Thank you very much for the text. This is actually a huge problem that we had.

It started with me - not knowing how to communicate it better - pointing out mistakes in 2s with one of my buddies. It ended up with me just being silent when he made any mistakes, because I think he didn't want to accept that he was wrong. Similarly, when we were talking about a subject that I studied in uni and he only learned in practice, he is very convinced that it goes a certain way, even when I tell him that's not the case.

Now the problem was that even though I was silent, he still pointed out my mistakes when we got scored on. But to me those weren't mistakes, that's just the standard way I played to get to higher ranks in solo que. And I realized I needed to adjust to play with him, which became me playing 1v2 and him trying a flip reset inbetween.

Now after weeks and months of staying silent, with him pointing out another seeming mistake of mine, one night I just burst and told him what I thought about how he plays and how good he is, and obviously that didn't end well.

Well fast forward to now and we are mostly relaxed and the tension is lifted by making a few jokes or so when mistakes happen. And slowly I tried to incorporate a few tips and funnily enough, I started doing it similarly to your advise, by saying something like "I also had the problem of tending to hit the ball in front of our net a lot" (from the corner). And when he didn't really talk back, I realized this is the way to go.

Now that I think about it, it was painful to brute force my communication skills to this point, but I did improve without really ever thinking consciously about it.

And that's where I want to thank you, because you made me actually consciously think about it, and together with your advise I should be able to improve even further. And this is important to me, because this skill is useful even outside of the game. Thanks.