Improvement is a Skill

Introduction: Improvement is a Skill in Itself

To improve is something everyone can do in any field. There are no prerequisites to improve, except perhaps the drive to do so. But a lot of players become stuck, unable to get better, which leads to, for lack of a better word, mediocrity for extended periods of time. So then what does it take to improve?

Improvement is a skill you learn as you partake in the game. It is not something so simple as wishing to be better and driving yourself to do so. While drive is important, a drive to improve without any means or steps to do so will result in nothing. The skill of improvement is a combination of a will to obtain knowledge, reflection on your wins and losses, willingness to learn from peers who are better than you (and accept the knowledge they have to offer), and much more. As a result, those with a deal of experience are more inclined to have the skills with which to improve; complete beginners are not. This does not mean that beginners do not improve. They certainly do. But they often are less willing to accept that the ideas they come up with are not good or that others may know better than them, which leads to excessive amounts of mediocrity for a very long time. As they gain a certain level of experience, they begin to understand that others know better than them, and are willing to learn from them. This is the point at which improvement begins: after you have lost enough times that you get tired of losing. So how do we get there? And how to we improve once we are? The skill of improvement is actually a lot of smaller skills all combined into one, and that is what I intend to discuss here.

Part I: The Skill of Improvement Broken Down

Improvement requires a lot of dedication and knowledge on how to improve. I call it a skill in itself because it is not uncommon for people to seek improvement, but not know how to obtain it. Improvement is broad though, and it is the type of skill that is really just a combination of mentalities that, just by having them, helps you succeed. I am going to call all of these mentalities "sub-skills." They form the most major basis for anyone trying to improve at anything, and they are the type of openminded mentalities that allow you to succeed at it. By opening yourself up to these, you are improving not only your game, but also your way of thinking in any regard.

The first major sub-skill of improvement is a willingness to obtain factual knowledge about the game you play, in this case, Yu-Gi-Oh. Yes, this is a skill, and I call it that because so many players lack it. There is a common attitude among new players and even mildly experienced ones, that "it works for me" is actually a viable stance or opinion. This simply is not the case, and learning this is the first step to improving. If something strictly wrong has been working for you, you have been doing something wrong. Often actually, a player has to throw everything he thinks he knows out the window in order to begin obtaining real knowledge. This may in fact be the most important step to improve because its the breakthrough step. If you never reach this step you will never improve.

I am going to show a conversation I had over discord with another user, and it is a very short one, but it literally highlights exactly why I say this.

[7:47 PM] [Redacted]: But my problem is that I don
[7:47 PM] [Redacted]: Don't*
[7:47 PM] [Redacted]: understand zoodiac decks
[7:51 PM] Cameron: getting better at the game takes a lot of time studying
[7:52 PM] Cameron: do you have a willingness to learn and obtain factual knowledge?
[7:52 PM] [Redacted]: No I don't
[7:52 PM] [Redacted]: ,-,
[7:52 PM] Cameron: then you won't ever become even decent.

This is a harsh thing to hear, but it is the truth. This mini-conversation (which certainly continued and devolved into worse) is actually this mentality personified, and it is why I have written this article and worded it the way I have. It may seem crazy to think that there are people who do not seek to improve, but there are, for whatever reasons. Be it "time," or "I have work" or etc., these are just excuses and hurdles that people use as a crutch to excuse themselves for mediocrity in the field. If you want to improve at anything you have to make time, and you have to spend that time learning if you want to continue past a certain point.

To obtain knowledge you need to ask your own questions, research the game, its history, its theory, and shadow better players. It is never enough to know something. It requires the how and the why, and these can only come from research and questioning. Willingness to achieve these is the first step to becoming better.

However, knowledge does not just extend to theory and history. It also applies to rulings and the famous people who play this game. You cannot improve if you do not know how your cards work and you cannot improve if you do not know who you should be paying attention to. Making sure that you are up to date on the game and the events that take place will help you to understand just what being a good player is.

The second major sub-skill is a willingness to be wrong. This one heavily ties into the former, but it is much more difficult to grasp early on. Sure, by achieving this stage you have proven that you can learn, but rarely do you want to be wrong. Beginners and even experienced players tend to be wrong a lot, about, well, everything. That is okay though. A willingness to be wrong shows that you are capable of reflective thought and understand that you do not know everything about the game. Open-mindedness is incredibly important to the process of improvement, and it is trait that puts the top players on top, and keeps them there. There are players who know better than you and there always will be. Understanding that there may be a point at which you are wrong benefits you more than you could realize as you could seek to improve.

Beginners often like to believe that the habits that have made them win in a few games are the end-all be-all (and I say beginners in the general sense of "anyone who is not very well versed in this game"). There generally tends to be a lack of understanding of variance, in that beginners will not realize that perhaps the opponents they beat could have bricked, been bad themselves, or both. This leads to them thinking their strategies are the best and rejecting opinions that say otherwise until proven to them. While being a skeptic is both natural and good, complete rejection of dissent halts progress and improvement, and these players will not get better. What is necessary of you as a player is to learn, not to argue. Argument is only useful if it ends in resolution, and that cannot occur if both parties are unnecessarily engrossed in their own opinions. To improve, you must accept that you can and will be wrong and use the knowledge you have gained from past experience and education to guide you toward new realizations about the game.

Willingness to be wrong also shows a sense of humility, which is necessary for improvement, as blind arrogance will guide you down a path of mediocrity. Thinking you are the best player ever tends to lead you to think you cannot improve because you are good enough as it is. And I think it is obvious why that is never the case, even if you somehow are the best.

The third major sub-skill is willingness to lose. A lot. Winning teaches you very little, but losing teaches you everything you can learn from playing. Good players lose very often, more than you would ever realize from watching their performance at top tables. It is through losing that you learn what works and what does not, and which methods are acceptable in a duel and which are not. Through losing duels, you achieve not only a drive to finally win, but valuable information that will benefit you in constructing your deck and adjusting your playstyle, naturally driving you to the established theories and precedents set by better, more successful players that came before you. It is generally not enough to learn these theories. As I mentioned before, you have to know the how and why; losing teaches those to you and brings about great realization about this game. Do not be afraid to lose. As long as you are in practice, count every loss as a lesson.

The importance of losing is something that many people just simply cannot grasp early on, but it is absolutely necessary that they do. If you were to take any deck, say Zoodiac for example, and create it solely from theory, you would likely have a good deck. But then you test the deck and you keep losing. Well, this is fine, because it means a few things you should be striving to fix:

1. Your deck has some sort of inconsistency or lacks some kind of power needed to beat other decks you would be facing.
2. You are not playing your deck correctly and must improve your technical or combo-based play.
3. Your opponent is drawing very well every time and you are not.

We can discard number three, as it is neither likely nor representative or your deck. So then we are left with either some inconsistency or a lack of a tech card that gives you a disproportionately better match-up against a certain deck than normal, or you are misplaying, perhaps erroneously. Both of these issues are fixable, but you would never realize them except by testing the deck and losing the games you lost. Losing teaches you where your decks inconsistencies lie or where your misplays are, by punishing you for these things. The more you lose in testing, the greater your realization about your deck, your playing, and the game in general will be. Never be upset to lose in practice, because it is only a help in the end.

The fourth and final major sub-skill is the ability to reflect on losses. On their own, it does not mean anything to win and it does not mean anything to lose. If you cannot reflect on these things then you will not improve. Why did you lose? What could you have done to avoid a loss, if you could have done anything? Was there even anything to do? You have to ask these questions after each game and match to understand what went wrong and what you can do better the next time. Good players are not good because they have some kind of mysterious natural talent. No one gets to the top tables without knowing why they win and lose. Knowing how to reflect on your losses helps make sure that they happen less often, or at least that you improve every time you lose.

A helpful way to learn to reflect on losses is to play open-handed with spectators. If you make a misplay and lose due to it, someone will point it out and question your play. What could you have done differently? This is where you really begin to understand yourself as a player as well. You learn what biases you have and what plays you are more ready to make as opposed to plays your are less likely to. If you are the type of player who plays too aggressively and gets punished for untimely pushes, eventually this bias will become obvious after you have lost to it enough times. Conversely, if you are overly conservative and lose because you feared to make a push, be it because you did not read the backrow properly, or you did not think about the top card of the opponent's deck, or whatever reason you may have, then you will learn that bias as well. This is where you really begin to fix errors in your playstyle and thought process. The more you reflect on your losses, when avoidable, the more you learn about all the things you should or should not do in a game.

Part II: Mistakes and Wrong Opinions

On the path to improvement, people make a lot of mistakes that hold them back from improving, even if they follow all of the former advice. And boy there are a lot of those. A lot of them stem simply from wrong opinions or views on the game fueled by the beginner's brain. You can accept that you are wrong about card trader (and I use this card as an example because for some reason it is awfully ubiquitous) being a good card and reflect on your losses all you want but that will not do you any good if the reason you are losing is because your deck is trash, to put it bluntly. There is little you can do to improve until you weed out errors in your improvement process and truly tighten your grip on it as a skill in and of itself.

One major mistake is this common beginner attitude that originality is the heart and soul of playing the game and that if you are not playing an original 40 card combination that you are a meta-whore or something of the like who does not deserve to play. And people who think this way lose and deserve to lose as much as they can until they learn why their opinion is wrong. This mistake is most common and understandable from beginners, but it pervades into the community of "experienced" players, where it takes the biggest toll; other beginners learn these kinds of opinions and habits and that restricts the amount of improvement they can make as a result.

There is no moral high ground for playing an original deck. There is no award to be won for your deck being suboptimal yet original. The idea that "netdecking" (copying another person's build of a deck card for card) is bad needs to cease, because it is actually one of the most helpful tools for a beginner, as it teaches them how decks function and the strategies to be found within the modern game. When you tell someone you only play original decks because you hate netdecking and do not want to use what someone else uses, you are making yourself look dumb, and you are making any player who does not know better worse.

Another big mistake I see often is the notion that you get better by playing some low-tier or rogue deck because it is "harder to win with it." This kind of relates to the former mistake, but in a way it is worse, because the logic has no basis even in some kind of false morality or pride. You do not get better because you handicap yourself on purpose. Playing Crystal Beasts against Zoodiac does not make you get better. It just makes you lose a lot. Sure, losing can help you get better but there is nothing to learn from when all you can reflect on is your deck being awful. The mistake here is playing a deck that is not the best or close to it. Always play the absolute best deck available to you. It does not have to be one you made, and if it is the best deck, then I can assure you that it likely will not be. Improvement in deckbuilding comes from study and theory, but improvement in playing comes from being able to learn real information from your reflection. This can only be done if you are on a relatively even ground with the opponent from the get-go, Thus, if you are not playing the best deck you have available to you, then you are not going to notice any real improvement in your abilities because you are never going to stop losing, and even when you lose you will not be learning anything from it.

Something that is common is how often people want "partners" to improve with, but they usually seek other beginners for this. Practicing with other beginners is an awful way to learn. If neither player knows anything, how do they teach each other anything? Most often, they just rub bad habits off on one another and neither ever improves. Seek help from good players, and if they do not want to help then find someone else. Make it obvious that you are willing to learn, because very often beginners or others seeking to improve do not come off this way. There is this common attitude from beginners that experienced players are elitists or rude or mean, but this usually stems from many beginners being stereotypically helpless and close-minded, thus refusing to learn from them, leading to any effort used on them being a waste. As long as you make it known that you are worth the time to help, you will eventually get some.

The idea that winning means anything is also annoyingly pervasive. You learn very, very little from winning. Just because you won three games in a row with the deck you just made ten minutes ago does not mean it is not awful. It more likely just means your opponents are also average or below-average players. You do not really get better from winning. In fact, winning constantly means quite a few things:

1. Your opponents are now below your own skill level, and thus no longer any help for improvement.
2. You are neglecting to reflect on flaws in your own deck or playstyle, and thus settling into bad habits that will haunt you until you begin facing better players.
3. You are becoming satisfied, and thus complacent, and will not improve as long as you are able to continue winning, which is in direct opposition to your goals.

Winning is not really all that great or important unless you are at a tournament where it matters. In practice it is almost always much more beneficial to lose so that you can identify real problems in your deck or playing and fix them before it does matter. As I mentioned before, the more you lose, the more you learn. The more you win, the more you settle into bad habits just because you have not been punished for them yet. It takes losing to spot flaws in deckbuilding or playing that are otherwise not obvious from the outset. Play as many good players as can find and every time you get better, keep playing better players. With the dawn of the internet and online simulators for most games, Yu-Gi-Oh especially, there is always a way to find players who will challenge you. Winning means very little, and most of the time it just means that you have reached a plateau of skill, and unless you can get over it, you will not improve from there.

Another poor mentality is the idea that (often one's own) experience is the end-all of a person's ability. This can cause you to put too much faith in them, and do not think that the opinion of a more experienced player is immediately worth more than that of someone less experienced. You can be experienced and still be awful, and this is a lesson many experienced players hate to learn. A player (A) who has traveled to multiple YCS tournaments in his life, say ten or eleven over six years, is certainly more experienced than a player (B) who has been to only one or two in the past year. However, for the sake of the argument, Player A has had a 0-3 drop record at all of his events because he took bad deck choices and believes that his original Blue-Eyes White Ice Barrier Crystal Beast deck is the best, while Player B made day two at his first YCS with a 7-3 record and topped his second with only one loss. Player A absolutely has more experience with the game and the tournament scene in general, but his opinion should not be more highly regarded due to this. Ethos is incredibly important in any field, and reputation means a lot. Players who are both experienced and proven to have a good mentality and record are the ones to be trusted. (Note that this does not mean that only the opinions of those who have topped events are valid. That is another poor mentality on its own. Some players are simply unable to attend events due to monetary reasons or life occurrences, so reputation should not solely be built on how many times a person's name has appeared in a Konami feature article.)

Probably the biggest mistake I see people seeking to improve make is to simply play too much. The process of improvement does not hinge on how much experience you have, nor does having a certain amount of experience entitle you to natural improvement. This ties into the previous points on reflection. Playing games back to back does not matter if you are not thinking about why you are playing the way you are playing or why you won or lost. If you are not taking breaks between games to reflect, you are not making any impactful change to your skill level. And it is not just between games that you need to take breaks. Playing a lot does not matter even if you reflect if you do not understand the basic theory behind the game. Reading up on things better players have written and said about the game is necessary to improve at it, and you cannot do that while you play. When you are constantly losing and reflecting is not helping, perhaps it is necessary to take a break and read up on what someone in the same situation has said about the game; there tends to be excellent insight found in such articles. When you are stuck and the answer is not coming to you naturally, you should always seek help from peers who are more experienced and more accomplished at the game, to see exactly where you are going wrong.

Conclusion: Improvement Is Not Natural; It Requires Real Effort

Improvement is a task that everyone can undergo, no matter how new to the game, or how experienced, they may be. A constant struggle and drive to improve is required but this alone is not enough. You must seek the knowledge, be open to it, reflect on your losses, and learn from yourself and other players about what it means to be good at the game. There is a lot to be learned and taught about the game of Yu-Gi-Oh and the effort required to learn it all is tremendous, but with the correct mindset, it is possible to actually become the type of player that could top a YCS.