I'd spent the last week sailing pretty smoothly up the tower to floor 9, but now have spent the last day repeatedly bouncing between floors 8 and 9. It's funny where most of my matches on floor 8 feel pretty comfortable and chill but then as soon as I go up to 9, I'm getting handily smashed. Most of my sets are 0-3, and even just taking a round or two within an 0-3 feels like a win.
I think a big part of it might just be a mental factor? Like yeah the players on this floor are clearly generally stronger than me to some degree, but also things are probably coming out more skewed than the actual gap in our skill level just because I'm not used to playing vs. stronger players. With how quickly I've been making my way up the tower up till now, I think I've generally had the edge vs. most of my prior opponents and in my games have mostly felt pretty confident to just play how I want, dictate the pace of things, etc. But I definitely don't have that feeling on floor 9, and I think I've been playing worse as a result because I'm not used to playing at a disadvantage. Since I'm out of my comfort zone, my offense is more predictable and easy to guard since I feel less confident mixing in command grabs, taking risks to reset pressure, etc. On defense it's easier to get flustered into bad mashes on attacks I know aren't safe to mash vs. and get counterhit as a result, I'm more timid in neutral, etc.
So gonna try working on getting out of that sense of intimidation and try playing more confidently on this floor. After all, I'm already getting 0-3ed, so there's not much point in playing scared! Plus floor 8 is generally routine enough that getting demoted just means getting a bit of a break to play some chiller, more comfort zoney matches on my way back up to floor 9. And also, gonna start putting more emphasis on celebrating winning individual interactions, rather than winning matches. Up till now I'd been winning enough that it was fine to just celebrate when I ran someone over, but now that that's looking hard to come by... yeah, if I lose a round but also successfully bait an anti-air and then whiff punish it, that's a pretty cool thing to pull off vs stronger players! Cheer that on! Because if I start stringing enough of those together, suddenly I won't find myself losing as much.
