Keep an open mind, understand there’s always a better way and, most importantly, don’t be stubborn. This is the first lesson I impart on anyone I coach.
I adapted this lesson from a translated clip of Jeong “Apdo” Sang-gil, former League of Legends professional.
In the clip, one of Apdo’s main points is no matter how good someone is, there’s always room for improvement. No matter how big or small, there’s always something that can be changed for the better.
“I am just one person and how many League of Legends players are there?” Apdo said through translation. “How can I find something before everyone else if I’m only one person?”
In the clip, he admits during the years he’s played League, he’s almost discovered nothing original. He said in some instances bronze, silver and gold players are better at finding optimal strategies than professionals.
I haven’t kept up with competitive League of Legends for a few years, but at least when I did, Apdo was considered if not the second-best player, one of the best in the world. Also, he was thought to be the best non-professional player after he retired. According to Leaguepedia, he’s considered the best ladder player of all time.
So, for Apdo to say gold players are sometimes better than him is similar to saying middle-schoolers are better at finding strategies than Michael Jordan.
It’s difficult to set ego aside and accept you don’t know best. It’s a hard pill to swallow when you find out something you’ve been doing for years is wrong.
It’s even harder to find out you’re not good enough.
“I need to be crushed to learn,” Apdo said through translation.
Before I pursued competitive Hearthstone, I used to mainly play League. I had dreams of hitting top 200, being on a big team and streaming to hundreds of people. At one point, I was even rated one of the top 50 Vi players on the North America server by op.gg.
However, during that time I started realizing no matter what stats I cherry-picked, I had a next to zero chance of turning pro.
I became friends with one of the best gamers I’d ever met. He’s one of those people who could pick up almost any game and within a few months be better than almost anyone. He could do incredible things in the game of his choice: a rhythm game called osu!
I had a decent understanding of the game, but watching him play was incomprehensible. Watching him pass songs I’d fail in the first ten seconds really was beyond my understanding. Listening to him describe game mechanics my hands could never do was fascinating.
Despite his talent, he was still miles away from professional play. Maybe I could reach a comparable level in League, but I’d never be able to come close to the mechanical level required for high-level competition.
So, I took a long, hard look at myself and realized instead of trying to blindly brute-force improvement in League of Legends, I’d go back to another passion of mine: card games, specifically Hearthstone.
The dream of League of Legends died, but the dream of high-level competition shined more brightly as I saw the light at the end of the tunnel.
Climbing ranks, hitting legend as a free-to-play player, joining my first professional team, winning my first online tournament, climbing to top 1000, taking Cydonia to game five and reverse-sweeping TerrenceM at DreamHack Austin 2018, hitting top 100 and finishing top 300 Feb. wasn’t because I just kept doing the same thing but better. I didn’t sit around thinking and suddenly have an epiphany.
Fornari versus TerrenceM was one of the 21 matches that ended in a reverse-sweep during the DreamHack Austin 2018 swiss rounds and was the longest match of round eight.
I watched videos, streams, looked at stats and new decks, changed cards, classes and lineups, played in dozens of tournaments and hosted some of my own, spectated friends and sought advice from almost everyone I could.
Like I said, it’s difficult to accept you don’t know best. The month after I finished top 300, I was struggling with playing Midrange Hunter. I barely hit legend and just chalked it up to Priest being overpowered. As it turns out, that wasn’t the reason.
A top 10 legend player volunteered to watch me play for a bit. After about an hour, I learned I was mulliganing wrong, playing way too defensive and being too risk-averse. Now, I eat priests up.
To be blunt, if you’re not rank 1 legend, you’re doing something wrong.
There’s always room for improvement, new cards to be tested, metas to exploit and strategies to optimize.
There are hundreds of thousands of possible combinations of hands after drawing 4 cards. This increases to millions when factoring in mulligans. There are thousands of lineup and deck combinations, and virtually infinite combinations of playable cards.
It’s impossible for one person to know everything about Hearthstone, let alone figure it out themselves. Even world champions aren’t afraid to ask for help.
