« The Salty Runback: Rise Up »

Eagerly, you tore the cellophane from your copy of Street Fighter 5 and sped home to gingerly ease it into your PS4 or PC like it was prom night. This is my time, you’ve thought to yourself. You’ve watched Justin Wong, Daigo and Ricky Ortiz, and you’ve thought, "I can do that." Maybe you have played fighting games for a while. Maybe this is your first go-round getting serious about them. Either way, you’re full of vim and vigor, picturing yourself standing on the stage at Caesar’s in Las Vegas, medal around your neck.

Before you go buying plane tickets and paying entry fees, there’s a few things you need to know. First among them, I’m sorry to tell you, is that with all your determination and belief that you’re going to break through and be the next PR Balrog: You’re wrong. You won’t. At least, most of you won’t.

I have called hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours of tournament matches. I have sat front row center next to some of the best commentators in gaming, not just fighting gaming, and called play-by-play for some of the most infamous names in our collective hobby. I’ve called matches drunk out of my mind, sober as a sheet and fifty shades between; I’ve called matches in ballrooms and bars and even a bathroom (once); I’ve called games in rooms of hundreds with tens of thousands watching around the world; and I’ve called games in garages with tens and tens more watching. The truth is, I never intended to be on that side of the camera and microphone for any of them. I intended to be in the seat, stick in lap, with Seth Killian talking about me instead of sitting next to Seth and talking about someone else. But the truth is, I’m god fucking awful at Street Fighter; and most other fighting games, in fact.

You’ll try and you’ll fail to get to where you daydreamed you’d go, but let me tell you, stay with it. Somewhere along the way, you’ll realize you don’t really care you never got to play Tokido in grand finals. Well, maybe you’ll care a little, but that disappointment gets blunted by all the friendships you’ll have made along the way, and it fades with the crazy stunts your new friends will push you into. I’ve called matches for guys who went on to stream or make YouTube content, and then that content landed them jobs doing what we all love. Some of them ended up in the booth next to me. When you reach that moment where you are finally forced to realize you won’t be the next Justin, you’ll find your niche, and you’ll probably enjoy all of this more for it.

For the few of you that are going to make it, though, I have some more advice. It's not the technical kind, but things I’ve picked up over the years watching people much better than me play games I love, the things that a lot of them seem to have in common. They aren't things like execution—some of the best players I know have bad execution—but instead are the intangibles that separate us, the small things that make good players into champions.

Be gracious and ruthless. Never mistake that you are the only person who cares if you succeed, that you are the only person who wants you to ultimately succeed. Though you will make friends playing Street Fighter 5 if you just choose to look for them, in the end, the more successful you are, the less successful they are. You’ll need people to practice with, to keep you entertained between matches, and to share tech. Most of the best players are those that have cultivated big circles of friends in the scene. All those relationships that you’ll build come with a caveat, however. Everyone in the ballroom can be your friend, but from the time when you plug in your stick until the rounds are over, you don’t have a single friend in the world.

Thicken your skin or buy good headphones and delete Twitter. You can get banned in League of Legends for insinuating you took someone’s mother to dinner and then the two of you had congress. At a fighting game tournament, that’s the baseline for the shit talk bell curve. If you win you’ll be a fraud, and if you lose you’ll be free; fraud or free—"yo fraaaay"—, no in-between. The more you win, the worse it will get. I once watched a match where someone from the gallery stood directly behind a player and shouted “ass” every single time that player would block. Guess who lost the match.

Tier lists don’t matter, because you don’t play the game at that level. Unless your character of choice is just garbage, and there’s few of those in modern fighting games, then don’t bother with lists of which characters are supposedly the best. What good is it going to do you to play strong characters when you barely know how to anti-air? Play what’s fun and master that, then worry about learning Sagat; or Karin, if you live in some sort of weird alternate universe where they have released a Street Fighter game that for some strange reason does not include Sagat on the roster but inexplicably has Karin available.

Getting elite means not smelling your feet. I don’t care if you sit at home stewing in Beefaroni farts in a bedroom that reeks of self-manipulation and stale Pizza Rolls, but when you come out to the session or you sign up for the tournament pack some Speed Stick and some soap. No one ever won anything playing alone, and no one wants to play with stank.

Finally, stay hungry. Even when you start getting good, keep pushing. Travel and win on enemy turf. Take pride in learning your bad matches and embarrassing the best players for those characters. If you are gonna lose early in the bracket, become a land mine to someone and enjoy the feeling. When you win, keep running up the scoreboard. Don’t ever let anyone take a round off you for free, and when they take it, get right in line to take it back. I know a lot of good players and many of them are gracious losers, but all of them hate it and you can tell they do.

Welcome (or welcome back) to Street Fighter. I don’t believe in you, but that’s the most important piece of all: You need to be the one to believe in you, and fuck everyone else. Somewhere along the way, you’ll find something you’ll love: competition, overcoming challenges, setting and achieving goals or meeting new people, some of which might be in your life for a long time to come.

The Salty Runback is Darry's editorial series. His views are not representative of IPLAYWINNER as a whole.