Practicing practice: another method of practicing

Are you stuck in a rut and wondering what you can do to improve? While grinding ladder games can certainly make you a better player, mindlessly spamming that Find Match button may not be the most efficient way to improve especially if you're below Masters. Sometimes, a few matches with focused practicing is better.

Practicing practice

With focused practice, we split our gameplay up into parts and focus on improving each part one at a time. Take professional musicians for example. Very rarely will you see professional musicians play a whole piece when practicing. Instead, they would pick a part of the piece that they are having trouble with and repeatedly drill that part until they get it. They will play that specific part over and over again until perfection and then they move on to another part.

Taking a cue from musicians, we could also pick a part of our game, one part, and improve it. Now, this doesn’t mean that we only practice that one part repeatedly though. We focus on that part while playing as usual, hence the name focused practice.

For example: you are a Zerg player and you keep on forgetting to build Overlords thus supply blocking yourself. To remedy this, you go into a game with the direct goal of not getting supply blocked. Your primary objective for that game is not to get supply blocked; winning just comes in second. You do this over and over; game after game and I guarantee you, by the end of the day, you will start hitting those Overlord timings and the amount of your time spent being supply blocked will decrease.

Are you a Terran who’s having trouble keeping your SCV count high? Or a Protoss who keeps on forgetting to Chronoboost? Do the same thing. When you go into a game, focus on minimizing gaps in your SCV production. Go into a game and keep your Nexus energy empty. All the while still playing to win. Winning is still important but while practicing, it's not as important as improving that specific part of your play you are working on. Focus on improving small parts of your gameplay at a time.

Pieces of the Puzzle

The trick however, is figuring out what part of your play to improve. In a game like Starcraft where something as simple as not having a Zealot on hold position can lose you the game, what part of your game do you improve first?

First off: keep that Zealot on hold position! Figure out why you lose and focus on not making those mistakes again. After every loss, load up the replay and figure out exactly why you lost. Focus on not losing because of the same mistakes again.

You should try to improve your macro over your micro first. Keep up worker production and do not get supply blocked. Spread your Creep if you’re Zerg, Chronoboost if you’re Protoss, and use MULEs if you are Terran. Most importantly, only focus on one thing at a time.

Try and benchmark yourself with replays from pro-gamers who are doing the same or a similar build. Note how much supply they have at the 5-minute mark and at the 8-minute mark and try your best to reach that supply in your games. You can also use the after-game reports in measuring your progress like measuring how much time you got supply blocked or how much workers you’ve built.

While grinding games on the ladder has its benefits (concerning game sense, experience, etc.), focused practice could help in our own quest for improvement. You can actually apply focused practice to anything in life from work to play to other hobbies in order to improve efficiently. Take small steps to improve leaps and bounds! Good luck and have fun.