"Ahh! Ya scared me."

It is Monday June 27th 2011. And it is the first full week of my new Starcraft 2 life. This week I will attempt to shape the way I spend my time training to be a better Starcraft 2 player. There are many things I could do to get better: reading up on build orders, watching replays, watching tournaments, trawling through the the extensive (and entertaining) Day9 archive, looking on forums for hints and tips and what the most common strategies are. But by far the most useful thing to me at this stage will be to just play more.

It sounds easy enough, but as I'm sure some of you know it isn't. I have tried before a number of times on many games, including Starcraft, to play more 1v1s however every time I try can never keep going long enough to get over 'the fear.' The same thing happens every time. I play some games, loose most of them and then somehow start to win a few. Then I notice that my ladder rank has gone up and suddenly I start to care about my rank and more importantly losing. I don't want to lose because then I will drop down from that hard won rank 50 I just got. I get on a winning streak and fear playing another match in case I lose and my over generous ladder rank goes down. Its a terrible thing I know, to admit caring about ladder rank, but I do!

No-one a part from other SC2 players will care and the overwhelming majority of those people you never meet anyway so why does it matter if you loose a few games? I know I shouldn't care about losing but when you don't play that many 1v1s every victory is sweet and every loss frustrating.

And that's when the Fear grips you. Well not real fear of course, its only a game after all not the trenches of the Somme. Still, you get nervous playing a game, you stop thinking clearly while playing and even clicking that "Find Match" button becomes a battle in itself between the desire for improving rank and the trepidation of losing.

Now though I don't want to get better just to show off my rank and say "look at me I'm rank #1 Gold." Now I want to improve because I love this game so much and I love watching the pros play and one day I want to be good enough to understand all the strats pros use and replicate them myself. Sure I could just copy a BO but to understand the timings used and when or when not to attack or build that lair is completely different. This is something that only playing at the higher levels can teach you.

To do that I need to overcome any anxieties about 1v1

To do that I need to play more.

So the first and most important thing I will do on my journey to greatness (well one can dream or at the very least certainly exaggerate for dramatic effect) is to pledge to play at least 5 1v1 games a night. It might not sound like much but if I do that 5 days a week that is 25 more 1v1s then I play at the moment. Hopefully it will be more, but work, life and keeping a blog takes time. We can't all be like Liquid HuK and play 12 hours a day.

I'm hoping over this week I will get a regular schedule for playing these 1v1s and get over the fear of playing and start to ladder a lot. I will be playing my first games tonight and streaming them live (which I will talk about more later) at www.justin.tv/blackadderiv

To quote one of the cockiest SC2 units out there "Ahh! Ya scared me."

But not for much longer...