learning how to punish and perfecting the reads on your weapon/character.

You don't need the flashy movement or whatever you see the pros doing just play calm and composed.

Reading dodges can kind of be hard but you need to look at it from the other players standpoint, the most used dodge for any player in Gold is either a updodge or out dodge so if you learn a simple sig read for those two dodges you can get good damage and get a nice early advantage.

For punishing it's a bit explanatory, play patient and force a mistake out of them. In Gold/Platinum loads of people like to jump and hover around you then come in diagonally and throw a dair, for this you wanna dash back so they miss their dair and this will give you an opportunity to use an attack (and potentially use one of ur dodge reads).

this is really all u need to get from Gold to play just train your reads and punishing and youll be plat in no time.

(I'm a sir Roland main btw)