Top 6 important things to being a good runner

List of most important things to practice when wanting to get good at Pokémon Crystal

1) Manips
 Absolutely the most important thing in today’s game is rng manipulation. You need to be able to execute these very consistently if you wanna get good times.

2) Spinners
 Unfortunately there are 29 spinner passes in this game and if you’re not playing them fundamentally correct you will hit 3-4 every run which loses 4 minutes to nothing. You want to literally be practicing passing spinners if you want to get good at this.

3) Basic movement and execution
 It’s unbelievable how much time people lose to just basic execution alone so you need to make sure you’re playing very well. I estimate that most runners lose around 2-4 minutes against top runner execution which is astounding.

4) Advanced execution
 This kind of execution is all the small little buffers everywhere that adds up over a 3 hour run. If you don’t do this you will never be able to get within even 2 minutes of record. People probably lose about a minute total to this kind of execution which combined with basic is 3-5 minutes.

5) Practice
 This should probably be number 2 on this list as without it you have literally 0 chance of competing. You want to be practicing spinners, manips, ice path and mt silver(cannot stress how important it is to be able to execute all those things near perfect). Use save states and keep grinding execution until you get it near frame perfectly.

6) RNG
 This is easily the least important thing in crystal with all the manips. You’ll need luck to get record eventually but if you’re just aiming for a time 2 minutes worse than record this basically doesn’t matter. Grinding mindlessly for good rng means nothing because you’ll just lose all the time to execution which is what so many runners make the mistake of doing.
(An example of this is a run I watched recently of a runner I won’t name(he’s a good guy), he got a run that to me looked like 3 minutes worse than record, it was actually 9 minutes worse. Where did all the time get lost, when you can’t find this it means it was lost to yourself)