[ROOT`iaguz]

Originally Posted by Unstable

While you have a great mindset of practicing transitions, I feel you are under utilizing practice partners, ladder will never be as effective as correct practice with teammates/friends.

For example, you want to know build A vs reaction A,B,C,D,E so you practice 5 games, then you want to do the transition out of A. so then you have, A vs, A1,A2,A3 ALL of the different possibilities. You can grind this out in a day. This is how it is done because its the most effective, sure it sounds boring etc, but that's how when you see Koreans make instant decisions, its because they don't have to think they already have played every possible situations and practiced what the best response is.

Try the practice partner way and i guarantee your game will be boosted 100x higher. Even if you don't have a team to do it practice partners can be effective for this as well.

It's true that a dedicated team of practice partners who all play together and develop strategies and all that is effective. I think it's foolish to try and argue this with the coach of a team who did this and most probably did improve massively as a result of living together in Korea for a month or so. It's what the KOreans did in BW and SC2 and it's one big reason why they kill everyone.

But there's nothing wrong with thinking "hey this build might be fun" and throwing it out in the random swirling maelstrom of ladder games to see what happens to it when it is exposed to literally everything that can happen to it. Sometimes it's obvious "oh my blue flame drop tvp gets smashed if he opens Phoenix. That's quite obvious!", but there's also lots of subtleties that you can still get without having to grind out with specific people like "oh I"m adding marauders way too early into my TvT build" or "hey, this style looks like it'll be weak if I hit it like this".

And thanks to my KR account, I know I"ll never want for people of roughly equal or better skill value as me.

EDIT- one final thing. Ret said that most of his training for MLG and Bnet Euro invitational was ladder games with maybe some practice partnering. But he is Ret so w/e.