"Oh suck it up! You act like you got BOTH arms blown off!"

Well my first 1v1 session taught me a lot. It taught me that if you don't play for a few days you may forget to build an overlord at 9 supply or get your first expansion slightly late. It taught me that if you don't play everyday you will not be at you best so prepare for some tough games. It taught me that to miss a day will slow you down but to miss a week or more is disastrous! Don't play any Starcraft 2 for a few weeks and when you come back nothing feels right, you feel slow, lost, wondering what to do next with all timings gone out the window.

This is how I felt in my first 1v1 game. I felt this way mainly because I forgot to switch to Zerg before playing and loaded as Protoss. Yeah...

You can imagine how I felt when the game loaded and I had no creep, no hatchery, no overlords and funny little floating probes instead of insectoid drones. Lost, slow, helpless and all of the above. Not a good start. Needless to say I lost that game horribly but I learn't possibly the most important lesson and topic of my last post: stick to one race (and for the love of God make sure you select them before entering a game).

My second game went better. It was a Zerg vs Zerg on Tal'Darim Altar. My over arching plan for Zerg vs Zerg is to get really quick zerglings and then bannelings right after. To do this I sacrifice getting an early hatch. My opponent decided to get a second hatch early and then zerglings/bannelings. This immediately put him on the defensive which suits me. I knew I had a window of time to break him before the extra hatch gave him the edge and the tables will turn.

So we trade blows for a while, losing zergling for zergling with me trying and failing to get a spine crawler in his expo. We both end up with bannelings at the same time so any hopes of me winning that way goes out the window. We are both microing about the same and I refuse to give up pushing and keep sending more and more lings down. Eventually he gets his base secured with spine crawlers and I have almost mined out my main base.

I am just thinking the whole time, "I must break through or he will get mutalisks and beat me with his better economy." Well I failed to break his defense and he destroyed me with mutalisks as I predicted. I knew what he was going to do and yet I failed to prevent it.

This got me thinking. What do I do if my first push fails? I had no answer for this in the game and it cost me as I stubbornly sent more and more zerglings to die. But hey that's what zerglings are good for. This is the most important revelation I had this session (well second after picking the right race to start with). I need a game plan. I need to know how I will open each game, what my end game is going to be and how I will get there.

It made me realize that I don't want to be going for an all in lets kill him now opening, but to do enough to survive to reach the end game where I will be comfortable enough to kill him. I didn't have a plan that game and that is why I lost. If I had a plan then not doing much damage with my rush would have been ok, because It would have given me enough time 2 get my second hatch up and tech up to lair. Then make a spire and harass until I am ready to start massing Brood Lords and then go kill him. With a simple plan like that I would have done much better.

So lesson learn't. Have a game plan.

My third game was again a Zerg vs Zerg. I did much better this time. Not because I made a plan, I didn't really figure that out until after the session and I watched the replays. But one thing I took straight from game 2 was that in a banneling war the guy with more bannelings wins. So I made much more bannelings in my first push and pretty much won right out when I exploded all his lings and drones. An easy win but enough to make up for the two previous losses.

In short my first 1v1 session on the road to awesomeness, was a nervous affair that started off with an epic fail and ended with a conciliatory victory. But it was fun and eye opening at the same time.

As a Medivac pilot with their sympathetic ear to the blight of the lowly infantry soldier would say:

"Oh suck it up! You act like you got BOTH arms blown off!"

"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...