if I can make it out, then Evo this year. if not… you’ll have to challenge me in the north.
I’ll be sure to touch on this on the next podcast. I hope I can get a hold of glory hole Pherai soon.
It’s funny that you bring him up because when I’d watch Yi play casuals he’d have a good, long streak of calls on his opponent that would eventually be broken by a good block. He’d respond to the block with a full blocked combo into super. I think I accidentally picked up this habit because I refuse to let my opponent attempt to punish my uppercuts and instead have them attempt to punish super instead because there’s a higher chance that they will mess up the punish.
One day mio.
definetly milestones, with some being bigger than others.
I’ve had an similar experience to Fran. I had gone to Japan in 2009 but at that point my understanding and knowledge was too low to absorb it. The two biggest moments for me are playing and watching MOV at sun route cup. it didn’t click there but afterwards I felt like I saw/understood a lot more while playing and watching.
Second was playing gesu in Austin and talking to him about the game. it was basically reinforcing everything I heard about prior and more.
random 3s story about our matches that I like to tell. My ken vs his dud, final round, both down to chip health. I walked back and was going to delay chip incase he did wake up cork. he did wake up ducking cork and chipped me. he explained when i asked that he assumed I would delay, and that if he did wake up cork it would not chip me at that distance (the first 2 hits do the most chip), so he did ducking cork to ensure he’d chip me. Thought that was a really sick read.
anyway, I’m not sure what reason to have as motivation in 2013. I’m definetly less motivated but still watch, study and play to improve.
I dont have an awakening moment just yet…im still zzzzzzzzz…
The lovely thing about this is that we all have different stories to tell, in my case it was more of both, you never really get an “awakening” with this game since there’s always so much to learn whether it be about the game or yourself as a player, so there are certain things like epiphanies, so to speak, that you get whenever you reach one of those milestones or whenever you categorize a specific event into a milestone…for example, my first milestone was playing in my first 3s tournament, which was a team tournament, and my first round match was against Justin Wong. Most people said oh see you in losers but you don’t think of it that way, you look at it as a chance to grow yourself and see what you’re capable of when push comes to shove. I lost at that time and kept working harder and harder especially when online came out, there were certain players that I aimed to beat online because they were at a higher level than me or simply just better. I set a milestone in those specific players till I got my “awakening” and finally get on the same level or began to beat them consistently. It almost ALWAYS got me results when I put the player on a chopping block and said “ok, I’m going to beat him next, not because I want to win but because I want to see how strong I’ve gotten”, over time it paved the way for my offline milestones in my case, which were at first placing top 3 at locals (my first castle fight night, i got 2nd) , placing 1st in locals (next level tournaments, Doylestown tournaments) then moving on to top 8 at majors, then top 3 at majors (my first ECT,i got 2nd), then finally placing 1st in everything
Throughout that whole time i continued to put players on a higher level so I can set a high standard for myself and never be surprised, I went into the competition knowing who to look out for, what I’m capable of and how much pressure I could handle. This moved over to the japanese competition and I set a NEW milestone for myself in terms of development, I saw MOV play in 2010 at Sunroute Cup and played him myself but definitely was no one near strong enough, but that whole experience of watching and playing the WC players got me stronger overall when I came back to NY, people basically saw a jump in skill level like some hyperbolic time chamber stuff literally (1 weekend, playing/watching MOV= almost a year of experience) and that was my “awakening” in plain view to everyone so from then on it just escalated from there. Fast forward to today, yeaa not many people play 3s seriously or enter tournaments or whatever, but there’s still a scene to work hard for, we’re all still players who had the same dedication to get better and this won’t change. With the 25th anniversary tournament being my most recent milestone, there’s still a worldwide scene to appreciate and this should be the motivation needed to get stronger since it also had the same effect as that 1 weekend at Sunroute Cup.
Moral of the story: Setting milestones for yourself in any type of form will have its results, but the epiphany you’ll get when you look inside yourself after that milestone will develop you into the great player you always wanted to be.
Insightful seems extremely apropos in this case.