Gameplay, Practice, and Ranked Insights | This Valorant Life Episode 4 | Valorant Podcast

In this week's episode of This Valorant Life, join Adam and myself as we unravel the secrets behind mastering the balance between gameplay and practice. Learn the keys to dominating ranked matches, from honing your mechanical skills to outsmarting opponents with 5-head decision-making. Discover the power of map control and the hidden playbook that can elevate your gameplay to the next level.

Transcript

Tim: 0:00

Hi everyone, in this week's episode of This Valorant Life, join Adam and myself as we unravel the secrets to mastering the balance between gameplay and practice. Learn the keys to dominating your ranked matches from honing your mechanical skills to five head decision making, and discover the power of map control and the hidden playbook that can elevate your gameplay. And you'll notice a different format this week. Let us know if you like this side by side format better, or if you like the whole frame format that we were doing before. And with that, let's get into it.

0:28

All right, welcome to episode four of this Valorant Life podcast. I'm on with my friend and co host Adam. Today we're going to be talking about What's the optimal ratio between playing games and practicing? And how do we even think about ranked? And what are Adam's experiences working with his clients and and his ranked journey and how he's grown? So with that, why don't we jump in? When you're working with your clients, Adam, what are, how do you kind of explain to them or guide them and how much they should be practicing versus playing ranked? I think it definitely depends on your current rank, but for the majority of players, a little bit of mechanical focus first. As like a warm up or a brief introduction into the game is a little bit more crucial. So as a rough guideline, just throwing out arbitrary numbers, you know, let's say like a 30 minute warm up followed by three to four ranked games or however much your energy levels can take you, whether or not that be more or less. And then concluded with either self reflection. So that could be in the term of auto review. But majority of the time, you know, you can just end your session there and that's okay. But if you're trying to take it one step further, you could do some thought reviews, you could do some custom work, you can do maybe even another aim routine, something like that, but that's kind of how I view it in terms of, I guess, practicing and going a little bit more in depth, like, let's say you're newer to the game, I think it's a little bit more crucial that you just don't even think about playing ranked. And you're just getting the fundamentals down first, so you can do this in the range, you could do this in deathmatch, and then maybe you sprinkle in some rank just for fun or to see what it's like in a maybe in there. What do you think is the rank under which it's just super important to work on your fundamentals? Definitely anything below gold, once you reach gold, maybe plat level, you could start experimenting with letting lineups or maybe even, you know, pre round positioning or, you know, certain playbooks. I think that's kind of when you kind of sprinkle in, but before that you just take as many duels as you can and make sure you can actually shoot back. And that is because that's kind of the fundamental building block of playing Valorant is that some point you need to be able to take duels and click heads. Exactly. Especially in ranked, since it's a little bit more of a simplistic game. You have to be able to get your kills eventually. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. And so, in your mind, what are, like, what would be the breakdown of the mechanical fundamentals that players should be practicing? Like, what are, what is the list of those mechanical fundamentals? The super basic point, I guess, would be crosshair placement on the head level. I think majority of players know that now, so after that I would probably say getting your pre aim and then your peek down, so I guess this would just be movement or peeking in general that kind of combined. And making sure you're comfortable with getting kills with just your crosshair placement. And then after that, you can kind of experiment a little bit more with, you know, incorporating your aim to get some of these multi frags or maybe even spraying. But until you're comfortable with peeking and getting the kill instantly or like somewhat instantly off a crosshair placement, you shouldn't be considering spraying at all. It should just be like one or two bullets, you know, maybe even some bursts, but. Not no spring and then yeah, no. And the thing underlying this is just these are translatable habits that will support you in your future rank journey as opposed to, let's say, you could probably get past gold, just crushing an Odin, just crouching and spraying, but it's going to get you punished later. Like, is my understanding there correct? And I, like, if you were to kind of bring this into sports terms or something, I don't really play much sports, but like, I don't know if you were playing basketball or something and you didn't know how to dribble, then you're not really going to be able to offer much to your team. Maybe if you're like a really good shot, you know, you could just throw where you're standing, but. You know, you have to get kind of get that movement down first and then go from there. And where would you factor in, so you talked about crosshair placement, like head level, right? And then peaking, like pre aiming and peaking. And then where would you bring in, because I've actually found this super useful ever since you showed me was like, when you're kind of peaking through an off angle, just tracking the corner, but with like a gap so that, and I've actually like, rather than just peaking a corner on wide swinging and just. Aiming like into the abyss and then trying to ream like this idea of almost like peaking with a gap on the corner has made it way easier for me to take these off angle fights. But like where would you add the tracking of the corner into this as a fundamental or do you think that's a more advanced thing? It's definitely more of an advanced thing, but to, since you're asking, I would say like if I were to throw out some numbers again, if you get the pre aiming and peaking thing down Mm-Hmm you're probably gonna win 70% of your gun deals. And like in your mind, like that's all you need to know. And then the times that you die to it or like die because your cross is in the wall is just like whatever, but like really good players kind of know that 20 to 30 percent where you kind of do need to live your life, give yourself that gap to convert those duels. And like you said, typically that is more for off angles or like if you're scaling on a site and you need to do it quickly and you're scared of them peeking into you. So like on those. 20 to 30 percent duels, like if you can recognize, like, this is a time to hold wide rather than preeming into the wall and you can convert that, like, that's where I think you become a really good player. But to be honest, I think you could probably just preem, crutch and peek out and like do that all the way up until immortal or even higher. But, you know, if you can kind of understand when it's better to hold wide, you get a lot more kills than your teammates would never get just because it's just so overlooked. And I know for, like, people use the term crosshair placement like so often, right? It's like just work on your crosshair placement, work on your crosshair placement. But I noticed that when I focus on it, and I'm sure like this is at the same at every level, is that if you have really good crosshair placement, the game fundamentally feels like pretty easy sometimes. Whereas if you don't have crosshair placement, like you're it's always a struggle like you're all and I'm sure if you don't have crosshair placement, my guess would be you have way more volatility in your performance. Like sometimes you're cracked and sometimes you can't hit. The side of a barn, whereas I think if you have good crosshair placement, you're like fundamentally that way more consistent player. And that is very true. And just to kind of like put in some real like player examples, like if you normally play really high sensitivity, you can kind of crutch on your speed of your sense because you don't actually have to be your cross. It doesn't have to be close to the angle and you can kind of flick over. But the problem becomes where, like, the enemy player has really good crosshair placement and then peeks you and you just instantly die. So, there's two ways you can kind of approach this. People with really, really low sense. On the extremes, I would say. Like, really low sense, they have to prioritize their crosshair placement because they physically can't move that fast. So they're able to kind of like get the kill with that alone. And like the micro adjustments are easier. And then with really high sense players, again, like, because they're on high sense, they're able to kind of angle snap a little bit faster. So PRX something is a great example of this. That guy's crosshair placement is God, like near perfect. And he plays on extremely high sense. So he's able to kind of have consistency in his gameplay, like you said, because even though he's playing high sense, he's made it. A big fundamental thing for him to be able to have good crosshair placement, whereas like if he was just a high sense player with bad crosshair placement, he wouldn't be as good as he was. And so like in terms of like working on that, like the way I was thinking about this, this is my journey. Like I started playing ice hockey in university. Ice hockey, like many sports, is a game where you have to have the puck on your stick, like that's part of playing the game is having the puck on your stick, but in a game, you might touch the puck like 15, 20 times, right? But if you're practicing, if you're like in like a skills development course or class, like you're touching the puck for the whole hour. Because you get to just practice, right? Whereas in a game, you're touching it, maybe like two minutes total out of an hour. And that's what got me thinking a bit about, like fundamentally in a ranked game, let's say you have like 30 gunfights, but in in a 10 minute death match, you probably have 60 gunfights. So like if you just play four death matches, you've like quadrupled, quintupled, the amount of gunfights. And so you're, if you prioritize playing your death matches like one, like one-to-one in terms of time, like death matches to ranked, then you're gonna get, as long as you're being really intentional how you're practicing your CrossFit placement is gonna exponentially improve by doing that versus just playing two rank games. Mm-Hmm. like, so do you like incentivize some of your lower rank players to just. DM more rather than play more ranked or like, how do you get that ratio working for them? So they actually get enough reps. That's a great question. I guess I haven't really thought about it extensively, but I would say like the way I can kind of view it now is like. If your mechanics are your bottleneck, which the majority of lower ranked players will be, then they should spend more time on that bottleneck. And then once it kind of evens out a little bit more where you're winning most of your gun duels, or maybe even it's just 50 50, then that's what you kind of have to approach positioning or utility usage a little bit more. So like with that in mind, like if you're newer to the game, or if your mechanics are really weak, then you should probably have like an overwhelming ratio to get those. Fundamentals and mechanics down first, like maybe you'd like a two to one or a three to one, like you play two hours of deathmatch on one ring game or, you know, so on and so forth. And I'm sure like a one to one ratio would be fine as well, but I guess that just depends on how much you enjoy playing deathmatch. You could even do swift plays, you can even do team deathmatch just to switch it up, I guess. But. Like you said, you do get a lot more reps doing deathmatch. So I think it's, it's definitely way more viable to, to kind of get those reps down. The one caveat I will give with that is even though deathmatch is equivalent to ranked in terms of the map you play on like team deathmatch, most of the duels that you take in deathmatch won't be one to one. Sure. It's very, very much wide swing. People don't really. Like slice the pie. They don't really like take small peaks out, et cetera. You know, like the movement is very one dimensional is the best way I can explain it. So at a certain point, you're only getting reps, killing people that white swing you, and you're not getting reps on all the other engagements. So once you're comfortable killing people with your wide swing, then that's, I think maybe where you kind of explore team death match, because then you can kind of do shorter peaks. You can use util. And then maybe you explorers with play, ranked, unrated, et cetera, but just understand that like deathmatch is great to increase your You're as a wide swinging mechanics, because that's all you do and then killing people that wide swing you, but to get everything else down, you might want to explore the range or, you know, like I said, other non competitive game modes. Well, and then it seems like team death match now with the addition of that to the game can expand the practice you get because team death match has, I think, on balance, like 50 50 fights. It's compared to cause you're generally not getting shot in the back then regular deathmatch. Right. And it's definitely should be used as a supplement rather than not only playing TDM or not only playing DM. Like you should definitely be using both just because the map difference. Right. Like if you're playing DM, like normal death match, you get to play the actual maps you play. So that's where you kind of develop crosshair placement and knowing how to peek, stuff like that, getting familiar with the map layout. So a lot of people ask me, it's like, Oh, which one's better than the other? Like you should only be doing both like realistically. Regular death match, just because everyone else is white swing doesn't mean you have to white swing. Right? Like, I think a lot of times, like you're incentivized to play fast, so you don't get shot in the back, but to really improve, you're probably better off slicing the pie and sometimes you get shot in the back. Like you just live with it rather than just creating these bad habits of. Just like kind of blooding onto site and not actually peaking every angle a hundred percent. And one thing I want to add to that is a lot of people play death match to win. I was, I remember looking at my tracker to look at my history on death matches and just looking at the ranks. I was losing death matches consistently to like plats, golds, like they were like, they were the ones winning like plots or golds. And meanwhile, me as a radiant, it's just like 20 kills. And like, that's. You know, multitude of reasons, but mainly I think it's because I'm not playing the death match to win. I'm just trying to replicate the fights as I would take them in a real game. So that's really important. And to do that, maybe it's useful for players too. So I recommend it to not play with audio though. I find that if you do play with audio, you kind of just hear too much. And then you get overwhelmed and you just start holding angles. And, you know, trying to not get shot in the back, but so let's say like a player has progressed to diamond, you know, speaking for myself, right? Or high plat. And you know, I'm going to continue working on DMS and stuff like that. Like, how much time between playing and other stuff should we be ideally spending time on? Like, in my mind, there's playing time, like ranked, right? But there's also VOD reviewing. And there's also, you know, just jumping in customs and testing out lineups. And then there's the DM stuff to maintain gunfights and gunfight hygiene. What do you think an optimal split for that looks like once you're past just the, the, the basic mechanical fundamentals? That's a great question. I would say if you have all the time in the world, you should at least fulfill your quota of playing your ranked game. So whether that be three to five, whatever it may be. Your due to your energy levels filling your quota is really important just so you can kind of understand what works and what doesn't. If you have extra time or if you know, you can't get that quota and you kind of want to be a little bit more efficient with it, then you should definitely be spending more time to get your mechanics down. So let's say you have three hours, right? You would probably split it one hour, one hour, one hour. To doing mechanical training and then some type of game sense training to improve your decision making so that could be soft auto review or butter viewing higher level players. And then the last hour would just be trying to implement some of that and playing one ring game or, you know, if you get a really quick one, you could try to play too. But like if you had three hours and you're trying to be like super well rounded for a diamond player, that's where I would go. Okay, so that's, that, in your mind, would be better than 20 minutes of DM warmup and two to three ranked games? Probably. I think it will heavily depend on the player. So the caveat I will put here is, like, if your mechanics are already really good, then doing this 1 1 1 split would be a lot more beneficial. Because then you have that full hour for... Learning how to play the game at a higher level. And then if you're like, let's say like your mechanics and your, or sorry, if your game sense already really good, like your decision making, then maybe that 20 and then three rent game split would be a little bit better because now you're trying to implement and just get some reps and seeing like testing what you already reviewed. So I think it definitely depends, but for the majority of players I see, I would say a little bit of review would go a long way. This is kind of in alignment with what we've talked about before, which is like, while there are general recommendations, like a big part of this is tailoring and like listening and, and reflecting on like what works best for you, right? Like if, if you think your skills or your lack is in a certain area, then your training should be reflective of that. It shouldn't just be like, this is what people say. And therefore I do it. Maybe what about aim training? Cause I actually have some interesting feedback on this and I'd love to get your thoughts on it. But like we've talked about mostly in game stuff in terms of practicing versus playing. And then where does aim training come in? This is a hot topic. A lot of people think it's useful. A lot of people don't think it's necessary. I'm on the boat that it is just really efficient. So if you have extra time or if you're really interested in the raw aiming aspect. It's very useful to do. But I would say like if you're one of those players that either you know, isn't super interested in it or just isn't taking the game super serious, then you can definitely improve without it, you know? Mm-Hmm. you can, you can play the range, you can play death match, you can get to a pretty high rank. And there are pro players that have gotten to the level they have now without AIM Trainer. It's just because it wasn't popular before, but I imagine. If they were to go back and do it again, they would supplement some of their training with aim training. At least if they're serious about it, I think supposedly ZywOo is never aim trained. That doesn't surprise me specifically because that guy's grip is so palm grip oriented and not a lot of heavy aim training people use. That type of style. Yeah, so I got in training with mini God. I had a session with him. It was actually really good. It really helped me understand the things that I need to work on. And he gave me that I need to work on my flick technique, which is flicking to a target and then micro correcting and like really actually focusing on the speed of that, like really committing to it rather than what I would try to do. Which is kind of like hover my mouse over, you know, because I didn't have full belief and control in my mouse movement. And so I really improved at aim training, but what I found it doing in my games Was because I had so much focus on like flicking and clicking as quickly as I could I was getting back into this habit of like Panic flicking shooting is like right away, like really not making use of the first shot accuracy in Valorant. And I noticed that like, because I was doing so much aim training and so little in game DM, it was actually like degrading my ability. I think it like fundamentally my mouse skills improved, but my in game performance decreased because I wasn't really Adequately matching my aim training with in game work. And so like it was ingraining these like bad habits of trying to flick as quickly as possible. And just like clicking as quickly as possible. Have you seen that with clients before? Yes. I used to be one of those actually. Because I spent way too much time in training. Like even now my headshot percentage is very low, which you would think. If you aim trained a lot, your head percentage would be higher, but I think the distinguished or like the thing that you have to distinguish there is like there's two separate techniques, like technique in an aim trainer to kind of maximize your score and then technique in. The video game or like that you're playing. So in this case, Valorant to kind of like maximize your chances of getting a kill. And like, they're not the same, you know? I find that like, if you're going to aim train in Valorant or to increase your level into Valorant one speed is very important. So I'm glad that that's being addressed because I think. If you don't have the speed, you can't snap from each angle to each angle. If someone's going to like from just a pure crosshair placement, right? You're like switching from this angle and then you're snapping to the next. Whereas I would just kind of like slowly hover, which is not ideal, right? And that's like fundamentally. Most control, which is in training. And that's a very high, like a very important skill to know. So if you're training speed and like, it's translating into your like crosshair placement for angle snapping, then I think it's very good. But like where it kind of maybe becomes a little bit detrimental, like you said, is when you're just really focusing on speed versus like getting that first shot accuracy on your, like in your gun duels, then, and then it becomes kind of bad. So, like you said, it's, it's like a fine line to kind of walk. Because you don't want to be so heavily on the aim trainer that your technique in game becomes bad. And then if you're solely focused on kind of hitting your first shot and technique in the game, then you won't be as quick as you need to. So I guess like to kind of what I do now is I like to use aim trainers as a way to warm up my aim. And then I make sure to kind of get my technique back when I play Valorant by either doing like going into the range and just focusing on accuracy. Or I go into death match and use sheriff only because then like, I'm really kind of dialing on my first shot bullet or first shot accuracy. So but regardless, I think like, if you can kind of understand. Where you're lacking in aim and not make that to take over your in game gun hygiene, I guess is the best way to word it. Then it, then it's really good. This is a total aside because I was meaning to ask this earlier, but then we followed a different thread, which is. Okay. So when we're talking about crosshair placement, you're talking about high sense versus low sense. And it'll be interesting because EG is playing PRX and Demon 1 is like exceptionally low sense. And PRX something is very, very high sense. And so my provocative question for you is whoever wins this match, it's, it's going to end the debate, right? Like whoever wins, that's the King of high sense versus low sense. Right. Honestly, like I thought about that too. And I feel like that's something that I would use to justify playing on either or for me. But yeah, at the end of the day, it probably doesn't matter. I just find it crazy that a demon one can actually aim with such low sense. Yes, I think so too. And the most impressive part about it is he's so fast. He's so fast, so fast. Like I can't replicate it at all on his sense or even slightly higher. In my mind, when you think of a low sense player, you think of the way kind of yay place. Which is like super, super methodical and, and demon one can do that, but like he's kind of known for the flashy, like, you know, updraft dash crazy plays and he still hits his shot. Right? It's very crazy. Okay. Well then what about ranked? Play ranked. Unlike, you know, if you were playing youth sports or any other sport, you might practice and you play. So the practice is purely to get better and work on things. And then to play is to perform to ultimately where the result matters. Ranked is kind of both, right? Like there's in rank, there's certain things you can only practice and ranked. And yet ranked for most players, unless you have competitive scrims through like a college team or, or a tier two or pro team, there's nothing else. So, like, how, like, when you think about it, when you help your clients or people improve, like, do you think about ranked as practice or is it performing or is it a bit of both? I think in an ideal world, it is a little bit of both, but I think what I tell most of my clients is that ranked is practice. And then if you kind of improve, you want it to be inevitable that your rank follows, but your improvement and your rank shouldn't be like equated to each other. Like, so you basically want to get good enough to the point to where like you will rank up no matter. No matter what, so, and then like that is kind of performing. So like your baseline trying to improve will kind of bring your rank up towards it, if that makes sense. But I do understand like when people get to rank up games or like, you know, they've been, they had a goal to get to diamond for the longest time and they're getting really close. Like that, then it becomes a little bit more about performing. And in that case, like if someone's in this like rank up game or like they're trying to don't try anything new, like, you know, just figure out your game. You know, maybe. Just, I don't know how you, however you focus and you just play your game, just play your game and don't try anything new. And then that's where you start performing. But I think like, if in my personal opinion is like, if your goal is just to be good at the game, you shouldn't really ever try to perform ever. You should just try to be improving or practicing, I guess. Once you kind of like the game is quote unquote solved, like, you know, exactly what you want to do playbook wise or prep book wise, or react to certain scenarios, like, at least I'm speaking from my experience, like most of my lobbies are simple enough that I know what to do in most situations. And it's kind of about either for me executing or me coordinating with my teammates to do what I think is the correct play. So for the majority of higher rank players, like if you already know what the correct play is, then it's a little bit more about performing and min maxing your performance in those games. But I think like for most players, that's not the case. They don't know what the correct play is. So up until where you're really confident on your decisions, it's, it's always about learning. Well, we've talked, kind of talked about this before, which is like, if you know exactly the right situation to be in the game gets a lot easier, but to know the exact right, the right situation and positioning to be in, you kind of have to have a game plan, like a thesis for how this game should be played and how you can like tilt it in your favor. And I've, like, I'm sure every player has experienced it. The opposite is when you haven't planned for how the enemy is going to util dump you when you're playing defense. And you haven't thought about it, then you get shocked or like droned, and then you're like, kind of jumping around and you get shot in the back, right? So then positioning is fundamentally made the game really hard. Whereas if you've solved the game and you really know how to think about it, you're generally always going to be like in a pretty good spot. Is that fair? I think that's a hundred percent fair. Cause then you don't die to random stuff and you're like, Oh my God, they had this and that, and that was BS. Whereas like, if you just thought one step ahead, the most common example I can think of is like, if they have breach old, you probably don't want to play on site, you know, just play off site, or if they have kill jail, you probably don't want to just wait for the, you know. Them to get set up for the retake. You might want to fight them in the post plant things like that. So yeah, the other thing that comes to mind is like in in investing, like, which is not really related to ranked, but I think we can bring concepts in, which is. A big thing is like having like the longest view in the room, right? Like people who think about investing in a longer term do, do better clearly over the longer term than short term investors like Warren Buffett. I think he said over 40 years, he's made like six good, six really good decisions. Right. That's like a long time between good decisions. It's, it's, it was an astonishing. It was like a good decision every five years. That's an astonishingly large gap between really, really good decisions, but I think similarly, if we look at your rank journey, if all you ever do is think about improving or like winning that game. You might be doing it in a way that prevents you from getting to the level where, you know, I'm so high level, the game will automatically just recognize and put me in that rank. So I feel like looking at ranked as practice is like fundamentally a good way of approaching it because at a certain level, you'll continue to improve and then your rank will just continually reflect your improvement rather than like trying to gimmick your way to a certain rank. Mm hmm. I agree with that. Just thinking off the top of my head, you know, like you could definitely just gimmick your way up in the ranks playing judge only. You could do viper lineups, brim lineups, you know, just things like that, that like utility that is very one sided or a gameplay that is very easy to execute. You know, you can definitely get to high levels doing that. Like there are players that get to, you know, higher modal or even radiant back when the game was younger. Yeah. Just doing those types of things, but I think the game is progressing so quickly now that people are catching onto these things and like, you have to be a little bit more well rounded to actually climb the ranks. Way back when I used to give the advice, if you were just straight up mechanical aim demon, you could insta lock Reyna and get to immortal. That is, I don't think that's true at all anymore. I think like you could probably get to like, it's just too much utility. Yeah. You could probably get to like maybe diamond, maybe ascendant if you have really good aim. But there, there are students and clients that I talked to and have coached in the past that have better aim than me, like objectively raw aim benchmarks, just way better aim than me, maybe even better aimed in some pros, like on the benchmarks and their ascendant, you know, there may be hard stuck a model and it's been like that for months. And that's simply because I think they're not putting themselves into the positions to make the games easy, like you said, like dodging util and kind of thinking one step ahead. So at some point, like, you know, your aim is not going to take you that far and your game sense is not going to take you that far. You kind of need to be, like I said, that well rounded player and not be super bottlenecked in one thing. I've heard it talked about before, and this is again an investing concept, but it's like, there's like first order thinking, you're like, this thing happens, and then this thing will happen. And there's a lot of things where most people can do first order thinking, right? They're like, oh, they're going to drone out this position. So I shouldn't play there. But then it's like, I think it's like the second order thinking, which is they're going to drone out here, and then they might haunt here, or they're going to drone out here, and they're going to flash here. And smoke. And so it's like the second order that now from here, what would I do to make it advantageous for me? Like an example would be on Pearl. I feel like and correct me if you think it would be different. But if they're pushing five men art and I'm playing art, I think we talked about this. The solution is not for me to try and kill five people, and it's also not for me to run into our spawn. The best thing would be like five people art. I'm going to take a main and push in and make it very difficult for them to keep the post plan or something like that. But like, I feel like that's like the second order thinking of like knowing what you want to do, because in that moment. You're going to be too panicked to think about what a good fallback or what a good option will be. At least that is for me. I think that was very correct and that I would say is the correct decision. I guess like just to kind of go off of this, like, I think one of the main reasons why people struggle with this is like, they don't really know what map control actually is, like what the purpose of map control is. And this is like. So, like, once you have your mechanics down to, like, an acceptable level, like, the next thing would probably be trying to figure out how map control works. Or, I guess, like, maybe the next thing would be how to use your kit, and then how to use your kit to take map control. So, like, maybe it's the third thing. But, like, once you can kind of figure out how map control works, and, like, how it plays in your favor, or how it plays in the enemy's favor, I feel like rank just becomes super simple. Like, you know, for example, going back to this pearl thing, if they're a splitting a main and art, and you're on a site, you either have two options, right? You could fight to die on site or you could fall back. But what people don't really understand is like. If you just hold down one of those areas because they're splitting, then you don't have to deal with it in the first place. You can just play retake and have that one control. So I guess that's like the third secret option, right? Because of how map control is. But a part of that, a part of that I would say is also recognizing where your teammate is, right? Like if, if your teammate is a main and you're watching art and they're flooding three art, you're probably better off. If, if the teammate has fallen off, you should probably fall off and he's pushing a main. You got to go fight with him. Like, that's probably the best option. Even if you both die. Right? Right. Like that's the thing that I don't process well is like, I'll kind of make my decisions in isolation when my decisions get amplified or disamplified by whether I'm actually making it make sense within the context of what my teammates are doing. That is a really hard thing to do in ranked, especially because one, people don't communicate all the time and two, they don't know, like, they aren't thinking about what you're thinking or like, they don't know what the right play is. And maybe you don't know what the right play is, or like, which is on different pages, right? So that's why ranked is super hard. So that's probably like the most underrated skill in ranked is being able to adapt to what your teammates are doing. Because then like, even if it's the wrong play, it probably will work out. Like you've probably seen like many times, like people would just double swing through a smoke. We're like, objectively, like, maybe it was better for them to either spray the smoke or use utility, whatever, but because they double swing, they have a decent chance of converting. But if one guy goes through the smoke, dies, and the other guy was trying to do something else, like, you know, the round's lost. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Really hard. We had, we had one other thing that you had talked about before we jumped on, which was the game sense and decision making and that from there, the next level is mechanics. Like, what was, what was your thinking there? Okay, so basically me saying that like ranked is very simple, it kind of involves rushing and then defaulting. And both of those are very readable in the context of ranked because the utility is very similar. So like positionally on offense and defense as a player, once you kind of understand how to play against rushes, and what to do against the default, everything else is just mechanics. So referencing like pro players and ranked I just watched the Jingvod earlier today, you know, he just went A ramp every round on defense on split, jump peek info, and then rotated ropes. This was with Raze, right? He was playing Raze? Yeah, he was playing race and like, of course, like if, if he was in a pro team and he was playing a scrim or a match, like he's not going to be doing the same thing every round, but because ranked you have, like, you know, if he, if they come a and he's a ramp, great, you know, he can like get those fights he wants, you know, if they go, if they don't go a, he can get info. They're not a, and then you can rotate mid. And so like the difference, like if I were to replicate his exact playbook, the bottom neck then would be my mechanics, because then he would swing three or four and get two kills. Meanwhile, I would swing into three or four and get one, but like, you can see the decision making is exactly the same. I would do the exact same thing that he would do because it's very simple what he does. And I, I guess like, if you think about it like this, the better you are mechanically, the simpler your gameplay should be. Whereas like, if you have really bad mechanics, you can kind of need to go into gimmicks or like really try to out position your opponent to, to like, I would say to take that at a deeper level. It would mean that you need to be reflective or self aware enough to understand which parts of a player's playbook you should copy and which parts you shouldn't. Mm hmm. Right? Like, I was like, even if Zekken can hit a, like, a crack angle, like just a tiny, like, line peak. Just because he can do it and he can try it doesn't mean that that's probably a useful playbook for you because you're probably never going to hit it. Right. And I guess that's like the really hard thing to Improve at Valorant is like, even if you study these better players and they have their own play style that works for them and they think it's solved for them because they do it every time and it works, doesn't necessarily mean it'll work for you. And I think like, for me, this kind of really applies on Fracture. My one way on Fracture this act is not great. I have a really good understanding of the map, how people play it. I've watched a lot of people on different agents, whatever. I have a really good understanding of how the map works. I have a 30 percent win rate on the map, and I think it's specifically because like, even though I know all this stuff, it doesn't work for me. So like, I need to. Stick to what works with that map. And for me, what works for that map is just taking a main fights or, you know, pinching arcade and dish or whatever. And like, I was trying to do all these other things and like, maybe the context wasn't right, or maybe I didn't have the raw aim to pull it off or, you know, the comfort for it. Demon one for that, for example, he just fights B main every round. And we're like, when I think about it, I can't take the B main fight because I'm scared of the op. Like I'm just going to be posted on the angle, but he just swings and kills him. You know, so it's a hard thing, you know, it's a hard fight to win, but I'm guessing that points to a bigger fundamental, like underlying thing, which is, I think at a lower level, you just copy the playbook, copy and paste. There's no thinking because you literally don't know anything. Right. And I think as you get further into your rank journey, then it's about, okay, so they're making these plays, which is, you can just copy and paste, but really the next level is they're making these plays. Why are these making, why are they making these plays? Does that align with who I am as a player? I'm like my strengths and weaknesses. And then based on those principles, understanding my own strengths and weaknesses. What does this, like, what is the strategy for me then? Like based on these principles, they do it, this, these are my strengths. And then how do I express it through my strengths rather than exactly how they do it? Like, is that fair? I think that's well said. And like the quick thing I want to touch on this is like, maybe you can think about your playbook or decision making like in terms of levels. So like the really, really high complex playbook You might be a little bit more mechanically bottlenecked because you're trying to outplay And then like, as you kind of get closer together, your playbook and your mechanics simplify. And then when your mechanics get even better, this is kind of where Smurf playbook comes in when you're just overwhelmingly mechanically better than the enemy team. You just play as simple as possible. You look for gundals, you play middle of the map, you look for picks, you fast rotate, things like that. And like that objectively is the least. Complex way to play the game. Or I guess in other words, the most simple way to play the game. You just stand in the middle of the map and then rotate to where they are. You're just like a, like a little kid. And because of that, your mechanics are so good. You'd be able to pull it off. And like, I guess like if we're going back into the learning aspect of this, if your bottleneck is mechanics. And you're not trying to win or perform, but you're trying to practice, maybe it is good for you to just remove all of that complexity in your playbook and just try smurf playbook in air quotes to level up your mechanics. And of course you will be mechanics to improve exactly. And then you can kind of go that way and then vice versa. Yeah. Like any game specific situation. Cool. Is there anything else that we missed that you want to talk about? Off the top of my head? I don't. I think so. Me too. Awesome. So with that, we'll sign off. Thanks for listening to this episode and until next time. Until next time. See you later.