I am learning from my losses, are you?

[Major]

Let me first start by stating the below is just an opinion. Take it or leave it. But trust me when I say I have lost so many games I almost believed myself overqualified to be writing this! Hahaha.

Have you started a streak of lost games or a long way into one? Are you starting to question your own ability to play your army? Bah! Humbug! You’ve just learnt some valuable lessons to help kick ass!

I hate losing… well… I don’t like it, hate is a strong word... But it's close. I don’t even like to write about my losses or the prospect of it unless it is in jest, but hey, who does!? But we all lose games. Having a series of losses in succession that just doesn’t seem to want to change to a win no matter what tactics you try can be quite standard some times. Sometimes I understand how it can be hard for players in the scene today. Unlike years past, games are recorded and reviewed by thousands that may, although constructive in their approach or desire to help, can feel somewhat scrutinizing to some people. Some people cop it more than others, Some care, some don’t. Truth is though, a spout of losses needs to be held onto and treated with more care and consideration than a series of wins.

When you lose a game, it can sometime lead you to the obvious questions and doubts: Should I change my game plan? Review my list? Change my expectations? How do I keep myself from getting too frustrated? How do I keep my self-confidence? Should I just give up and start looking at what’s on next year? How you respond to yourself when thinking these questions will impact dramatically on how things turn out for you as a player

“Check yourself before you wreck yourself” – Losing isn’t an indictment of your ability and that’s something you need to understand. However, the way you respond to losing can be, When the lost game count starts to rise, your values and personality will be exposed in a way in which wins do not allow. How you respond will show those around you what you’re really all about.

Control those emotions – It can be a pain sometimes to keep emotions in check, especially if you’ve put a lot of time and effort tin preparing for a tournament your now losing. But that’s exactly when your personal leadership and maturity are most needed to show people the calibre of person you are. A good way of getting better at this is to go over behavioural expectations of players more frequently than what some would claim to do and remember, its ok to call others out on poor behaviour, but it’s how it is done that is important!

Review your expectations and keep them consistent – When your in a rut, it is sometimes tempting to lower your expectations or standards for behaviour. However, lowering your expectations of yourself will gain you nothing.

Stay in the green, POSSITIVE! – I lose sooo many more games than I’ve won. It’s extremely easy to feel negative about yourself when you are losing games left right and centre. But you need to fight that every step of the way. Your body language and the words you speak need to convey that, while you may have or currently are losing, you are still hopeful for a win or confident you will ge tone back.

You are either your own worst enemy or best friend. Its up to you to be enthusiastic and bring yourself energy when competing. You should strive to be as excited when things are going well but always remember to present positive encouragement to yourself when things are falling to poop.

Evaluate why you are losing – Losing a fair bit? Well a key to turning that around is making sure you don’t lose confidence in yourself. This can be made easier if you are always evaluating why you may have lost a game or a series or a tournament and look at ways to improve and avoid the same issues as before. Obvious to most of us right? Some people still don’t do this. And that’s ok, but it’s never too late to start!

Make the whole thing a learning experience – Did your folks ever say to you “you can learn more from losing than winning”? Well, true… BUT. The operative word in that is “can”. This learning doesn’t happen automatically so make sure you grab hold of the moments inside a loss than can teach you something!

So what’s the point of my babble today? Why has Major written another essay? It’s simple... This is our hobby. It’s supposed to be fun, no matter who wins or loses or what the final score is. We laugh and joke every day (mostly), win or lose, stick with your own philosophy and promote yourself as the great person and player you know you are, so everyone else can see it too.

[MrCharisma]

53 minutes ago, Major said:

Have you started a streak of lost games or a long way into one?

 

In 2016, I won 1 battle.... in the 2nd last week in December! One year on, I'm heading to the Australian Masters to compete with 15 of our best players. It could have been easy to stick to my square bases and throw in the towel. 

If I could add one more critical component to your piece: seek out a coach/es.

Even today I ask my opponents for feedback on how my army or performance could be improved. I might not always listen to them, however; it allows me to identify common trends or attempt new ideas in future battles. If something worked (or didn't work)... write it down! It's scientifically proven that you retain more knowledge if you write it down. I keep a notebook with me for every battle;

I take a lot of photos during my battles including deployment, as that can often put you at an advantage or disadvantage before a dice has been rolled. I had a really big issue in handling armies with special deployment like deep strikes while I transitioned from WHFB 8th to AoS... so I planned out my ideal deployments for each scenario. It didn't always go to plan but I felt that I was more strategic with my drops and why I was dropping than if I made it up on the spot.

This also includes mapping out each scenario and what pieces of my army become more important. This was a short exercise I did on the plane heading to Blood & Glory as it's often hard to transition between two games at a tournament and mentally get a head start;

I use TGA and the Freeguild thread to obtain feedback on army lists, tactics, and seek advice from other players. It's amazing what you can learn from people who have had a similar experience.

As always, insightful essay @Major and nobody actually loses if you have fun and you learn. I always believed that there is no such thing as failure, only feedback.

[Major]

Thanks @MrCharisma for your encouragement and your reply was equally insightful! and yes you are definitely right. A coach can always help! I had actually considered writing something similar to this but FOR coaches so you may have just persuaded me fully! Best of luck for the upcoming masters, you already know I am rootin for ya!

[MrCharisma]

Cheers @Major, I'll probably get punched in the crotch by some of the armies... but I'm just happy to be there. 

I'm looking at you Clan Skryer with your double Gauntfyre with 9 Stormfriends (yes, I mean friends... because you don't make friends with Stormfiends).

[Major]

1 minute ago, MrCharisma said:

Cheers @Major, I'll probably get punched in the crotch by some of the armies... but I'm just happy to be there. 

I'm looking at you Clan Skryer with your double Gauntfyre with 9 Stormfriends (yes, I mean friends... because you don't make friends with Stormfiends).

Hahahaha yes there are plenty of friends of AusHammer competing amongst you lot at Masters coming up and some of the lists look BRUTAL. most excited to see how the rats perform in the Australian meta. Anyway, not relevant for here but looking forward to it and will try pop in on day 2 to say hi!

[Tee Hamersley]

Oh Dear. It is blatantly obvious you haven't met my wife yet. A champion Muay Thai boxer at age 15. Everything is taken so seriously.  

 

Great article Major Major.

[Major]

2 minutes ago, Tee Hamersley said:

Oh Dear. It is blatantly obvious you haven't met my wife yet. A champion Muay Thai boxer at age 15. Everything is taken so seriously.  

 

Great article Major Major.

Lucky for you @Tee Hamersley I have also done one on Sportsmanship if you fancy a read!

[OracleOfScales]

No, no I'm not. I'm having a total blast playing though

Current plan is to fire mind bullets at my opponents models to win games. It's like I'm roleplaying a Slann, I should make a Slann outfit....

[polarbear]

Back when I was a kid playing Warhammer, I sucked. I lost to my friends all the time. I've always been defensive-minded in everything from sports to board games. But AoS and I think specifically one of Russ Veal's podcasts taught me to be aggressive. I became a much better player with AoS (maybe also because I'm an adult now) by being just balls to the wall aggressive. 

[tolstedt]

Taking notes is important.

In chess it's easy to find where you went wrong, because the computer will tell you, but the soviet school still preaches self analysis of your own games. 

Use your mind to exercise your logic to find where you went wrong on your own before using the computer.  Do the same with sigmar games.  Try and figure out what the mistakes were.  

[stratigo]

I'd have to lose first.

 

 

I kid. I learn more from my losses than my wins. When I lose I spend hours, sometimes a day, thinking about what cost me the win, where I went wrong, what I could have done to win. When I win I just go "Well I won. Nice"

[Sharkbelly]

I have yet to lose a game.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of course, I have yet to play a game...

[heywoah_twitch]

I'm definitely learning from my many losses. I come from a competitive magic the gathering background and my main opponent is a strong chess player so we have very interesting tactical games and the progress of our improvement has been very quick. The shop talk of alternate lines during and after games is fun, and we both tend to take notes later (purely from habit) on our games. Dealing with loss is something both of us are very used to, practiced at, and familiar with overcoming in a positive way.

Getting mad is counter-productive, verging on self-sabotage. Do not look for an excuse for a loss, look for an explanation. Sometimes you were just going to lose (the classic example would be you choose the line where you need a 2+ to win. It doesn't matter that you rolled the 1 and lost, it was the statistical right decision at the time). Make the choice that, if you played the same game a thousand times, you'd win 833 of them - I'll take that all day. Now, maybe there was a less risky winning line, but that's another discussion. 

It's important to find the root causes of a loss, and what different choices would affect play, but don't forget that for every different choice you 'would have' done, your opponent's line of play would almost certainly change in retrospect as well, lest you not oversimplify. The snowball effect is very strong in Age of Sigmar, so keep that in mind as well (with the double turn I'd argue that the snowball effect is absurdly strong in AoS). Don't be tempted to blame a loss on poor dice rolls when you haven't been keeping track of them (resist the pernicious Selection Bias, where you remember the three bad groups of rolls but on average your rolls game-wide were quite high). As well, watch out for the Gambler's Fallacy (three 1s in a row, surely the next one will be a 6!). Did you lose because your army in underpowered? Maybe, but you probably made mistakes too - I certainly did. Play Better first, then find out.

Now an important part of playing better is showing up with the tools to win. Can your list handle all the battleplans? Can it deal with a horde? Can it kill a big centerpiece monster? Can it quickly move to an objective? Two? Three? Can it hold a point and can it assault a point? Can you hide your buffing heroes in terrain 18" away or do they need to be closer and hence in danger of getting shot off? Can you auto-capture an objective? These are all questions you have to ask when building an army list. "I hope it's not duality of death" or "If they bring over 75 models I literally can't win" are not places you want to be before you even deploy. Decisions you make before the game begins can also cause you to lose.  

Lastly, try not to get too salty over the double turn. Defensively playing around your opponent's chance of getting it to mitigate the effect is generally a luxury afforded to those currently winning on board. If you're losing and you get real cautious, the opponent typically gets to just sit back and soak up points. Sometimes you gotta bet big to win big.

[Dave Fraser]

Hard to say to be honest, this year I have barely played in the second 6 months of the year, maybe 1 game/month and some of those have been intro games for new players.

At the start of the year I played a few tournaments and was on a pretty tasty record:

• Firestorm Fours - 5/0 (using old filth TK the most broken list possible)
• GW Heat 2 - 3/2 (Mixed order gunline) Lots against a couple of top 10ish players decent showing of myself
• Weston somethingorother - 2/1 (Moonclan)

For me this is a pretty good record, I'm generally a 50:50 type player for win/loss ratio so having come out on the positive for all my events this year (the few it has been).  What I would say is that I've played with a bunch of different armies & virtually all my non tournament games have been with the Chaos GA which I haven't taken to an event! So I've tested out a wide range of stuff which usually isn't conducive to good results.

The learning's I've been taking from my games:

• Scenario, scenario, scenario
• Know how your army needs to deploy
• Know your opponents broad strategy
• Understand how/where you have to engage with your opponent
• I don't care if my army dies horribly as long as I score the scenario

[Cerlin]

I took extensive notes on my first 30 games. During GHB 2016 I was playing Free Guild and Dispossessed vs Sylvaneth, Stormcast, and other new armies.  I think I lost 9 of my first 10 games.  Note were key.

I am now close to a 50 percent winloss ratio. 

I learned the game, my armies, the importance of positioning, etc.

This holiday I have started to teach friends how to play. Its been a good cycle over the course of a year.

[Sheriff]

I impulse purchased the new notebook in the store. It's actually quite handy for recording your mistakes and writing what you would do next time in the same situation. 

Shame my handwriting sucks so bad I can't read my own notes though.