How to improve efficiently

[IllusionLaser]

I am primarily a SSBM player, having gone from playing a low execution character who primarily improves through playing good players and match analysis, to a high execution rushdown character who benefits massively from individual practice. However, both of these concepts seem quite difficult to transfer over to Pokémon.
How would you say you should structure the different activities you do to improve in Pokémon? Is just constantly grinding ladder (as the adv one is pretty good) genuinely an efficient form of practice? How long would you spend on game analysis? Open to lots of opinions

 

[Alpha Atom™]

I am primarily a SSBM player, having gone from playing a low execution character who primarily improves through playing good players and match analysis, to a high execution rushdown character who benefits massively from individual practice. However, both of these concepts seem quite difficult to transfer over to Pokémon.
How would you say you should structure the different activities you do to improve in Pokémon? Is just constantly grinding ladder (as the adv one is pretty good) genuinely an efficient form of practice? How long would you spend on game analysis? Open to lots of opinions

Hello I will start with saying I AM NOT A GOOD PLAYER. So take this with a grain of salt.

1. Play games, try different teams and playstyles and decide what you like the most. Spread a wide net that you can walk on. Use sample teams first because you do not need to know how to make teams first. Learn how to manage the match-ups and what to do with meta mons first.

2. After you get a decent amount of game-sense. Start watching good players replays. How they make their team and how they make their decisions. See which one of the good players sticks out to you the most.

3. Start building your own teams. Try building teams with the knowladge you got from playing. Try to experiment. Does this Ev spread work. What is I use this move instead of this. You will not make really good teams from the start but you will slowly understand why and how some things work and why some not. You will realise how some pokemon make a really good core and how some pokemon screw eachother over.

4. Play, Play and Play. Now it is time to test this teams you made to their limits. You will understand how everyone moves and how to read the best options by playing with all types of opponents. Some play passively while some play hyper-aggresively to take you down.

And the most important rule of them all HAVE FUN. If you do not have fun then you will get stressful which will strain your decision making.

 

[Cdijk16]

I am primarily a SSBM player, having gone from playing a low execution character who primarily improves through playing good players and match analysis, to a high execution rushdown character who benefits massively from individual practice. However, both of these concepts seem quite difficult to transfer over to Pokémon.
How would you say you should structure the different activities you do to improve in Pokémon? Is just constantly grinding ladder (as the adv one is pretty good) genuinely an efficient form of practice? How long would you spend on game analysis? Open to lots of opinions

1. Small team tournaments like Advanced League, the upcoming ADV PL and a few others(try the unofficial tours section) are a great way to improve for newer players in my experience.
2. https://www.smogon.com/forums/threa...pes-and-cores-a-data-driven-approach.3654874/
This guide contains most of the basic stuff about ADV though it is a bit old.
3. There's a video called "how to get into competitive ADV" by BKC i reccomend watching. His channel has a lot of good ADV content in general, though the videos on it are very long.
4. I second everything suggested by Alpha Atom above as well.

 

[ojr]

I think the above posts were pretty good but I see it like this:

Point 1: Ladder ladder ladder. I would say 1500 is your first benchmark elo and 1600 is your second benchmark.
Point 2: Get all the information you can. This will help your laddering process and make improving way easier. Getting information can be seen as acquiring teams (using the forums here where people post their teams publicly), knowledge of the tier (reading on how others view the tier via forums and/or viewing how others view the tier via youtube (BKC and thelinearcurve)), and watching other tournament replays (for instance: SPL, Callous Invitational, ADVPL, final rounds of seasonals).
Point 3: If you are asking to improve efficiently, then don't use your own teams. Chances are quite high that, since you are a new player, building a team would be quite hard if you want to have a solid team to ladder with. This comes back to point 2 of acquiring teams, ADV has amazing resources so you gotta make use of them!
Point 4: Get out there and play in tournaments. Sign up for tournaments on smogon here and tournaments on discord like ADV League here.
Point 5: Why am I losing? You feel like you played well in a game or actually felt like you didn't play well and lost a game. Save the replay and look back on it. You can try to spot where it went wrong or maybe ask someone else through discord if they can help you see what you did wrong.

have fun!

 

[Cdijk16]

Another thing I would like to mention is that analyzing your own replays after a game ends is a good way to improve. BKC made a good video on this(How to analyze a pokemon replay?), look it up if you want. Watching replay commentaries of good players is also a good way to improve.

 

[Amaranth]

One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet and that helped me massively was getting outside opinions. Self-review is all well and good, but if you have flawed ideas of what is "good" and "bad" self-review is not going to do much; you will continue to do things that you think are good, but are actually bad. It can take quite a while for you to realize if you don't talk about the game with other people.
If you can get sparring sessions with better players (or even similar level), then discuss the games afterwards - that's ideal, in my opinion. It makes game review way more fun when it's a social thing, too.


Of things said above, I especially second "don't build your own stuff, just steal until you get better". Building will not make you a better player; being a better player will teach you how to build. You can start cooking your own anti-meta stuff once you understand how the meta works. Until you get there, it's pointless.
And of course, can't go wrong with just playing the game. ADV ladder is okay, ADV tournaments is probably even better. Both will reinforce concepts and things you're learning and really consolidate them in memory.

 

[Blizihguh]

Not a great player or even an especially good one, but I feel like I've managed to improve a lot over the years so I have some thoughts about this.

The number one most important thing imo is to pick a format and really dig into it. At a beginner-intermediate level, there's a lot of learning you need to do, both in terms of raw mechanics and more conceptual stuff like team archetypes, prediction, managing gameplans, etc. The conceptual things are important to learn but it's very difficult to think about that stuff when you don't have a baseline familiarity with the format. So I would recommend picking a format you enjoy and then looking through all the resources you can find -- VRs, analyses, teambuilding guides, team dumps from good players... ADV is a really great choice for this, there's an embarrassment of riches here. Once you have a mental model of the most common mons and lines of play, it's a lot easier to improve fundamentals like identifying key targets/wincons, predicting your opponent's team, etc. Those skills are a huge component of player skill in Pokemon, and they're also much more transferable between formats.

There's a tournament called ADV Revival going on right now and I've personally found the video commentaries to be both entertaining and informative. A lot of the matches have some weird teambuilding choices, but there's a good mix of players from different skill levels, and the commentary does a good job of calling out what's normal vs what's spicy vs what's just kind of crazy. They're fun to watch and I think over the course of the series I've learned a bit about prediction and team comps in the ADV OU.

Other misc things that might be worth stating:
- Ladder games and tourney games are both good practice but they encourage slightly different things. When you're going to play someone in a tour it's expected that you might look at their previous games and get a sense of their habits, which can incentivize you to bring different things. Even if you don't do that, a team that flounders horribly 30% of the time is just a lot more viable in a bo3 than it is on ladder.
- If you're iffy about whether something kills/outspeeds/whatever mid-match, it's normal and expected to just look it up. /calc is right there. Not saying you should do this for every move, but it's worth doing when you're up against something weird and the answer is important. Eventually you'll start to remember these things, and knowing them is a skill in its own right.

 

[5imian]

I've been playing a few years now, and I'm one of the hosts of ADV Revival;

Beyond all the great advice from above, I will say this- engage with the community heavily. There is literally no better resource out there than the community at large. ADV is a goinmul game with a 20 year history, and players engaged with the community who've been playing that entire time. I've learned so much just from discussing ideas with newer players and expanding upon the ideas I slowly come to as I play.