Scrim performance != match performance

This article will further define a common barrier to performance in our ideas around scrims and matches. This article is inspired by and will feature quotes from Jared Tendler’s latest book, The Mental Game of Trading.

It is often the case that we expect that practice (“scrims”) is where we get better and that once we’re in the match environment, it is simply about how well we can replicate our scrim performance. However, this is misleading because there are elements to our performance specific to the match environment that we must acknowledge and improve; otherwise, we may be looking in the wrong place when analyzing where things went wrong.

Equally, teams are often judged by how good they are in scrims. But scrim performance has no bearing on performing when it counts, which is all that matters in a competitive discipline. Scrims are an important data-point that we can use, but a team must be careful not to overestimate its importance because:

1. It won’t tell us everything about performance.

Being blind to your weaknesses due to faulty assumptions is an oversight that will cost time and growth, as the team may place the efforts to improve in the wrong direction entirely.

2. It will create a false sense of competence.

The belief that you are good based on scrim performance will initially translate to match confidence. However, if the script from our scrims doesn’t follow into the match, it may be more difficult to maintain confidence.

In The Mental Game of Trading, Tendler describes the critical difference between a scrim and a match:

“This common error in learning happens in many performance arenas. The golfer who doesn’t play as well in a tournament as in a practice round. Or the new actor who kills it in rehearsals but can’t deliver on stage. As many golfers and actors, if you believe the sim and the live market are the same, there’s a fundamental flaw in your understanding of performance. “I’m making the same trades; it should be no different,” is a common refrain that highlights this flaw. While the trades may be the same, you are not.

Things are happening in matches that aren’t in scrims, and we need to understand what those things are. The most significant changes are emotional differences which, through work on our mental game, we can work on to become better players. The most obvious experience that we’re all familiar with in matches is nerves. As Tendler describes, “dialed-up nerves increase your ability to sense and perceive the environment thanks to your nervous system. You absorb more data than usual, fuelling the zone and high level-intuition. If you can’t handle the nerves, secondary anxiety will accumulate and cause a drop in performance”.

But what’s the deal with nerves and pressure? In matches, results matter, and there is a lot on the line, something that isn’t true in scrims; examples include reputation, confidence, place on a team, the future, expectation from yourself, team and fans, and more. All of these things serve to produce pressure, and pressure produces nerves. As such, we step into an emotional landscape that we need to learn how to navigate and resolve; again, there will be challenges here that aren’t possible to experience or practice by playing scrims, we have to use awareness and take notice during matches to begin to see what’s happening. As Tendler mentioned, nerves themselves aren’t a problem; they can be a great help, but how we react to them can signal an issue.

A primary emotion is the initial feeling that seems to come up from nowhere. Secondary emotions are the conscious reaction to the primary emotion. For example, suppose we get that initial feeling of nerves (primary emotion) but we become so nervous and fearful that we become hyper-aware of our nerves, we start to consciously notice how nervous we genuinely are; we may begin to respond with other fears or negative thoughts or flaws (secondary emotion), “I feel out of my depth,” “I don’t know what to do,” “I have to change what I’ve practiced, this isn’t working,” “This guy is outplaying me.” These thoughts further add to the accumulation of that primary emotion, creating a downward spiral effect and a gradual erosion of your performance as, eventually, the emotions are overwhelming.

Here are some examples from The Mental Game of Trading of how fear could manifest:

• Overthinking
• Second-guessing
• Not trusting your gut
• Fear of losing
• Pain of losing
• Attached to unrealized gains
• Assuming the worst
• Fear of Mistakes

I will inject my own experience with fear in here. Last year when competing in Diabotical, we were deep in a tournament against strong opponents that we wouldn’t usually beat in matches. However, we knew on paper, we could and should due to our scrim performances. One of the matches was going well, but we hit a hurdle on one of the maps. I had an overwhelming sense that we would lose and that I needed to do more, but I felt like I couldn’t — I felt like we needed to win so badly, but I felt powerless to play better than I already was as I was performing great already. There was a lot on the line for me: I had returned to competition after three years of inactivity. My team had already experienced setbacks. I felt a lot of personal responsibility for our performances. I needed to prove to myself I was as good as I thought I was. We didn’t have many opportunities to compete, and I began to experience a fear of losing. My secondary emotion was fear-based and distorting the reality with negative thoughts like “I feel like we are losing. There’s nothing I can do. I want to win, but it doesn’t seem possible” “I don’t want to lose,” I was preparing myself mentally to lose, to mitigate the pain of losing. However, just because you feel one way, emotionally, doesn’t mean that it reflects the reality; in that sense, I was jumping to conclusions and assuming the worst. I noticed all these negative thoughts and knew they would impact my performance, and as I knew I was already in my A-game, I became fearful of mistakes as I was aware that these thoughts would likely knock me into my B or C game if they continued. Through understanding the nature of these fears and thoughts, I was able to refocus and dial back the anxiety, remove negative thoughts, and be excited again to perform. I refocused successfully, remained in my A-game, and we won the match. I felt like I had unlocked a new super-power, as this fear has been a pattern for me, something that has defeated me in the past. If we had lost this game, I could see a debriefing afterward that would result in us possibly changing our approach, something that wasn’t necessary to win. How often, I wonder, do we change approach instead of seeing the mental game as the real culprit? The journey isn’t over, though, because this was only one scenario where I experienced a trigger that resulted in fear; I am sure I have many more triggers and many different responses. I still need to do work to understand in detail where these feelings originate so I can resolve them and improve my performance. Fear can create many flaws in our game, but there are other emotions besides fear to consider that are detailed in The Mental Game of Trading, such as Greed, Confidence, and Tilt.

Nerves are helpful, but they can be hard to manage. If there is an over-accumulation of anxiety, we will get bulldozed by it, and our focus is pulled away, leading to worse performance. We have all experienced how it is when we are totally dialed in, how nerves allow us to go deeper into this feeling — but similarly, we’ve all felt how nerves can produce the opposite to put us “in our heads.” In my experience in the previous paragraph, had I not found a way to re-frame and talk back to the negative thoughts, I would have soon been overwhelmed. Even though I knew better how to deal with them, we need to go a step further: by understanding the triggers and primary and secondary emotions, we can help prevent the emotional flaw entirely by working toward a resolution, so my work is not yet done.

It’s worth noting that in-game context can change the emotional challenge a lot. Speaking only of fear-based hurdles: If you are close to winning (12–7 up) but not there yet, you may be attached to unrealized gains, or if you are against the ropes in an OT, you may fear mistakes as any one could result in losing the match. If you are in your C or B game, you may have Overthinking and Second Guessing issues that prevent you from making correct decisions. If we consider Greed, Confidence, and Tilt, we start to see how all these different emotions appear during certain moments in a match. By defining the flaws by understanding the emotions, we will improve our awareness; we will spot these issues more clearly, leading to resolving them more quickly to improve our performance.

Tendler advises that we must treat emotions as signals. They are not there to be minimized or reduced. They are there to be understood; the answer is finding a resolution instead of an approach that reduces or controls them. To do this, we need to define and map the patterns so we can work on them. His book does an incredible job at creating a system to iron out these flaws. If you are looking to work on your mental game, I strongly advise you to read The Mental Game of Trading. His success speaks for itself. If you want a living example of his system at work in esports, you need only look at EliGe.