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It’s Valorant Time
I love gaming. The competition. The graphics. The speed, the maps, abilities. The headshots, the camaraderie.
Today I asked myself a question. How do I get to the level of gameplay that I want to get to? How do I play Valorant in the way I want to play it?
I listened to my body and I used connection theory. Your body is tired. It’s aching. Your mind is cloudy and distracted. Your eyes are dry and tired.
I need to feel the magic that Valorant can be.
I turn on the Dark and Dangerous playlist:
It is time to turn off all the lights. To go into my closet. To let everything go silent.
I feel scared and anxious and my head hurts, but my body knows it’s okay to relax now.
I lay on my bed to meditate. Long enough to wonder when I should stop. Long enough for my mind to wander to think of my colleague who left today and wrote a very nice email. Long enough for the magic of nighttime to sink in, for me to want a hot drink and settle down for a night of gaming.
Turned off the lights again. Fired up the playlist again. It feels like the mood.
Had a good few games where I team MVPed every single game until the last one with a smurfing reyna on both teams. The one on my team was classic only, the one on the enemy team was not. Didn’t really like my duo, he annoyed me. Also bottom fragged every game.

Pretty pissed off about that last game.
Valorant 34: Deathmatch
My initial attempt at deathmatch:
Watching Tenz’s deathmatch
Some reflections:
- I’m not back at deathmatch at all
- I need to get better at flicking
- Tenz tries to micro adjust to one tap, strafes for 1-3 shots then crouch sprays
- Takes more time on the people who arent looking at him
My second attempt:
Its much better, but I do feel more pain in my finger from the pressing the mouse and it my biceps.
Some more thoughts:
- Add more movement into the aiming to make it more smooth
- Flick faster
- Work on using less force when pressing the shoot button
Some thoughts:
- I definitely have a really good feel for DM and my mechanics are fairly good
- I can use DM to practice thinking about angle advantage
- Tenz is calmer, moves a little slower and intentionally moves crosshair to hold specific angles instead of swinging everything
- I need to keep a focused crosshair on one area unless I’m swinging
- Think of everything as holding angles, even swinging, you are swinging to hold another angle
Valorant 37: Back on the Grind
Thoughts:
- Make the transitions smoother, add in more wide swings
- Focus on micro adjusting more before shooting
- Overall very strong stuff, great positioning
- Not having much luck with the micro adjust
- Try to shoot twice and crouch
- Use the difference between head and crosshair as new micro adjust method
- I hate DM
- I don’t really know what to do
- Maybe need to watch some pro vods
I really want to work on my mindset when I get upset, miss my shots or get frustrated with my teammates.
Some ideas:
- Pumping myself up
- Judging based on “clipable” moments rather than kills
- Use music to pump up
- Self-talk strategies
- I believe in myself
- I’ve done it before, I can do it again
- This is a small part of my long journey to being the best
- When feeling physically/mentally unwell and need a reset
- Exercise
- Watch videos of my vlogs and reflections
- Tumeric tea
- Playing music
Valorant 17: Choosing My Own Path
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.
- I want to play with people who are fun to hang out with
- I want to make the entire game comfortable to play for me
- 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:
- Brute force brawl with team, if team is pushing site together
- Try to get the enemy to trip up and make a mistake by confusing them and holding weird angles or lurking
- 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:
- Warmup physically, and stretch, get pumped up with music
- Warmup in deathmatch, get a feeling for the mouse
- Warmup in the range and spike rush and defuse
- Meditate
- Play a game, focus on winning rounds
- Vod review, focus on the minimap awareness
- Practice in custom game lineup and setups to win next time or win by more
- Meditate, reflect and write blog post
Valorant 30: Resetting
Rank got reset yesterday. I am sliding back into gold 1.
I thought about a few things today:
- Creating a Valorant learning course syllabus
- Focusing on playing the perfect game
- Focusing on effort and energy
- Focusing on the personal journey I am going on and the lessons I learn about myself
- Alex Hormzi approach of making it impossible for you to fail
Lessons I’ve learned about myself so far:
- Success means love to me
- Anger and rage covers hopelessness and out of control feeling of something that is uncontrollable or difficult
- I yell at myself because I’m afraid of failing
UNIT 1: VOD Review
- Day 1 – TenZ – 3/9/23
- Day 2 – CNED – 3/10/23
- Day 3 – Yay – 3/11/23
UNIT 2: Map Understanding
- Day 1 – Icebox – 3/12/23
- Day 2 – Split – 3/13/23
- Day 3 – Ascent – 3/14/23
UNIT 3: Mechanical Breakdown
- Day 1 – Crosshair Placement – 3/15/23
- Day 2 – Flicking – 3/16/23
- Day 3 – Spray Control – 3/17/23
Valorant 25: Blunder Chess
So today, my girlfriend and I were discussing how to make better decisions in Valorant and it made me think that we are playing low level blunder chess. Blunder chess at 200-800 elo is simply playing chess with these main ideas:
- Check for blunders (hanging queen, bishop, knight or rook)
- Check for checks on king
- Look only one move ahead
- If no clear threats, work on positioning
The idea behind blunder chess is simply that people at low elo will make a lot of mistakes and you can simple wait for them to make a mistake.
I strongly believe my elo (below diamond) that “blunder chess” is highly effective since a lot of simple mistakes are made.
I wonder if I can do the same simple ideas in Valorant where I don’t strategize too much, but check for very simple positioning and big mistakes:
- If I pull my util or knife out, can I be shot?
- Am I under time pressure?
- Positional advantage:
- Taking space or map control
- In order of lowest to highest risk
- Utility/teammates
- Shoulder peak
- Jump peak
- Jiggle peak
- Wide swing
- In order of lowest to highest risk
- Defending map control
- In order of lowest to highest risk
- Utility/teammates
- Hold and fall off method
- Spraying
- Jiggle peak
- In order of lowest to highest risk
- Taking space or map control
- Treat teammates as utility