How To Improve
A basic guide on how to get better at Smash
Before You Read
First thing's first, there is a guide on youtube that is EXTREMELY helpful in teaching players the basics of how to play Smash. If terms such as Neutral, Advantage, Disadvantage, RAR, and many others, are unfamilliar to you, or if you know terms like those but are still not 100% confident in your gameplay, I suggest watching IzawSmash's series on The Art of Smash. Even if you are confident in your gameplay, you should still watch this tutorial. Yoda Cage is the one who showed me this playlist, and even HE found a lot of things that were new to him and helped him improve. You can never be too good to review the basics.
Go To Our Events!
Going to our events is, by far, the most important step in getting better at playing the game. When I first came to Drexel, I was absolutely terrible at Smash Bros. All I ever did was run around and use Smash Attacks with Zero Suit Samus. I have even gone back and reviewed some of my old replays, and it looks like I never even used shield and relied solely on rolling away from things. However, in the past 2 years that I have been at Drexel, I have improved A LOT, and I have the Drexel Smash community to thank for it. I went to most of Drexel's practices and tournaments, but never once even won a single game until over a year and a half of practicing. However, every loss is a new opportunity to improve. If your opponent was able to beat you, then there had to be some reason why. Maybe they noticed that you were using one of your moves too often so they waited for you to do it and then punished you for it. Maybe they noticed that you keep getting up from ledge the same way every time so they covered that option with a hard hitting move every time. They might even say that you weren't playing against their character properly, and give you advice on the matchup. Asking your opponent about what they think you were doing wrong is the best way to start finding ways to improve. Don't let your skill level discourage you from coming to our events, even if you think that you are going to lose. I knew I would lose before I went to every event, but I still went just so that I could play against different people and ask them for their thoughts on how I can improve.
Save Your Replays
The second most important thing to do to improve at the game is to save ALL of your serious replays so that you can review them with other people at a later date. Whenever you go to a tournament, or if you are playing seriously with other people at home and aren't just messing around, then save EVERY replay of your gameplay. It is best to review your replays with multiple people, and even better if you know that the people reviewing them with you are good players who can give good advice and feedback. It may be more difficult to save your replays while at a tournament, but what I usually do is save the replay onto the switch, and then later when nobody is using that switch I record the replay with my phone. It is much better to be able to rewind your replay to watch your gameplay multiple times and figure out what may have been the best thing to do in a certain situation, so even if you have your replay saved onto your own personal switch you should definitely make the effort to transfer all of them over to your computer. To transfer your replays to your computer, first convert them to video in game, and then turn off your switch, remove the SD card from your switch, and insert it into your computer. There should be a few folders on your SD card. One of them holds data that you should probably leave alone, one of them contains all of your screenshots and screen captures in your switches photo gallery, and the third one contains all of the replay data for Smash. Find the replays that you want to transfer over and copy them to your computer.
Watch Competitive Smash
Watching your own replays is a good way to improve, but it isn't always easy to find somebody else to watch them with you. If you can't find anybody to give you good advice on your gameplay, then watching professionals play as your character is the next best thing. Pay attention to what they are doing in any given situation, such as during Neutral, or when they or their opponent is at ledge. You can even try to find flaws in your own gameplay by watching your replays, and then look at the pros play your character to see what they would do if they were in the same situation. Watching streams of tournaments, and vods of past tournaments, is also good because it gives you an opportunity to see what EVERY character in the game can do, which will prepare you for playing against that character during a tournament. For example, normally, if somebody throws out an F-Smash then you would think "Hey, they just whiffed a smash attack. I'm gonna go in and punish them for it". This logic is USUALLY perfectly fine, until you try to punish a Meta Knight for F-Smashing but YOU are the one who gets punished for it. Meta Knight's F-Smash has next to no lag, so it is almost impossible to punish it. If a Meta Knight throws out a random F-Smash in neutral, they are just trying to get you to think that you can punish it and run in so that they can hit you for free. However, since normally an F-Smash is punishable if it whiffs, you would never even think anything differently unless you had seen a Meta Knight do the same thing before. There are A LOT of things like this that go against your expectations, so watching other people play the game is a good opportunity to study up on every other character in addition to your own.