An interesting thing happens when you pit a pro Street Fighter player against a casual player: the casual player loses.  A lot.  In fact, if the two were to play 100 games straight, the smart money would be on a 100-to-0 winning streak by the pro player.

Why is this?  Both players start on equal footing.  They both have the same character, same health, same moves.  All the buttons do the same things.  The tournament player doesn't get any kind of bonus or special advantage - in fact, he might even give the opposition a handicap (Seth, for example, likes to show off by beating people one handed)!  So why is it that one side wins so consistently?

That's because tournament players have a magic secret.  And now, for the first time, I'm going to make that secret publically available here on the internet:

They practice.  A lot.

That's it.  It's not that their reflexes are better, or that they psychically "know" what you're going to do before you do it.  It's not that they have better small motor skills, or that they have some kind of special knack for fighting games that just makes them good.  What the tournament player has that the casual player doesn't is just two things:  knowledge, and practice.  And boy, do they have a lot of both.

It's important to note, though, that the quality of practice is just as important as the quantity of practice.  That old saying, "Practice Makes Perfect" is wrong - or at least, incomplete.  Practice doesn't make you better by itself; it just makes you more consistent.  It takes the motions that you're doing and burns them into you, until they become muscle memory and you don't need to think about them any more.  Until you can react to a threat with your chosen response without needing to think.  Practice, in other words, just re-inforces what you're doing; it doesn't, by itself, actually make you do things better.

And that's why I said the other piece to the puzzle is knowledge.  In order to play the game well, you need to know which tactics are actually effective, and how to counter them yourself.  You need knowledge of what moves to do in what situations, how to best take advantage of an opening, and how not to provide opponents with those openings yourself.  You need to know how people think and react when they're pressured, what their possible counters are, and how you can counter those counters.

I can help supply the knoweldge.  You'll have to supply the practice.

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