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Hello again fellow sea enthusiasts!
Slightly delayed but here nonetheless is the weekly installment of: This Week I Learned (TWIL), Where after a week of rigorous practice, I briefly discuss what my goals of the week were, how (if) I achieved them, and what I can do better to achieve said goals.

This week I was trying to get in better mental states for tournaments, and also better my mechanics, the latter not going so well, but the former going ok I felt.

So, on to a more in-depth discussion about the mentality of a game like Starcraft 2.
Sc2, at high levels, and at least in my opinion, is about 50% strategy/mentality, and about 50% mechanics and micro and skill at the game. But, I would say people spend about 80% of the time going over mechanics and build orders and such, and a lot less time focused on how can I get myself in the best shape to win before we've started playing.

I posted a blog before on my thoughts on mentality on sc2 before, just after ACL Melbourne, where I did poorly. I felt this happened because as I played and did not to terribly at various other tournaments, I though better of myself and felt like I SHOULD be winning certain games. With this expectation I felt frozen. Suddenly every game I was thinking "omg what if he does x strategy that I know is pretty good against mine" or "Omg what if i 15 hatch and he 10 pools, then I'm only 1 game away from losing and then I'm out!!!" or "Omg he's pushing, usually I counter-attack at this stage but ughh I think I just need to defend omg I think I'm going to lose!".
Now, that's a lot of omgs for someone who isn't a 15 y.o teenage girl (trust me, I'm not) but that is how I felt in just about every tournament.

Until the other week when I had somewhat of a breakthrough.

You're going to ******* lose. It's gonna happen.

You're going to get cheesed.

You're going to drop maps, sets, tournaments, everything

Get the **** over it.

The moment you stop caring so much about what could possibly happen, what could possibly go wrong, what could possibly go right, is the moment I start playing to my full potential.

If you're worried about every single decision you could be making then chances are you're probably making the wrong ones, or you need to eat a slab of cement and harden the **** up.

A lot of this reasoning has to do with my blog the other week about wanting to do this as a career in some way, shape, or form. This decision led me to KNOW deep down that if I want to do this, these things are gonna have to happen, and eventually we'll get over it, and eventually it'll work out because that's what I want to make happen because that's the only thing I've decided I want to happen.

So, a few things I've started doing to act out these feelings into actual games:
In series now I'll either throw in a cheese or do something greedy.
For the life of me I can't think of what else I've changed, but just doing that has changed my whole mentality and I feel like I'm playing better in tournaments because of it.

Now on to mechanics:
My mechanics are pretty terrible I think, and are probably the worst aspect of my game, in tournaments and in ladder practice. A lot of it comes down to being a bit lazy and not fixing problems bad habits that I've had for a year or two now. Because for so long with my current habits and mechanics have gotten me by ok I felt I didn't really have to change them, because as long as I was more intelligent than my opponent then my mechanics would be good enough.
"The enemy of the great is the good"
"Good enough" is probably the worst sentence anybody can ever say, ever. Except perhaps "I just killed this kitten". Nothing is ever "good enough". You can, and should, always be doing something better. If you think you've done something better than good enough, wait 2 weeks whilst you've been "doing better" and you'll find you can do better than "doing better than good enough".
So this week I'm going to work on my mechanics hard out, fixing all the problems with them. This WILL cause me to drop more games on ladder, but will hopefully be a productive change in a few weeks or maybe a month.
To improve said mechanics I will be:
Changing Hotkey/inject method (currently I just click around minimap injecting) to shift injecting with queens hot keyed.
Try incorporate camera hot hot keys for bases.
Play faster.
Try a new mental checklist for what is happening in the game. As a lot of times in game I'll assume he's doing something normal and standard, only to be caught of guard because I neglected to notice he took a 3/4th gas really quickly or something.

So yeh, that's about it for TWIL.

As this is getting pretty long I'll just summarize a few last things:

Qualified for stage 2 of IEM, then in stage 2 got knocked out by FlashDrake, he played well, I went for 2 cheese timings to try help mental game, didn't work, bummer

Played CubyBy, who played a lot better than I thought and looks like he has been improving a bunch.
I can't exactly remember the games, but I think they were mostly macro games where I did my builds and did too much damage and won out from there.

Then played Petraeus, game 1 I did my normal macro muta build, he defended a LOT better than I've seen anyone else, so lost. Game 2, roach baned him when he was going mutas. Game 3, I 10p he 15p and defended his hatch annoyingly well, and that was it, I was out!

Melbourne LAN which happened yesterday:
Lost to Rival 2-1 in Upper Bracket round 3, game 1 did muta macro build and won, game 2 he ling all-inned and I was to greedy, game 3 I threw away a decent advantage and didn't transition quick enough out of mutas and barely lost when my counter-attack failed to kill him, but he played well.

In lower bracket took out pezzaperry, first game I 3 base baneling busted him and failed, 2nd game 10p into 2 base baneling bust which worked, game 3 he went some weird chargelot archon mothership off 3 bases build, I scouted to early templar archives and went mass roach style doing roach run-by's into his main and multi prong attacks and eventually won.
Defeated arrival in 2 standard macro zvzs.
Then my moment came where I would hope to exact revenge upon pox, who is now officially my arch nemesis in Melbourne Lan tournaments.
Game 1 I said YOLO bitches and 16 hatched, he 10p
Game 2 I went greedy muta macro build and he roach baned.
And that was it.
In the last 4 Melbourne Lans I have played him 6 times and won once I believe, so I hope to remedy this quite soon.
My Melbourne lans have this pattern: Defeat few players, lose to someone in upper bracket, go to lower bracket and knock out TOR players, then lose to pox in lower bracket final or round before lower bracket final. It's getting quite annoying haha. (I'm kidding I love pox and the tor guys and its more of a fun rivalry)

Ermmm So I think that's about it.

As always I'm streaming more where I am learning the things I preach about in these blogs, You can check out my stream by clicking the link in signature or go to www.twitch.tv/heyitskez

We'll be doing SEA News Podcast number 10 On Tuesday at 7:30 So definitely go ahead and check that out as well, with thread announcing it today actually which I totally forgot to do.

Until next week,
Byeeeeeeeeee!