Playing With Confidence

     So I am delaying the entry about Wesker because it's going to take a crap ton of time and school is owning me at the moment. Pretty much up until the last year of my life I had pretty bad confidence issues. Whenever I did anything I always thought I would fail at it and if I did manage to do it I always thought I could do it better. This affected lots of area in my life, but because this is a blog about video games I'm going to talk about how it effected my performance in tournaments.

     The first game I ever traveled for was Smash Brothers. I played Melee and Brawl. I took Melee pretty seriously and mostly played Brawl to troll people. People would tell me I was pretty good and I could hold my own against the better players in casuals. When it came to tournaments tho, I would lose my cool and drop everything or fall into the most predictable of patterns. This happened a lot and it would cause me to lose to players I shouldn't lose to. When it came to playing known players I would get even more freaked out and play even worse. I have been working on this a lot and I still tend to choke in some clutch situations, but I am never nervous until those situations. Here is a prime example, I am playing a person in winners bracket. I catch them in a Sentinel mix up and all I have to do is quarter circle a for a rocket punch to win the match. I choke and the rocket punch doesn't come out. After this I am mentally messed up and I lose the match despite having a huge advantage.

THERE IS GOOD NEWS!!! YOU CAN FIX IT.

Here is what I have been doing to fix it. First, is to not care and act like it never happened. Look at Diago's face when he messes something up. It doesn't get to him. Where as look at someone like Marn. He freaks out when something bad happens. Second, practice simple execution like that until it becomes second nature. After I whiffed that rocket punch I went into training mode and did like 200 rocket punches to make sure I never missed one. Third, listen to music. Listening to music can help you zone out noise, get you pumped up, and focused.

I am going to T3, a tournament in Indianapolis, in a few hours and I am planning on winning and not getting nervous. Hopefully I'll do well because I could use some extra money. Remember, never give up you can do it :D.

-INZ