[Meatex]

Well if i'm not mistaken I was the first person to get coaching from aLtPiG and a few people told me coaching was a waste of money. So I thought I would post up a bit of a review of my experiences. I wish I had the money to do so for other coaches and as such I won't be drawing comparisons with other SEA coaches until I do get the opportunity to experience other coaches. So lets begin ^^

First off coaching is not for everyone - if you know your weakness and know what you need to work on, whether it be injects or just doing a build order smoothly then coaching is not for you most likely. But if you are like me and at a point where nothing you seem to do works or you have nfi how to deal a particular strategy or just feel like you are stuck then coaching can be very helpful.

I did 2 hours with aLtPiG and have have the VOD available on my stream (ww.justin.tv/meatex) so should you be curious you can check it out.

First hour was ZvP
Given that I was looking for some general help on the matchup we worked mainly on a smooth opening with 15 pool 15 hatch (something I never considered) against an AI. I would have liked more opportunity to play with human opponent but at 2pm on a Tuesday not many of my practice partners were on TT
We worked on basically roach hydra but didn't go into much depth. Again it was mainly focusing on smooth opening
Also I didn't come with any replays to go over which I wish I had done so I wasn't able to get any feedback or tips for the style of ZvP that I liked other than some theorycrafting about the style. He did have a link and some info prepare on ZvP which was cool.
The hour went by pretty quickly and looking back we didn't seem to cover that much but I did get some golden tips which will help me a lot.

2nd hour was for ZvT
Now this is currently my weakest matchup and expressed that I have trouble dealing with those marine tank contains / slow pushes. So he took the opportunity to teach me Losira style (outlined in this forum ^^) and again working on a smooth opening was the main focus. We finished up with aLtPiG playing T against me while I practiced trying to deal with his opening harass and the first marine tank big push following that. Again, looking back, it felt like we didn't cover much but I did get some good tips.

Overall coaching and style
I like that he, shall we say, set the theme of the coaching session - trying to improve the opening and emphasized making it as smooth as possible. His coaching gave some very helpful tips. I would personally like to play more against a person while practicing but given it was my first session and was trying to get the opening BO down I can understand. Replay analysis is part of coaching but I did not take advantage of that TT
aLtPiG is an extremely friendly and easy going guy and it was a pleasure just to chat to him (I probably shouldn't have spent so much time chatting and practiced more ) So the atmosphere was relaxed and very quickly got comfortable.
And there is certainly no doubting that at $15/hr he is the best value coach I have seen, at least for zerg

Conclusion
★★★★☆

Pros
Being friendly and relaxed is a big +1 for me
He came fairly prepared given what I told him about what I needed help with
Got some golden tips
Set a good theme

Cons
felt like we didn't quite cover as much as we could have (could be just me not having coaching experience or more likely me being too chatty )
Would have liked more vs player coaching

*He also offered to look at replays should I need him to (for free) though I think this would be subject to his time and I would assume for just a few replays ^^

Quick Comments

	nirvAnA:	Deserving coaches really need testimonials like this, thanks for letting everyone know how it went:)
	Sixth:	GJ Writing this up man
	Crankenstein:

[Next_rim]

I thought the point of coaching was to discover your strength and weaknesses as a player in general, and set a target to do a particular cycle of training to capitalize on that knowledge. That's what coaching is for in sports, anyways.

If I was to get a coach, I would ask for some kind of feedback on my style, and strength and weaknesses of that style. Passive or agressive? Micro or macro? Harass or timing push? This knowledge comes only from experience, which a pro coach has, and you don't. How do you play against an agressive micro harasser, if you are one yourself?

Working on mechanics (openers, build orders, unit comps, army ratios, timings, scouting) can be done w/o a coach imho.

When I tried to play wc3 at high level, I was constantly assessing situation in a following matter: I am a harasser and multitasker. I need to go out and kill whisps, while parallel creeping. He has 5 archers, and he is agressive creep-harasser. He comes with DH, which means I will lose at least 1 ghoul, so I need to kill at least 3 whisp, which means I can afford up to 4 death coils. If he was passive creeper, I'd have to kill at least 1 orange creep pack myself, which means I'll need to heal a ghoul, and can't afford to get manaburned or waste more than 3 death coils into whisps.

Smoothing openers doesn't get you into that state of mind. Knowing deep core mechanics and your style does. Don't think you should be paying to be read a lecture on something you can get from liquipedia. But you could pay to get a feedback on style and strengths.

[nirvAnA]

Coaching normally gives you key information from a different or more enlightened perspective than your own, and many people have found out how useful it has been when coaches instantly identify the areas that have been keeping them from progressing. Sure not everyone may feel they would need it but i guarantee with a fantastic coach 9/10 times the students will benefit greatly and it will also drastically reduce the learning curve/time otherwise needed if they were on their own.

This thread is not a discussion on the benefits of coaching but rather a testimonial for a coach from a very satisfied student so lets keep it at that

I might make this thread into the "Coach Testimonial" thread as more students chip in. Thanks for sharing your experience Meatex

[Meatex]

we did discuss my style with ZvP and I showed him my style.
He told me the weaknesses in that style and recommended against it - you can see that on the VOD at my justin tv channel ^^
As for ZvT I was at a point where I was lost as to what to do.
And given that I didn't provide replays and wasn't asking about about anything specific I didn't experience that side of things. aLtPiG will plan a lesson around what you wish to look at.
I would love to do more coaching with other guys and get more experience then I would be able to write more informed reviews
But I feel like PiG is a good coach and did a good job ^^

[Next_rim]

Nirvana,

Good idea. Let's split the thread into two then. It would be nice to discuss general benefits of coaching, what people expect, and that might help those coaches out there to adjust.

[Eldrid]

+1 rim I agree with both your above posts

[Delraich]

I really like what next rim said regarding the expectation side of things. What I think what I would like (considering I have never had coaching before), is a structured appraisal of key weak areas i need to work on followed by a set of specific exercises/ task that i need to do to sort them out.

I also like the idea of identifying strong areas based on style and how to capilize on them. As a novice player, i dont i have any strong areas - but if someone said - hey, you seem to work like this... blah blah blah... so focus on this type of style/ tactic, that would be super. Maybe the coach could even say, look dude... you chose protoss because you thought it was cool or whatever, but your style actually suits blah better... so why not do that?

I think any direction needs to be quite specific though, with actual targets to meet... but hey im not actually a coach so i dont know for sure.

[Meatex]

Well I told him i had no idea about ZvT and asked him about my style ZvP
Coaching like any study you get out what you put in. If i had replays he would have checked them prior to the lesson and it would have been more beneficial to me
Unfortunately I hadn't played much as I only recently finished FaDe Open 3 (not the finals though)
So all my replays were of games I had observed
If you want structured with goals you are going to have to decide exactly what you want to work on and provide replays etc. aLtPiG did as structured a lesson as you could given that my request was I don't want to die early game to that 9-10 minute marine tank push and had no replays to go off and no other caveats
Anyway you should watch the VOD if you're curious. He clearly thought about what to cover and how given my answer to his questions

[PiG]

Firstly I would like to say thankyou to Meatex for taking the time to write-up this review! Any feedback helps me. I'm relatively new to the sc2 community, only really starting to get involved from around January this year and have only given about 4 coaching sessions prior to my session with Meatex. This is the key reason I charge much less than other coaches, I am relatively inexperienced!

Everyone here made some interesting points. I have been taking advice from people that watched the VoD aswell as watching some other coach's approaches to teaching sc2.

I personally don't like to teach in an awkward or stressful environment. which is part of why whilst im still learning my own teaching style I like to just take my time and chat with who im teaching. I don't think anyone should pay just to get comfortable with me though, which is why my lessons almost always run over time (My 2 hour session with Meatex went for roughly 3 hours, if you count the roughly 30 minutes of us just talking about NASL and the meta-game at the end :P).

I realise that in future when teaching people who don't know 100% what they want from the lesson(such as Meatex), I should adopt a more stock-standard approach to gauging my students skill-level and expectations. With Meatex I asked him a set of standard questions I had and told him to send me any replays exemplifying particular matchups or problems he wanted to work on. However I realise now just how important it is to really watch that replay so I don't spend about 15 minutes gauging someone's skill and what they want and expect.

As I'm also new to teaching I am a little wary of imparting knowledge as if it's the word of god! However I realise after watching parts of the VoD that I should be imparting my knowledge in a more confident and systematic way. Rather than justifying why i think certain strategies do and don't work, I should focus more on improving student's understanding and ability to execute these strategies.

In the case of Meatex I believe the most important thing I saw lacking with his play was his mechanics and multitasking. All the races in sc2, but mostly Zerg, demand that the player be organised in the way they approach their macro timers (injects, tumors, overlords, production). As such it is my belief that almost every sub mid-master Zerg (and some cheesy ones that are higher) fail to win mostly because of the way they deal with these timers whilst doing the right things with their army control. Essentially they lose games to pressure builds not because they control their army wrong, but because they miss so many injects that they cannot spend their money. Or vice versa: they spend so much time injecting larvae and macroing that they fail to control their army correctly at all!

What I attempted in my lesson with Meatex, as I do with most player's first lesson, is to impart 'standard' safe openers that allow the player to get used to their build so that they can focus on their macro timers properly. Now not only is the opener what buildings get built when, but also how you scout and what you look for, and how to react. I feel that without having a build you are completely comfortable with, knowing what to scout for and how to react, mixed with not messing up your macro timers under variable pressures, is impossible (unless you're TLO!). As MEatex had no standard safe ZvT I tried to get him to run through a safe standard build whilst checking for his opponents build order and reacting accordingly. In this case stopping a marine helion harass into an 11 minute marine tank push.

Unfortunately this build order was quite alien to him and took a while to grasp, hence those other factors didn't get to come into play too much. I feel like in ZvP on the other hand the opener became ALOT more streamlined and clear what to do under pressure. Most importantly I feel like once he had this build more understood, watching him play first-person and reminding him constantly of his timers and what he should be checking for in his resources, supply, and minimap, that he began to grasp the concepts of when you should be focusing on WHAT, AKA. multitasking. As he was under attack and getting ripped by forcefields I reminded him to ignore his roaches once they were cut off by ff and focus on things he COULD do such as injecting, making sure he wasn't supply capped, and continuing production.

One of the key points I think I made as he was about to make an attack was to wait a second and check all his macro timers were restarting their cycle (injecting, building extra ovies,setting rallies and building another round of units) before he entered combat so that he wouldn't fall too far behind whilst microing.

These are the sorts of things I aim to impart when teaching a standard opener. It isn't just me imparting a set order that structures get placed but the entirety of how you play the beginning of the game. As such I believe I should probably tell my students to have a 10 minute session with me a few days or a week before their lesson in order to check their openers aren't faulty or give them safe standard openers for them to practice to prepare for my lessons.

Once my students start to understand these mechanical and focus-oriented parts of the game better then am I willing to teach them micro, strategy, trickery and cheese. Of course if someone is set on learning cheese and isn't interested in learning how to actually improve their game, whilst wanting to pay me money, I will accept.

Writing this all out has helped me think out my teaching approach and hopefully I will be giving improved lessons as a result.

Thanks for your thoughts and feedback guys

[PapaBigBelly]

Great Constructive review Meatex
aLtPig is a nice guy
all piggys are