Shortcuts are one of the most lauded commodities on the trail to success. As human beings, we often want to take the path of least resistance.  Unfortunately, that path is often riddled with headaches, setbacks and erroneous conclusions. The phrase “going faster is slower” comes to mind.

When people look at Lee “Flash” Young Ho, they see a man piloting Terran in the most perfect way StarCraft has ever been playable. Naturally, everyone who has his eyes set on being the best at Brood War wants to be in the shoes of such a person.  Hastily mirroring the actions without first understanding the rudimentary fundamentals, the core philosophy behind the way he plays and his style, or seeing the depths of his own path—this is the path to a quick demise.  A lot of work went in before what we see as the final, glamourous result on the surface.

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Just like in real life, the first place you want to start is the fundamentals. Make it easy for yourself—not too easy, but at least consistent.  Little victories from achievable goal-setting is the core of any successful journey.

The hardest part here will be the balancing act.  You want to feel like you’re making progress to generate positive habits, but you don’t want to become dependant on any equivalent of ‘cheese’. Cheese is delicious, and it’s so easy to overindulge, but leaves us constipated and ill from overconsumption. You don’t want to cut out cheese entirely, but you don’t want to rely on it as a means of carrying your dish.  Sometimes, you load up on extra cheese to mask the flavor of a shitty pizza, but it’s not fooling anyone—it’s still a shitty pizza.

Basically, you want these easy ways out in your arsenal, but you don’t want to lean on them to the point of developing bad habits and stunting your ability to grow in other areas.  You do, however, still want to feel good. To do this, you have to set small, attainable goals.  These goals don’t have to be winning games, or winning in life, but successfully focusing on a small weakness in your play or skill set to iron out day-to-day.

Let’s talk about being on the opposing side of cheese.  Cheese is annoying. Cheese seems unfair.  Cheese makes you want to give up and swear off your opposition for taking the shortcut.

This all seems very overwhelming at first, but the truth is, cheese is hard to counter, but once you do, you swat it more times than you don’t. Contextually, cheese also relies a lot more on luck than the standard way of going about things.  If someone’s position is close and favorable, it’s going to work. If you scout the wrong location, it’s going to be harder to pull it off.  However, this does mean defeating cheese also relies heavily on luck.

So why not cheese? Why not take the easy route? It feels good! The fact of the matter is, cheesers often give up and move to the next thing if they don’t excel from cheesing. It gets old, and the reward mechanisms aren’t as favorable for doing it over and over. Eventually, it stops working altogether, with the exception of it occasionally working for the very reason that it shouldn’t be something you’re doing and thus throws your opponent off guard.  

This is all akin to people who take shortcuts that may have some short term benefits—be it going viral with a one-hit wonder, overinvesting and then dying overnight, etc—they’re not around long term. Sure, they’re likely going to be your most annoying obstacle when you’re starting out, but you never see these guys in the endzone, or playing at a top level.

If it hasn’t been made apparent yet, I want to emphasize how much of success both in game and out of game stems from consistency. I suggest from the moment you start all the way until you become top 10% at something to stick with a standard, foundational strategy that’s easy to execute after hammering it out repeatedly.  It has the benefit of being the most researched build or method, which makes it reliable and rewarding to replicate.

“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” - Bruce Lee

The above quote resonates with just about any expert. Almost anyone that’s become a professional in any sport or in anything of creative capacity have been tempted into skipping ahead to what’s “cool”, because they saw their favorite artist or player do it.  If I could go back and slap myself into just focusing on the fundamentals rather than copying plays from Lim ‘SlayerS_`BoxeR`’ Yo-hwan’s crazy micro highlights from “Pimpest Plays” films, I most certainly would. Same goes for shredding solos (badly) on a guitar rather than work on proper technique—I had awful form, and wasn't fooling anyone.

The thing is, you really have to fight off this temptation or you can waste years of your time for essentially no gain.  At best, you sloppily execute something cool you saw your favorite player or entertainer do, and spend the other 80% of your practice having gained absolutely nothing useful.

You still have to take some responsibility and decide for yourself when to advance from this step.  Many do so either too quickly due to being overeager or too late due to being nervous about trying new things.

What's next?

A bit earlier, we talked about cheese in relation to opponents.  While most players (or content creators) give up far before this point, the ones who do reach it tend to lack direction, or are too set in their ways. Eventually, we have to move on. Don’t get me wrong, devoting yourself to mastering the fundamentals is by far the most important thing, but it’s moreso because of its indirect benefit—developing positive habits—rather than the efficacy of the strategy itself.

Juxtaposed with cheese, standard anything faces a different dilemma. Because standard is, well, standard, that means it is easily the most researched build and approach.  This means your competitors fully understand what’s coming because if they’re any good, they’ve also grinded this method out. Once you’re competent at what you do, you have to differentiate yourself, otherwise your opposition will find you too predictable.

Obviously, this takes some fine tuning.  You don’t want to go so far out of left-field and reinvent the wheel, all for it to crumble (this can work, but is often akin to buying a lottery ticket.) What you then must do is deviate from the standard and find your own style. This is to, in a quite literal analogy, throw a curveball.  Pitchers tend to know how to pitch regularly, for example, but they throw batters off guard with different techniques they’ve developed. However, all of it stems from tons and tons of practice with regular, straight-shot pitching with a pinch of creativity, not by finding new, probably rule breaking ways to get the ball over home plate, or by throwing balls that consistently won’t strike but work against you instead, giving the batter a free base.

Again, I’d like to emphasize that I’m not trying to stifle creativity by any means - just that, much like the volatile and exact science of build orders in relation to resources and time, they need to branch out from the well-established foundation. This is an incremental process, requiring lots of time and diligence to see what more you can get away with and how much further from that foundation you can extend, rather than creating an entirely separate ill-fated entity—expansion of an idea or artform rather than an expulsion.

Perhaps this comes across as destructive towards groundbreaking ideas, but it’s actually only destructive towards your ego.  To deviate rather than alienate from an established build or tactic is to respect what made that foundation work for the greatest minds and players alike.  “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

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So remember, someone who happens to be the best at what they do aren’t a reflection of the flashiest thing they’re capable of or the sick plays they’ve pulled off, they’re the sum of all their hard work, positive habit building, and experimentation. They are a product of their grind and focus first and foremost.

Flash is someone who’s gotten timings, counters, and game knowledge so embedded into his mind that he’s taken the standard macro openers and has elevated them to greedy new heights, sometimes expanding safely twice off one combat unit producing structure, because he knows the fundamentals of how everything works (what constitutes a full wall off, what this unit will do if you put in ‘x’ command, etc.) He also refined 5rax play from being all-in for TvZ into a standard, world class macro opening.  In 2008, Lee “Jaedong” Jae Dong took two hatch muta, once considered an all-in ZvT build, and refined it to make it standard.  Park “JulyZerg” Sung Joon invented extremely micro-intensive builds that were very execution based that Jaedong later refined into standard style, and put on a world class display.

Get to work, have some curveballs in your arsenal, and use the genius of previous generations to your advantage. Then, from there, expand and determine - what will your style be?

Michale Lalor is the Editor-in-Chief here at Esports Heaven. Keep up with him on Twitter at @ESHDrexxin.

Image - By ACROFAN, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36327286