Melee Fundamentals
Melee requires an expansive skillset to excel. Knowing how to combat your opponent is only one small piece of the puzzle. The mental game and foundational tech skill that exist under the hood are arguably more important. Then, there’s an entire process to improve between tournaments. Here are lessons I’ve learned over the years. Though it has greater nuance and a wider berth, this article is meant to be something of an update to my 2015 “Guide to Getting Good at Melee.” There are of course exceptions to everything in Melee, and there is overlap between the sections, but below I try to mention the most important lessons I’ve learned regarding PvP basics, metagame, training, mental game, and tournament performance.
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Part 1: Requisite Skills and PvP basics
Get comfortable enough with your movement and tech skill such that you rarely need to look at your own character. The goal is to be able to focus your eyes on your opponent's character model, or sometimes the space between your respective characters, without sacrificing your own precision. When performing the most difficult tech skills, greater focus on your own character is warranted. If you are close to achieving this level of comfort and precision and want to attain true mastery, try taking a particular sequence of movements and performing it with your eyes closed. If you open your eyes and you're exactly where you should be, this bodes well.
Be ready to move as quickly as possible out of virtually every situation. The value of knowing endlag, hitstun, etc. in every scenario cannot be overstated. Though it is not always best to move on your first actionable frame, being able to is the single most valuable thing to master. Sneaking in fastfalls whenever possible is a good way to really speed up your game (see Plup). Ledge cancels and teeters can also accelerate your game, but don’t get too cute with them.
Punish game is crucial and easier to improve at than other aspects of the game, so strive to always have your bread and butter punishes polished and ready to execute at the drop of a dime. Switching from neutral mode into punish mode can be difficult. Playing more coherently in neutral can make it easier.
If you are trying to hit someone, you usually need to aim not where they are but where they will be.
Use baits, especially if neutral has slowed or if your opponent is playing static.
If you are disadvantaged, prioritize resetting to neutral rather than trying to get a reversal. Leveraging slick movement can help. Fighting out of a bad spot instead of trying to find a better one is among the most commonly committed errors.
Avoiding bad spots is great, but they cannot always be avoided. Learn to be comfortable in conceptually bad spots by understanding the deeper dynamic of the situation. Sometimes, intentionally putting yourself in a bad spot can be fine. Move quickly out of these spots before your opponent has mentally adjusted and can capitalize. It is entirely possible to bait your opponent by putting yourself in a bad spot intentionally.
Try to play on reaction. More than trying to react all the time, this means to set yourself up for situations where you are able to react. Conversely, using options that your opponent will be unable to react to is strong, even if such options are risky conceptually. Learning which situations are reactable takes much experience.
Understanding threat ranges and spacings will let you anticipate situations, which will improve your ability to react, especially with DI and SDI. Try to SDI most of the time but not at the cost of regular DI, generally speaking. Laziness about inputting SDI is a terrible habit.
Avoid playing in predictable rhythms. No matter how good your spacing and reactions are, being rhythmically predictable is a liability. This applies not only to dash dances and ground movement but also to airborne play, particular when it comes to using fast fall. Much of the urgency that players feel is fictitious. Sometimes doing nothing is the best play. Learn to be comfortable pressing no buttons.
Covering all options or most options is sometimes worse than committing to cover fewer options. The punish incurred by hard commitments may be worth ceding other coverage. Moreover, if your opponent knows you are trying to cover as many options as possible, they will select the option that is hardest or most poorly covered in tandem with the others.
Remind yourself of win conditions and play to them. Don't be too degenerate or predictable. Pay attention to if your opponent is being too predictable in this way so you can bait and punish them.
Have a balance of outplay attempts and chump checks. Being a bit wishful in bad spots is forgivable. The best players know to not play too cheesy but also not too honest.
Minimize your reliance on tech skill but always have it. For the most important tech skills, perform them constantly despite the possibility of flubbing because these are the ones you will need to have on deck at all times.
Going for reads out the gate can be surprisingly strong. People can have tells in their game, allowing for big commitments early, leading to decisive momentum or mental advantages. See How to Read Opponents for more details. Tl;dr is that you should hypothesize and categorize player tendencies. Information about an opponent can be gained for situations that haven’t arisen based on conceptual similarities.
Conversely, saving clutch reads or baits for the right moment can be better than taking a stock at a less crucial moment. My personal heuristic is that I will generally take any free stock, but if I feel really confident a particular gambit is going to work in the clutch, then I'll save it to leverage at the right moment. Sometimes this can even be the case if it didn't work earlier, as certain situations and dynamics could lead to something that failed previously. Saving a decisive read can win a set:
Learn to grab ledge quickly from any position on stage.
In many matchups, if the opponent is taking their time off the ledge, stealing the ledge is a strong play and is better than just spamming attacks on stage and hoping they bungle their invincibility use.
Shield the appropriate hardness. Practice this in doubles, where holding shield is much stronger. Don’t forget to angle your shield as well.
Formulate gameplans. Stage selection should correlate with your plans. Just because a stage is supposed to be good for the matchup doesn’t mean you should pick it. Going to a stage at a different point in a set, particularly in BO5, can have ramifications for your odds of winning on that stage and subsequent ones.
Have more plans for characters with more neutral game playstyles. If the other character has many viable ways of playing neutral, you will need multiple gameplans, or at least a highly malleable one with distinct branches.
Be cognizant of mental damage. Many sets are decided by a pivotal moment where one player’s mental game crumbles.
Part 2: Metagame
Spacing your moves at their tip is generally good.
Don’t waste your jump. Panic should not manifest in jumps.
Being grounded is generally good. It gives you access to the most options and allows you to CC/ASDI down.
Chronic shielding in scraps is a common bad habit. Defaulting to CC instead of shield can be strong.
Use movement. Movement can be tricky and low lag, whereas attacks are usually more committal. It’s possible to win neutral just by moving. Learn not only how to move but how to leverage movement. Most players can move well but do not know how to use it effectively. Maneuvering from disadvantage to neutral is one of the hallmarks of high level play.
Leverage stage control. When your opponent is cornered, don’t immediately commit and potentially let them get center for free with something as trivial as a roll. Conversely, don’t sit there and let them reposition for free. If you see them consistently get to the platform without contest, this likely indicates that you should pressure more aggressively.
Play out of the corner patiently. In corner situations, aggressors usually assert stage control by using zoning attacks, which will only hit you if you move toward center. Cornered players usually get hit for moving toward center rather than for being complacent in the corner.
Playing the lead is a valuable skill but is sometimes overstated or misunderstood. If what you were doing was working, and there is no reason for you to believe a change of pace is necessary, keep playing your game. Switching to defensive play or outright camping just because you have a lead can be a way to throw.
Learn to play respawn invincibility well. If you are good off the ledge, then retreating to ledge can be a safe way to play this. Otherwise, good platform movement, discretion about running through, and quick movement out of shield can be helpful. Baiting your opponent into extending right as their invincibility ends is the most desirable outcome. When on offense, pay attention to defensive habits or movement patterns to call out. Paying attention to your opponents composure and jitters can also be beneficial.
Space in tricky counterintuitive ways to enhance neutral and combo game. If you space and time your attacks in ways that mask your intention, it will make it harder for your opponent to know where to position in neutral, when to pick their moment, and how to DI appropriately. Don't delay aerials for follow ups if it increases their chance of getting out of the DI mixup. Frame advantage gained from delaying aerials is almost invariably less important than your opponent’s DI.
Know what beats your bread and butter so you can quickly adjust. Anticipating an adjustment and preemptively having the answer can be devastating, i.e., if you showed paper, have rock ready for when they throw scissors. Looks of true dismay and resignation arise if you are able to execute this.
At lower levels of play, antsiness, urgency, and boredom often decide sets. At mid levels, the decisive factor is often robustness and versatility of game plans. At higher levels, speed of adaptation is crucial. Refine your gameplay in these regards to level up.
Part 3: Training and Learning. What to do between tournaments to improve.
Pick at least two things to focus on and no more than five in any given practice session. When you get comfortable and consistent with something, replace it with something else.
Practice things that you are already good at. 99% of Melee players need consistent maintenance for basics. The best musicians practice much of the same stuff every single day. Armada used to combo a fucking level 9 cpu for practice. Missing wavedashes loses sets. Being able to comfortably do any wavedash length can win sets. Life is not an anime where you proclaim you mastered a technique because you successfully performed it once. Even if you're already good at something, you may be able to improve further.
Be flexible with your practice habits and keep in mind that practicing anything too much has diminishing returns. Doing one thing for hours on end because you’re struggling is a poor use of time. Incorporating that thing into a practice routine where you do it for 5-10 minutes over many days is far better. Don’t let yourself be stubborn when discouraged. Just move on and practice other things. Focusing on executing one technique for more than 15 minutes will get you into a rhythm that is too disparate from an actual match, thereby rendering the practice ineffective.
Try different things, even if they seem highly situational. Even things that seem useless at a glance may have hidden utility.
Discriminate between what worked in the moment and what is fundamentally solid. Going for some execution checks is fine but know they are just that. Plateaus are frequently caused by people achieving good results with strategies that aren't applicable against higher level opponents, such as excessive reliance on whiff punishing or spamming of low lag moves that are countered by hard reads or extreme precision and speed.
Learn the conceptual strengths and weaknesses of all relevant characters. It will immensely benefit your ability to create gameplans and assimilate new data into your schema. Sometimes makes fighting mid and low tiers free.
Learn which tech skills are most important for which matchups.
Study animations, hitboxes, hurtboxes, and how hurtboxes contort in different states. The value of the last is underappreciated.
Learn frame data, at least implicitly, to facilitate adjustments and to enhance your theorycraft. It might not seem like a couple frame difference in startup would make a huge difference but it almost defines which moves are usable in which situations.
Double down on your strengths. Mitigate your weaknesses. There is no best way to play and will not be for the foreseeable future of the meta. The best players have astoundingly contrasting styles. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. Learning how to play to your strengths and circumvent your weaknesses is crucial. Most characters, even of the high tiers, have huge weaknesses. Learning to play around your own weaknesses is similar to playing around those of your character. For weaknesses, situational optimization is usually adequate. For strengths, refine both micro and macro games.
Try to circumvent your opponent’s strengths. If you are playing a matchup where you are at neutral game advantage, this is usually as simple as trying to play the matchup rather than the player.
Evaluate your muscle memory and input methods. Change them if they can be improved. Though it’s a pain in the ass, it will benefit your tech skill. Somewhat counterintuitively, being able to perform tech skills in ways that you later opt out of is still generally good for your tech skill. Westballz once told me this and I was skeptical but he was right.
Reconciling your explicit and implicit understandings may be worthwhile. When you understand and execute something implicitly, this is a good thing, but you may at some point find that your hands forgot what they used to do, and you’ll be unable to consciously go through the motions to reproduce the lost muscle memory.
Write important shit down, especially if you did something sick by accident. Phone notes are good. I prefer them over notebooks nowadays. Wobbles once noted that much Melee innovation comes from recreating errors. I was skeptical because I highly value theorycraft and thought most ideas with merit would flow from your framework. Now I believe we are both right. Rewrite notes in the future to make them more easily digestible if you only glance at them in passing.
Write notes about sets you play to remind you what you learn and to serve as foundations for future ideas to beat people you aren't consistently beating. See Effective Notetaking.
Do not oversimplify or overcomplicate. Occam's Razor is wrong. Or rather, it's translated in a misleading way. Feel free to investigate this further but in a nutshell, pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate translates more literally as “plurality should not be posited without necessity” or “entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.” A better understanding of the formulation is that you should try to use the appropriate amount of nuance required. Sometimes things are incredibly complicated. Grasping for easy answers is a recurring problem with my Metafy students. I often hear people say "I need to approach less" and it's never that simple.
Solve puzzles in your head when playing friendlies or between tournaments.
Theorycraft and try to be ahead of the curve of the meta. Abandon bad ideas. Keep an eye out for ideas similar to your own and steal them. Steal shit in general. Absolutely do not be proud and stubborn here. And keep in mind that even if other characters can do stuff better than yours, doing a shittier version still has value.
Always endeavor to enhance your toolkit, especially with movement options. Punish game is an obvious thing to practice but being able to leverage more movement options has immense value, even if they are niche and rarely applicable.
Practice things in both directions on both sides of the stage. Aspects of the game and stages are sometimes asymmetrical.
Learn the rules to break the rules. Don’t venture too far out of your lane here. If you are trying to write your 9th grade five paragraph essays in a style reminiscent of James Joyce, you’re not going to pass the class. Build a solid foundation and expand on it. Once your foundation is solid, you have more latitude to experiment and style. Heuristics like “space your moves at the tip" are starting points, and eventually you’ll learn the exceptions.
Talk to people about Melee. Figure out which friends, streamers, or top players are helpful, articulate, and have ideas that resonate with you.
Keep an eye out for good content creators. I haven't watched many of these Melee Moments videos because the interactions were not necessary for me to dissect, but if it were several years ago and I were a newer player, these might be the best videos for me to watch. Ssbm tutorials was good for newcomers. As a Falcon, shoutouts to Chef Rach, Setchi, and the Cookbook. I haven't watched any of their things but I can say with some confidence that Fiction and Kodorin probably have some really helpful stuff out there.
Do your best to consume content in formats that are not ideal for you. There's a ton of insight out there that has not been condensed into quick digestible videos. Some of it will never be able to be. Read The Art of Learning instead of The Inner Game of Tennis, the latter of which can be adequately summarized in a short YouTube video.
Refine your lens for discerning good information from bad. The source may be irrelevant–good information can come from literally anywhere. Bad information can sometimes be presented such that it seems totally coherent, intuitive, and sensible. That said, knowing which sources tend to deserve the benefit of the doubt and which ones require greater skepticism is valuable. Setchi is one of the players I pretty much assume is right every time he says shit even if it's presented in a way that I don't find compelling or adequately explanatory. Conversely, I don't tend to believe things Crimson Blur says. But guess what. Everyone dunked on Blur for alluding to the existence of camera tricks. You know who else told me about camera tricks? Ice.
Cultivate connections with people who will help you improve. This could be practice partners, coaches, theory crafters, or even just people who see the game really differently from yourself. He's gone now, but I never understood what made The Moon good. At all. It seems like he sucked every time I watched him play. Yet I got utterly omega bodied by him whenever we did play. He was notoriously bad against Falcon but he also dominated against Smuckers. This isn't a matchup either of us struggle in. I am really not sure if I will ever understand what made that guy good in the least, but if I had been able to pick his brain while he was still with us, then perhaps my game knowledge would have been meaningfully enriched. If someone constantly makes bad decisions against another player and they never make them against you, this is likely indicative of you not understanding something. It took me quite some time to really understand and accept how S2J is able to do insane, mistake-inducing gameplay that I will not be able to replicate, but even just knowing this allows me to play to my own strengths rather than fruitlessly emulating someone else and being a shitty knockoff, budget version of them. Plus, I can still try to use a trick or two from his bag if I feel my poorer execution of it will get the job done against a particular opponent.
The Goomy Rating System. Here’s a time when another player enriched my ability to analyze and dissect the game:
I was on a roadtrip with Goomy. He told me he liked to quantify how advantaged or disadvantaged a situation is from 0-10. Let’s make it start at -10 instead of 0. So this a -10 is when you are dead to something trivial like a ledgehog, and a 10 is when you have to perform something trivial to take the stock. What your response is to any given situation should be correlated to how advantaged or disadvantaged the situation is. For example, if you are doing side+b out of the corner (fox/falco/falcon), the situation should probably be at least -8, or else it would be sensible to elect a lower risk play. Try rating situations and tailoring your bread and butter to the rating.
Don't shy away from or be reluctant to embrace information that isn't entirely quantifiable. Sometimes abstract or conceptual ideas are just as valuable as concrete ones.
Quick anecdote here that you can skip but that I'll share since it was a big personal growth moment: I once met a girl who gave me a breakthrough with this one. I never "got" visual art. I still don't really. But having her explain what she liked about a painting that I disliked made me understand what made it good and I appreciated it much more. As a left brained fellow, I tended to want descriptions to have well defined, concrete, unambiguous parameters. Some things are better explained in less concrete terms. She told me that this was a reasonably common toxic trait in men, particularly those of us who may have played Devil's advocate a bit too much. Understanding the painting in an abstract, thematic way was more valuable than grasping the nuances of the painting technique and specifics of the form. Skepticism is a good lens when learning new information but being inherently skeptical of anything that needs to be explained qualitatively instead of quantifiably is just a limiting world view. It's also impolite.
Sometimes understanding flows from the framework and sometimes the framework needs adjustment (see Piaget on assimilation vs accommodation). Sometimes empirical data is straight up irreconcilable with any world view that seems reasonable, but that still doesn't warrant discarding the data. Keep this in mind so you can accept things that literally make no fucking sense whatsoever. For example, my girlfriend guesses astrology signs with about 75% accuracy, which should be a 1/12 chance. We watched the Metallica documentary and she guessed all three of their signs, so that's 1/12³. We watch Love Island and she guesses their signs almost every fucking time. It makes literally no sense to me. If someone had told me about the Abate vs S2J ending and I hadn't seen it, I would have said that's not a thing that can happen. The mechanics of the interaction later became much more widely known knowledge. Or like, momentum. It's real and we all know it. It's still hard to understand and accept just how huge it is.
Decompress. Walks can be good. Many of us live and breathe melee but finding some balance is necessary. Human bodies are not machines, though we can try to emulate machines in bursts.
Part 4: Mental Game
Take responsibility for when you do not pick the correct option or when you flub. There are few games out there with less luck than Melee. This should be heartening. How well you perform, at least in the long term, is almost entirely in your own control.
Keep your ego in check. Almost invariably, too much ego is the problem with smashers and their paths to improvement. I've met only one person who suffers from not enough ego for performance purposes. Those with no ego tend to improve the quickest. Some ego is totally natural. There’s nothing wrong with taking pride in your accomplishments. But in Melee, there’s always more to master.
Manage your emotions. Discover what works best for you in terms of embracing feelings, suppressing them, flowing with music in tournament, etc. Attitudes need not be entirely rigid. Some days or some matches will require different attitudes than others. It would be naive to think that being rushed down vs. being camped will put you in the same emotional and physical state. Losing because of emotions will not happen if you have grit and adequate preparation.
Knowledge and application of psychological concepts such as chunking, confirmation bias, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and the Dunning Kruger effect may contribute to growth. There are many pitfalls and plateaus that can hinder your growth, and being primed to deal with the psychological aspects of improvement can circumvent such hindrances.
Being in the moment is conducive to optimal performance. Ego doesn’t exist when you are in the moment. Flow state can be achieved this way. Extraneous thoughts become fleeting rather than centralizing.
“Should” is a word that may indicate toxic thoughts. Any time you think you should win, your option should have worked, or your opponent should not have done something that did work, be wary. You can “should” your way all the way home, completely ignoring the context of what was actually happening.
Understand and flow with melee bullshit. Although this game has next to no luck, it has tons of completely unfair, counterintuitive horse shit. By competing at this game, you’ve chosen to subject yourself to it, especially if you picked a low tier.
Never be a slave to fear of failure. True failure only comes from resignation.
Keep it fun. Burnout is real. Competition is stressful. We play because the game is fun. If you play for any other reason, you picked the wrong game. Though results follow from an intelligent practice regiment, consistent practice is only realistic if it's mostly fun. Picking the right main as well as trying your best to find fun things about unpalatable matchups is important. Doubles can be a fun change of pace when you’re frustrated or fed up with matchups and the meta. Though you may not always be able to have fun at every moment, stress and tension will usually result in poor execution, so trying to have fun even in high stress scenarios may be a good mindset.
Part 5: Tournament Performance
Use respawn platform time. Refresh your memory about win conditions, crucial interactions, what’s been working and what hasn’t, and move forward with a clean emotional slate.
Warmup against worse people first and better people later. If you have ~1 hour to warm up, a player slightly worse than your upcoming opponent can be good practice. That way, you can focus a bit more on playing the matchup correctly rather than playing the player.
Choose your warmup partners wisely based on playstyle similarity as well as matchup similarity if a good main of your character isn't available.
Warm up tech skill incrementally. Focus on the most important stuff first. Hard and important things most of all. New things that you wanna add should come last unless you know you will need to leverage them to win that day.
Do the risky things that you practice in friendlies in tournament. If you aren't going to do them, then stop wasting your fucking time practicing them, UNLESS your tech skill is just generally fucking sick and you don't actually need to practice other shit.
Quickly adjust if a trick isn't working properly, perhaps after two failures. Try to leverage alternative solutions if your tech skill isn't on point.
In clutch moments, fall back on your comfort setups.
Manage your body. Esport is a cringe term but the game has a physical aspect. Some people benefit greatly from fitness and there is definite science behind this. Other people need lots of sleep. Nutrition is big for some and not so much for others. Varying sobriety levels, meditation, stimulants, THC, and other factors have highly variable impacts on performance depending on the person. Caffeine is often a double edged sword. That said, “sharpen the body to sharpen the mind” is a good mantra for most.
Plan your day so you can perform to the level you need to to win. This involves planning when you’ll eat your meals, warm up, and possibly even socialize.
Music may help get you in the right mindset, both before or during the set. Figure out if this can help focus your mind. See Music and Melee.
Some of these things are applicable to other facets of life. Melee gives and takes a lot from us. Years of playing this immensely frustrating yet profoundly rewarding game have yielded things of immeasurable value–I have learned to learn and sculpted a mindset conducive to improvement. A champion recently had some heartening words on this same subject, so if you don’t believe me, take it from him.