Day[9] and Friends

So now my StarCraft 2 story continues with Day[9]. I discovered Day9's dailies some time in early-mid 2011, I don't quite remember when it was exactly. The first daily I watched was #132 - Back to Basics: The Mental Checklist. It was a revelation. Even these super basic things which are at the core of playing the game were new to me. I knew how to do everything he talked about but the whole idea of mechanics was something I'd never even thought about. I suddenly realised that just waiting until tasks (build SCVs, make supply depots, etc) popped into my head was a very slow and bad way to play and that you had to actively think about them. I watched more and more dailies, one that comes to mind was Daily #121 - Plugging leaks in silver level play. Now I was ready to start playing on the ladder. Just by watching a handful of dailies, and without having played a game since my first hopeless attempts months earlier, I managed to place into silver.

I started playing the ladder and my play improved a lot. I found myself at rank 13 in my silver league with less that 20 games won. Day9 had suggested in one of his dailies (I believe Daily #269 - How to get into SC2) that it was a good idea to get a practice buddy so I went onto teamliquid.net and posted in the practice partner thread. I got messages from two guys, both were about my level of play. One was a zerg and the other a protoss, so that worked out pretty well with me being terran. I started playing a lot of custom games with them, particularly the protoss player as he was the best out of the three of us. About two weeks after I met him he got promoted to gold and I wasn't far off it.

I started to improve and my macro and mechanics were getting a lot better. I rarely missed building an SCV, only got supply blocked once or twice a game (not bad for a silver with only a week or two of play under his belt) and made shift-clicking workers back to the minerals a habit I didn't even have to think about. I was getting better and better but there was a problem. My practice partners played games with me and also laddered. I on the other hand was so focused on improving my play through what I had learned from Day9 that I stopped laddering. I felt I had to sit in custom games or games against the AI and 'hone my craft', as Day9 puts it lol. I thought I could practice effectively offline and then ladder when I felt I would be ready somewhere down the track and make a jump up to the next league. The problem was, my practice partners weren't available to play endless amounts of games and the AI is terrible to play against if you want to improve. By avoiding the ladder I created my first huge problem: ladder anxiety.

I'll continue my SC2 story in my next blog post. Thanks for reading.