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Valorant 35: Breach Fracture

Byjack

Thoughts:

  • Can flash high on B
  • Stun choke in A is common
  • You can stun from far away

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Valorant 41: Editing the Trifecta

Byjack

I still believe in the same idea of focusing on fewer things but I’ve made a few adjustments.

First, I increased my sens to .37 on 400 dpi in order to make it easier to hit flicks.

Then I focus on two things:

  1. Clearing angles like I’m attached to a dolly wheels and slide into the peek
  2. Stopping only when I am on someone’s head
  3. Crouching if I don’t hit my shot

Similar concept to: combination of crosshair placement and strafing

Jiujitsu Challenge? Knee Challenge

Byjack

Ok, so I no longer have an ongoing jiujitsu challenge, and I don’t really know if I have a knee challenge or not.

However, I really want to start that now. I feel really good about my progression.

It all started with 10 round Tuesday.

I went 3 rounds (2 days ago on the 21st). I absolutely died. I didn’t recover from feeling dizzy and like I was going to throw up for an hour after that.

I ate food when I got home, and slept like a baby after.

Ever since, I went to jiujitsu everyday.

On wednesday I was feeling super undermotivated, but I found an old training buddy and it was actually a good time.

Today I had even more fun.

My stamina seems to be increasing fast. I’m sore everyday and I still feel fine.

My knee feels good. It doesn’t hurt every day.

It feels strong. I feel like I can push myself more now.

My knee therapy and techniques around walking backwards, shifting my knee to be more balanced, stretching the hips and pointing the knee in the direction of the knee. AND IT’S BEEN WORKING.

I learned a lot from live rolls:

  • Don’t let someone get a completely dominant position, interrupt their attacks, move to the side
  • Don’t let your arms separate too much, too easy to armbar
  • Don’t let both arms get trapped above your head, too easy to armbar

I’m learning some basic attacks, armbars, leg locks, chokes.

Very cool stuff.

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Knee Strength 9: Videos for this Challenge

Byjack

Other than walking backwards, I found a new video that seems to have some very good videos for knee repair:

Also, I saw this video a long time ago and it did not work great but I still want to reference it in case I want to try them again at some point:

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Valorant 17: Choosing My Own Path

Byjack

I’ve looked at multiple things recently:

  • My lesson with a CS Go / Valorant coach
  • A excellent video of someone reaching radiant from silver
  • A video of how to aim well by Scream a team liquid professional valorant player

What I realized is that there are many ways to improve and win valorant games and climb to plat. There are somethings that will make it easier but you don’t need to do all of them.

Valorant, like life, is a game with specific rules, but how you play it is up to you.

A few different examples:

  • You can play only solo queue (deciding to team up with random people)
  • You can play only with people you know
  • You can play the game to gain rank
  • You can play the game to try out the different agents
  • You can play the game for the high reaction time and mechanical skill like aiming
  • You can play the game for the strategy required

I decided to make a list of how I want to play Valorant in the context of this challenge.

  1. I want to play with people who are fun to hang out with
  2. I want to make the entire game comfortable to play for me
  3. I want to focus on the actual objective, killing all the enemies and winning each round

Step 1: Finding people to play with

The most efficient way is just to focus on playing with people I already like playing with and try to meet new people by adding new people from games I play. I should also focus on unadding people I don’t like playing with.

Step 2: Making the game comfortable for me

The areas I need to focus on being more comfortable:

  • Minimap
    • Being able to visualize where everyone is just looking at the map
  • Aiming
    • Being able to comfortably get the physical mechanics of aim and crosshair placement down
  • Movement
    • Knowing the different ways and distances to peek comfortably
  • Abilities
    • Knowing lineups and ability planning
  • Clearing
    • Knowing how to path through a site properly
  • Switching weapons
    • Knowing the physical coordination of switching knife, pistol and main weapon

Step 3: Focusing on winning rounds

Usually, I am laser-focused on two things:

  • Abilities
  • Killing people and not getting killed

I want to reframe Valorant for me.

Generally, you want to either play for a plant/defuse or try to kill every member of the enemy team. 

As a result, I want to think about Valorant in the following plays:

  1. Brute force brawl with team, if team is pushing site together
  2. Try to get the enemy to trip up and make a mistake by confusing them and holding weird angles or lurking
  3. Try to set myself up for an ace by having my abilites and pathing planned out

Overall I think Valorant meets the following needs for me:

Growth: Getting better over time

Significance: The chance to practice my learning techniques in a measurable area

Love and connection: Playing with people who I like hanging out with

Here is what I think my routine should generally be:

  1. Warmup physically, and stretch, get pumped up with music
  2. Warmup in deathmatch, get a feeling for the mouse
  3. Warmup in the range and spike rush and defuse
  4. Meditate
  5. Play a game, focus on winning rounds
  6. Vod review, focus on the minimap awareness
  7. Practice in custom game lineup and setups to win next time or win by more
  8. Meditate, reflect and write blog post

 

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Valorant 7: Embracing Death (and Improving Movement)

Byjack

I’ve been thinking about what small exercise I can do right now to level up my gameplay and progress in Valorant since I haven’t had much time to play or practice recently.

After meditating on it a little bit, I settled on something that I know has held me back in Valorant since I first started playing the game – the fear of death.

The fear of dying in the game:

  • Makes me stressed out, and not think clearly
  • Makes me shoot too fast without aiming
  • Makes me frustrated when I lose
  • Makes me exhausted after playing for a few games

I’ve decided to learn how to accept death in the game, and to understand it better overall.

For example, understanding the “time to death” from an intuitive sense (and knowing how to extend that time) could be a GAMECHANGER.

It will intuitively let me know:

  • When to peek
  • If I whiff, whether I should peek back, crouch down, or keep spraying
  • How much time do I have to aim before I get killed by the enemy
  • Stay focused even after dying a frustrating number of times

So I hopped into a couple of deathmatches and gave it a shot!

I started out just trying to predict when I would die, but dying stresses me out too much to tap into my intuition (you need to be relatively clear-headed to feel things intuitively). I focused then on saying “die” aloud every time I died or predicting when I died. This is taken from a sports exercise of intentionality (you vocalize what will happen, for example, if you are playing badminton, you say “hit” when you hit the birdie, and “miss” if you miss). This exercise is supposed to train your intuition and powers of prediction and anticipation.

Some takeaways:

  • Crouching can make most people miss if they are shooting at you.
  • The direction you run and bunny hop is very important, need to figure out the most evasive ways. Sometimes running directly at them has zero chance of success. I need to work on sometimes facing the side not just forward to be more evasive.
  • The timing of peeking is important, how they have been spraying bullets is important.
  • When you are running behind a wall, before you peek, you don’t need to bunnyhop, just run normally, feel out intuitively, the moment you should peek out
  • I should start just by shouting out dead, every time I actually die, then try to predict
  • I need to aim higher to knife to the head, I keep knifing the body.
  • What I should try next is to stay alive for as long as I can.
  • I should also focus on letting the shock and frustration from dying play out before going again so quickly.

 

My intuition also tells me that I should focus on what I’m missing or losing when I’m dying and focus on those feelings right after dying.

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Knowing When You Are in Danger

Byjack

What was really striking about this commentary is about how amateurs play chess vs grandmasters, and how grandmasters play vs computers.

This is interesting because Hans Neiman was accused and proven multiple times of being a chess cheater, someone who uses chess engines to play certain critical moves.

If he actually is, his gameplay is more similar to an AI moving rather than a human.

What is interesting about that is that human seem to react a lot to emotional threats, when they are not actually in danger, thus putting themselves in greater danger.

I can relate to this a lot in Valorant, and I wonder if understanding the greater picture better in Valorant will help me understand how much danger I am in, and not unnecessarily put myself in more danger by peeking just because I feel threatened.