Something that I noticed when playing Valorant today, is that I tend to speed up and rush when I feel under pressure or stressed, when in actuality, I need to slow down.
Last game I trusted my instincts, and really slowed down when I felt danger and I felt it was much better.
I realized that when I feel safe, I can move fast. When I feel in danger, it is time to exercise extreme caution like in real life.
Yesterday I returned to Valorant and I wanted to learn a few things since being washed before I get back fully into the Valorant grind.
Class One: Hand positioning (90 minutes)
UNIT ONE: Figure out why
UNIT TWO: Explore Movements
UNIT THREE: Explore aids and relief
Class Two: Greater certainty (3 hrs)
UNIT ONE: Document VOD areas of stress and find equivalent situations in ranked
UNIT TWO: Try to predict decision making
UNIT THREE: Document another VOD
UNIT ONE: Figure out why
I’d say I have a little golfers elbow along with just muscle fatigue. No carpal tunnel syndrome or trigger finger syndrome thankfully.
UNIT TWO: Explore Movements
My perfect position seems to be legs balanced on the floor, chest forwards, armrest angled outwards and level with the desk and pushed backward so I can sit farther forwards.
The results on my sheriff-only account:
I feel mild soreness in my hand and forearm. My whole body feels a bit cramped as well. Overall, massive improvement.
I used a new aiming mentality, which I call the “Zoom In” Method where you pretend you are zooming into where your crosshair is and on the target, sort of getting mental blinders on. It seems to help especially with aiming for very far shots.
Then I played a rank match:
My “greater certainly” class was me looking up at how Som played vs me.
I was really helpful to see the util usage. I ended up using a lot of this information in future matches.
However, I spiraled after playing ranked because I was so frustrated with how I was performing. I ended up playing non-stop from Friday until Sunday sleeping not as much as I would like and always livid from anger that all my opponents were so hard to beat.
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:
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:
I’ve since taken a different approach to Valorant. I think I had a lot of good ideas in the past but I realized the value of simplicity.
Having too many things to worry about in Valorant makes it hard to focus on the game.
So I narrowed things down to just three:
An example of staying clean is Curry:
Watching his gameplay makes me realize how much I panic and do so much extraneous movement.
After applying these three tactics, I started doing very well in my games.
I just warmed up with a pistol spike rush then tried to do a little exercise I call – the last bullet.
Immediate benefits:
I tried it again today with AMAZING results (no recording though). This really helps you take your time in a nice way. The easiest way to start is to try to “catch” them on your crosshair when you enter. Then you progress to “catching” people on my crosshair.
My initial attempt at deathmatch:
Watching Tenz’s deathmatch
Some reflections:
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:
Some thoughts: