Late night ponder.

As a result of pushing your body to the limit during training, you constantly break your immune system down and thus increasing your chances of catching a virus. I called it an early night tonight as I felt the symptoms of the fever upon me. Took a couple of Buckleys (I hate taking drugs btw), and tried sleeping. After a few hours of restlessness, here I am. There goes my week of training, I suspect that I'll be taking a few days off to recover.

Yesterday back at my parent's house, I had an old friend come over to spar. He's a good fighter, but there's something about his sparring that I really didn't like. Sparring is a tool used to learn and try new skills. If one person is going easy and "holding back" (punching lightly), his partner should show some courtesy and attempt to fight at the same pace. There's no skill in abruptly increasing the intensity and take advantage of a counter strike when your partner is going slow. I'm not saying don't spar hard, I'm saying be courteous and make your intentions clear before the session if you are going to go hard.

Note: I'm aware that your definition of "sparring" may affect how you perceive the issue at hand.

Here is a blurp from the article Love of the Game: Not Playing to Win. It was a suggested read from a friend, very relevant to what I talked about above.

Love of the Game: Not Playing to Win


Now it’s time for what appears to be the opposite point of view: “playing to win” at all times is counter-productive. If you want to win over the long term, then you can’t play every single game as if it were a tournament finals. If you did, you wouldn’t have time for basic R&D, you’d never learn the quirky nuances that show up unexpectedly at tournaments, and you are likely to get stuck honing suboptimal tactics.

Playing to win and playing to learn are often at odds. If you play the game at hand to maximize your chances of winning, then you won’t take the unnecessary risks of trying out new tactics, counters, moves, patterns, or whatever. Playing it straight is the best way to win the game at hand, but at the cost of valuable information about the game that you may need later and valuable practice to expand your narrow repertoire of moves or tactics.

Here’s a simple example from Street Fighter. Let’s say I know for a fact that one split second from now my opponent will do a particular “super move.” To win the game at hand, the smartest thing to do is just block the move, but that doesn’t teach me a whole lot. How invulnerable is his super move, anyway? Could I have stuck out an early kick that would knock him out of his super? Or could I have waited for the “super flash” to happen (signifying the beginning of his super move) and then done an invulnerable dragon punch 1 frame (1/60th of a second) later? Maybe my invulnerability will last longer than his and I’ll knock him out of it. Maybe his will always win. That’s valuable information to have for the time when you have zero energy and the opponent forces you to block the super move and die. This situation will happen in the tournament, so you better know what your options are.

Very often in “casual play” I will forgo the safe option in order to try possible counters to certain moves. Even if I lose a game when a possible counter turns out not to work, the knowledge gained is well worth it, since I’ll never make that particular mistake again (I hope!). If you really want to play to win, you have to know all the options open to you at every moment and that doesn’t happen without a lot of disastrous experiments.

This concept applies to pretty much any game, of course. “Will my six Corsairs really beat his twelve Mutalisks in StarCraft?” Or, “I know I have the flak cannon, but will the shock rifle combo work just as well around corners in Unreal Tournament?” You will never know unless you try it.


Click here for the rest of the article:
http://www.sirlin.net/ptw/advanced-players-guide/love-of-the-game-not-playing-to-win/