Nikita 'SKillous' Gurevich | The Art Of Watching

"Improving at playing videogames is a very painstaking process, and in order to make the best of it you have to master the ways you watch the games."

I'm very excited to have one of Team Liquid's top StarCraft II player contribute another episode to the newsletter. This time, he is teaching us about the "Art of Watching"—how we can improve our learning process from watching games.

Improving at playing videogames is a very painstaking process, and in order to make the best of it you have to master the ways you watch the games.

It can be anything: VODs of previous tournaments, your own/other people's replays or personal streams. In this article I will try to give you some tips and key ideas that will take the "Art Of Watching" for you on the next level!

👀 Why We Should Watch

First of all, let's try to understand why it is important not to only play, but also to watch:

Getting the whole picture: Nowadays, almost every single game on the market has some element of incomplete information. It can be fog of war, camera angle that prevents you from seeing where other people are, or maybe a deck of cards that your opponent is operating with. It doesn't matter what exactly that is, but the key point here is that you don't know everything. It doesn't even matter if you are beginner or pro, because like anything else, this is the skill you have to work on throughout your whole career.

Understanding and anticipating what your opponent can do, even when you don't see everything, can only be achieved with constant exposure on the whole game view.

Getting important context: Let's be real: everyone wants to be a genius, but reality tells us that most of the times we are just like everyone else. So in order to get an edge over other players, we have to utilize not only our ideas that come to us ingame, but also use the best strategies other people use. But you can get inspired not only by other people's games. Even when you watch your own replays, you open up a completely different view on the same scenario. And it allows you to get inspiration and figure out something new.

Remembering mistakes and successes: You know exactly why you lost or won the game? Even in this case it's important to go over your own replay and take some mental notes. Even apart from the fact that you could miss something important, going over the same thing twice increases the chance of remembering it.

📜 The Art of Learning

Now, let's discuss some main concepts that you have to keep in mind:

Keep information up to your level: We can imagine the process of learning as an onion: you have the very inner ring first, and other layers grow on top of each other. It's the same with learning any game. You have to put your "layers" on top of each other. You can't learn the most advanced tactics without knowing how to move your character. Of course this is an extreme example, but it shows the point. You've gotta keep the information you are consuming up to your level, otherwise you will either completely miss it, or get overwhelmed and learn nothing.

As players, our goal is always to make any game related skill to be executed at the level of Unconscious Competence.

You don't have to think how to move your character or army, do you? Or some harder concept that is applicable to your game. And the goal to everything you learn has to be to put this information deep down your mind, where you don't have to "manually access" it. So the tip here is pretty simple: be happy with everything you see, but don't push yourself too much to see something that you have no access to yet. It's also applicable to guides or educational content you watch.

Try to understand, not just to watch: A common mistake that many people do, is watching without trying to understand. What do I mean by that? Let's say you just played the game, and you lost this game because of one stupid blunder you made. You go over that replay, and find the exact moment that happened. You tell to yourself: "Yeah, this is the reason I lost the game" and close the replay. But you missed a very important point here.

Why exactly did you make this mistake? What caused it? And the truth is, it's not even always game related.

It can be caused by tilt, by being tired, by not knowing something about the game, and this list can go on forever. But as a good student your goal is to identify why exactly the mistake happen, and try to work on a solution for that one. It won't be easy. In fact, this is another skill that you gonna master throughout your whole lifetime of interacting with your game of choice.

So don't get discouraged when you can't answer the question "Why?". If you attempt it, it's already a move in the right direction, so keep trying.

Watch full games, not just highlights: Title tells for itself. To get everything from one particular game, you need the entire context. Too often I'd seen people watch 10m highlight of 3h series and think they know what happened. Of course, if you watch your own game, it's fine to speed up the "obvious" moments (sometimes not so obvious tho!), as you are already in the context by playing the game yourself. But if you watch someone else play, it is absolutely mandatory to watch the game till the end. The only exception to this rule is if you are deliberately looking to improve on a particular part of the game (e.g. early game, or midgame), and you are going over multiple games in order to achieve that.

The main point is that it has to be comprehensive, you want to follow the game from point A to point B.

Take notes: Something that helped me feel more productive about watching games, is getting a notepad just to write my thoughts about the games I watch, mine or others. It can be anything: just a pattern I noticed, some good tactics that I think I can use, a specific build order that I believe might have some potential. The best thing about this technique is that it helps you to feel that you are actually making progress (you do even without it, but it's much harder to grasp) and learning something new. It's the best feeling after a day of learning the game to just look at your notes and see that you found something new. On top of that, it helps you remembering things better, which is also a big advantage.

Learn to recognize patterns: Every player has patterns. And the best way to learn from other people, is to find things that they do all the time. If a player repeats the same action over multiple games, it means that this is something he found success with in practice. It's especially powerful if it's not just a mechanical pattern, but a strategy or tactic that you can follow from point A to point B. If you find a pattern, it will be easier to remember as well.

Don't allow yourself to be entitled: This might be more of a high level thing, but I saw it even in beginners or people who only watch esports casually. I see it like this: a person decides that certain player sucks (especially in team games, as you can always say that he is "carried" by his teammates), no matter that they win tournaments or get high places, and they completely block themselves from learning from such players. But it's a big mistake.

If anything, if you think that a player sucks despite him winning, then you are in the wrong and you do not understand what actually makes this player great.

You would think that it only happens in team games, but I even noticed such behaviors in solo games like StarCraft 2. Some people would completely block themselves from learning from certain players because they think their play is too chaotic or "stupid."

Hopefully, you learned something new today. Thanks for your attention and see you next time!

Make sure to follow SKillous on Twitter/X, to keep up with the latest on tournaments, StarCraft II infos, tips and tricks etc. And of course: thank you very much Nikita for the valuable insights. 🙏

As always, see you all next week for a freshly squeezed episode,

Christian 🙂