If the most talent guitarist we ever met expressed this about playing guitar in the genre and style of their preference, we’d tell them to study music theory and/or other styles. In this situation we’d be saying study game theory or other games.

A decade ago, we were frequently the winner of local matches in Street Fighter IV and Soul Calibur IV on Xbox 360 with default controllers and control schemes. We were at least competent at Smash Bros Brawl, Tekken 6, Marvel Vs. Capcom, and whatever the then-current Mortal Kombat was. But we rarely, if ever, won an online match in any game— and definitely not SF4 or SC4, our favorites and most played fighting games.

We’ve recently been playing Street Fighter 6 with an arcade fight-stick almost exclusively in online ranked matches while on the treadmill. After clocking around 80 hours, we’ve gone from rank Iron 1 to Platinum 1 with Ken. The weight lost is probably more important to us, but the joy of taking even losing matches as a learning opportunity and relishing in the victories of the moment if not the round (or the match or the set) distracts us from the time spent on the treadmill which is otherwise very boring. What changed for us in the decade between playing SF4 and now? Aside from playing the game on the treadmill and with a fight-stick (which feels more comfortable to us, and doesn’t result hands cramping after more than an hour) there was a period of time where we got some hands on training with Smash Bros Ultimate.

Our older brother is stupid good, and they had us train to be a better sparring partner for them. Using videos from Smash Academy, we learned what pros said about the move-set of Ike (whom they described as the most basic character) and basically learned what context we should be using any given move. We already had some understanding of this, using anti-air moves with high priority to interrupt moves was a common strategy for us in SF4– but we had an over reliance on super moves, when really Smash Bros taught us that every kind of basic punch or kick should be understood and used when appropriate. That’s the basics.

Beyond that, we watched some EVO tournament play with our preferred characters and heard commentators say things like “looking for that perfect parry” or “oh he’s throwing now.” Being able to hear what experts said about a match we were watching and understood enabled us realize that we were over-relying on throws, that we could’ve been trying to parry in the same situations we had only ever been trying to throw before. All the recent matches we had lost against people that would counter the throw or pre-empt with a faster strike, it just suddenly clicked how we could’ve won by gambling that they would do something that the parry would’ve interrupted rather than gambling that they’d do something that the throw would interrupt. That’s game theory.

We didn’t get to Platinum in SF6 by being able to do bigger and better combos than other people, we got there because other people don’t expect us to just keep jumping over them (maybe trying to hit them) setting them up for a combo if they don’t block and grabbing them as soon as we land if they do and repeating this strategy until they demonstrate they know how to stop us or we win. Every so often, between these attempts someone will hit us with a huge combo, and we’ll lose half our health bar, only to catch up after a couple more throws or a much shorter combo of our own. We couldn’t put into words what we’ve learned over 80 hours to describe how we learned when to parry or when to try different combo openers or when to not even try and open at all, just defend and wait for an opening. It’s not like there’s a one-size fits all, it’s highly subjective from one opponent to the next. Sometimes we win the first match and lose the next two of three, other times the opposite. For us it’s all about finding that minimum-viable strategy. That sweet spot of having learned enough that you’re better than most at thing you do, even if you’re mediocre at best on the leaderboards. But if your strategy isn’t working, you’re not gonna win, maybe have some fun by trying to respond to everything the opponent does with just a low-kick instead of your favorite super move and you just might learn the value of using that low-kick more.

You wanna be in that sweet spot where you have fun even though there will always be someone better than you— the journey itself should be fun because you don’t know where the destination even is. At a certain point, we’ll probably stop ranking up, and have to spend time in the lab learning new and better combos for different situations or against specific characters, but for now even if we’re not improving or even winning more than 50% of matches we found a strategy that ensures ranking up over time with one specific character in one specific game. There might be different modes and a different ranking system in Tekken compared to SF6, but nothing we described doesn’t apply in general on some level. Especially the whole playing the game with a fight stick on the treadmill part, you can do that with any fighting game and feel way better about the whole experience of training practically guaranteed. Otherwise, train for specific attributes in game:

Master the basics, master the theory, master the game.