossible given the structure of our community.



Besides, the goal of tournaments is to find the strongest individual player among the throng of entrants. Even if coaching could’ve been done in a fair and balanced way, it would still be a move away from the skillset that we as a community value and want to test -- execution, adaptability, and mental fortitude. Devaluing adaptability is a step backwards.



Coaching doesn’t affect the outcome of matches!

Yes it does. That’s the whole point of coaching someone to begin with.