Blog: Structure up boys

I have noticed many tips out there regarding how to improve a player’s aim, but none about how to improve as a team. Therefore my first blog will be based on this topic. It seems many teams play and practice ineffectively. In my opinion there should be a certain pattern to follow, and I will go through the main steps.

Most people play to win and I consider myself to be extremely competitive. However, you should not always practice to win. What would happen if you practice against a better team? Let's recall the old Aftermath players who where e.g. practicing against fnatic, and beat them. If this happened with a lower level team, they would have been satisfied and repeated the standard phrase: "we beat x in pracc" only to impress their mates.

The scary part is that you actually get satisfied, but who did REALLY win the pracc? It could be different factors that made the winning team win, maybe fnatic fucked up a tactic, and cArn never stopped running the same call until the team completed the tactic the way they should? In that case, I consider fnatic the winning team of the pracc, with the conclusion that they learned and got a lot more out of it than the winning team did. You can’t keep focusing on the score while practicing with a team, you should rather be taking notes considering what went wrong and what the team can do to improve, even if you’re winning.

There are many things that are more important than others to win a match, such as pistol-rounds which is important to win, and is usually and often decided by luck, timing and clutching from players. One measure can be to practicing best-of-three (in this case best of 3 pistol-rounds). You should definitely also have a strong 4th round (as this of course is a very important round), and if you start by winning these two rounds in a match you are most possible to head off to a good result.

In the last interview with XeqtR, he mentioned that when he was the strat-caller and was top motivated, he was strict with his team, and he left as little room as possible for randomness. In my opinion, this is the only way to make it work. To do so, you need to have a certain structure while practicing which embraces learning. Many people can’t handle being spoken to in that way which keeps them from doing the same mistake over and over again and therefore you see many teams collapsing.

Okey, you have the foundation set now. You started practicing; winning a lot and getting defeated some, and maybe your losses is due to your strict line of practicing. Now it's time to practice to win, why? That's because you're going to meet teams where your strategies won’t work, but then you need to adapt and mix it up. When you’re practicing to win, the teamwork will get better, even though it doesn't seem like it. The key here is to make your teammates speak more to each other while improving and building better teamwork, based on communication and instinct.

I hope you found this information useful and that you start thinking about the differences it can make. Good luck practicing!