Combating tournament anxiety - Super Street Fighter 4 Question - sf4answers

More often than not, anxiety of this nature is a form of test anxiety, a fear of the outcome of one's performance when challenged.

And let's face it, tournaments are "tests" in the Street Fighter/competitive fighter world which are very extreme in grading outcome.

You either win (pass) or lose (fail).  At best, you have only one allowed failure (double-elimination) and at worst, you have no chance at failure (single-elimination).

These are very harsh conditions under any circumstance (which is why there are few in any competitive field which can handle this and excel).  Add to that the immortal words of Alex Valle "if you ain't top 3, wtf are you?" and it should be evident that it's completely natural to feel anxiety in the face of all of this.

Assuming that one isn't suffering from an anxiety disorder (meaning that there are other issues that must be addressed before one can rationally assess rational anxieties), there's a number of approaches that can be taken to overcome "tournament jitters."

Many anxieties can be traced to a fear of the unknown, and to that end, the answer is simple, perform the action repeatedly so that even in different variations of it, you know what to expect.

From a tournament perspective, this obviously means go to more tournaments, but just as important in playing in the tournaments is knowing what's going on in between your matches.  There's typically a lot of waiting going on, and that can get into the minds of a number of players.

Take pool play in Evo 2009.  Sometimes, there were wait times of at least 45 minutes.  That leaves a lot of time on your hands to worry yourself into failure and sabotage yourself before the match begins.

However, at most tournaments, the massive draw for people in the fighting game community is the community aspect of it.  Talk to these people.  Socialize.  If we don't do this, we have no right to call ourselves a "community" in any sense of the word.

More often than not, what you will find is that everyone is there to have a good time, and everyone has had an experience that is similar to yours.  Even if you don't talk about your specific concerns, you will find yourself talking about competing and the game, and should prove as a sufficient distraction until your next match.

If you are not a social person, then I'd recommend finding casuals (if you feel that you are up to it) or bringing something that will distract you for the time between your matches.  Listen to your music player, do a crossword, whatever.  Just find whatever will take you to that "safe place" (within reason, of course) and engage in it so that you don't think about what might be.

As you do this ("go through the routine"), your confidence level, regardless of your outcome or position, should increase.  You will start to recognize the routine, the people, etc, etc and it should begin to ease your anxieties.

Of course, familiarity is unrelated to skill level.  Over time, as both improve (or decrease, possibly), you will more than likely have the following reactions:

If you replace the X-axis with "familiarity level" from low to high, you should see the same set of results as your familiarity grows as well as your skill level.

Of course, the diagram above is perfectly applicable as is, and you will experience that as you enter tournaments with different people and a larger number of entrants (in which case, the challenge level is rising).  It's one thing to enter the Eight on the Break weekly tournaments in Jersey every week, it's another thing to go to Evo (which is exactly what I did, my first tournament was an Eight on the Break weekly tournament and then I went to Evo 2009 the week after).

All that being said, it's better to start going to more tournaments more often earlier than later.  The reason for this is that as we age, the price of failure/loss is more real and apparent to us and is more strongly imprinted on us.  It's these imprints which contribute to our anxieties and are very difficult to get past; the sooner you work to reverse their hold on you, the less work you will have to do.

This is exactly why you see children who are less than ten years old flying off ramps in snowboard parks without fear or performing other things that seem absolutely terrifying to us in our twenties or thirties (and beyond), they have the luxury of simply not knowing any better.  Because they were oblivious to the risk/loss potential, they simply plow forward without fear.

One could argue that this is what contributed to Justin Wong's ascension.  His very first tournament was at the age of 13.  If he had started in his late teens, it could have lead to a very, very different outcome because he would have already had imprints of the effects of loss made on him.