Anyone can become a strong player or even a pro player if you put the time into it. Reactions, reads, adaptations, all of those are very very important but nothing tops simply putting in the hours. While perhaps you’ve put in more time than a pro player into one specific game, their experience with fighting games, and tournaments themselves are much greater than other players. If you put in 5-8hours a day 6 days a week (allow 1 day to rest and reset) you’d become very good at the game as well.
How many thousands upon thousands of hours do you think Justin Wong or Alex Valle or Daigo or BAS or Nuki or even new(er) players like Infiltration, PR Balrog, or ChrisG have put into fighting games? As a person who has been on that side of the fence in another genre of video game (FPS) I can tell you that the amount of time they put in is extraordinary. Over the course of my 6 years playing Quake 3 as a tournament player I probably put in around 10,000 hours of time. That is over a full year JUST dedicated to playing 1 game. (10,000 hours = 416.6 days assuming 24hours played per day. At my peak it was probably around 12 hours per day before a big match 3-6 hours per day the rest of the time.) and I was doing this all strictly as an online player (only traveled to a couple events.)
Just like with fighting games, the nice thing is that there is a lot you don’t forget. Also while systems may change and mechanics may change there is a ton of stuff you can transfer over from one game to another within the same genre. I remember going to a fairly large 200 person LAN at one point, sadly the quake scene at the event was somewhat small so I entered into a 60 person 1v1 Counter Strike tournament (was free to enter, prizes were provided by sponsors, nothing huge.) first time I ever played Counterstrike in my life, took 4th place. Same kind of thing applies to why Justin Wong instantly dominates any new fighting game and can even perform fairly strongly in games he barely touches like Virtua Fighter.
A good way to get experience to start adapting quicker is to travel and play several different types of opponents and higher level competition. And if you take a L, make it count and remember/improve the parts of your game that lead to you taking the L. That way you won’t make as many mistakes or get downloaded as quickly. The shit is gradual though. Even for a lot of the top players there was a phase where they struggled before things just clicked. As with most things though, if you have more time available to improve, you’ll likely have better progress leveling up.
First off they are practicing more. It’s almost a full time job. But beyond that they are practicing smarter. A lot of improving at SF is learning how to improve. You’ve got to always be reflecting on your game and identifying your biggest weak points and focusing practice time on improving those weak points. Top players don’t really plateau like the rest of us.
Top players do plateau just like the rest of us, then they get hungry for a win and re-examine their play as well as face strong competition. They do have slumps though
they are on another level ( really ) where execution is not even considered to be a problem or a factor, they rather think about strategies and how to counter something or a specific character, you cant reach that level without sacrifice and very heavy time investment
I have more realistic targets I should say, if I can be the best player in my local scene then that would be a good start. I’m not gonna pretend that I can compete with the best in the world, I don’t invest enough time for that.
There isn’t any one factor that is universally responsible for why some succeed. But with that being said, I think location and resources have more to do with it. If you live close to where the big scenes are or have the resources to travel, you will have a much better chance to be a big name in the FGC. Take someone like CORN’s Antwan Ortiz who is an incredible AE player, because he live in Michigan, he simply does not have the chance to play all the great players from the coasts as often as he should.
in addition to what everyone else has said, they travel to practice, you hear the commentators at EVO etc regularly say that this player will travel to a whole other country just to practice against another high level player who plays the same character as someone they’re going to be facing in their next tourny etc
Pro-players also generally practice with one another, meaning that their shared experience makes them better than they already were leaving players who don’t have these social connections at somewhat of a disadvantage. Luckily, the FGC is (generally) open enough where you can sit down and practice with anyone randomly.
I think most of the reasons have already been listed but ones that come immediately to mind are:
Time - Some pro players put in ridiculous hours into it
Experience - They learn from being in in-game situations and also experience from playing new/old players or being in stressful situations
Training mode - Honestly, I feel like pro players just exploit training mode heavily and know what to do with it whereas most players don’t really know what to do it besides the same repetitive combos
Risk/Reward - Have a very good long or short term understanding of risk/reward in matches
Reads / Pattern recognition - They know how to immediately adapt and educationally guess what their opponent is most likely to do after noticing a few things about their opponents tendencies.
Profound experience, time practicing, best of all good people to practice with offline/online. No training is better than having another pro player sitting down with you and teaching you how to get better
I refuse to believe you cannot improve reaction time and that it is based on genetics. There is nothing that cannot be improved, we are talking about muscles and neural connections. The skill to be learned to increase reaction time is how to let go consciously of what you are doing, a mental state athletes refer to as “In the Zone” Recent studies have shown that the subconscious mind has made up it’s mind on what decision you with make up to six seconds before you make the so called decision with your conscious mind, so the better mastery you have of technique, and the more you have faced a certain situation, the quicker your subconscious can make that decision and the quicker it will do it for you. Pros make these amazing quick reflexes because they have trained more, trained smarter, and been it the situations thousands of times, Desk can play on two sticks at the same time because he has endless hours of practice, and trained himself to do completely separate things by playing two handed tap bass guitar for so many years.
There have been plenty of good players who didn’t have ridiculous “genetic” reaction. Reaction is first, and foremost, awareness of the situation and it’s possible options. Nobody can just react to everything with absolute precision 100% of time. It’s a matter of how you spend your levels of focus and familiarity with what’s going on in the match.