I'm really excited for this upcoming tournament and to see what I can achieve with a play to win mentality. I've been playing a whole lot and think I've made enough skill improvements to become a more competitive D3 player, assuming that's my tournament division placement. I do hope that D3 is my placement.

My initial thoughts are that I will have to get very lucky to place top 8, since I seem to be experiencing a major mental block with AAAing any 50-59 charts. I think my biggest weakness as a player is that I'm overly reliant on playing patterns that I'm comfortable with. Which means that I play very inaccurately with 60+ hand and jump streams that force me out of my comfort zone where I eventually gas out on stamina. On the other hand, I should be able to eventually SDG anything up to mid 50's once I hit that certain mindset while playing. And so, my strategy will be to take breaks and have the patience to accumulate a lot of reps each round, especially on files that I think are possible for me to AAA.

The Derustathon event has been really fun and helpful in preparing, so thank you to the events staff team for making all of that possible. And good luck to everyone that I'll be playing with in my division/in the tournament itself!

Round 1: Awesome file, didn't feel the need to AAA. Props to the step artist

Round 2: Not going to lie, I found this file to be extremely annoying. The patterns both look and play like its made with the intent to just be aggravating. A pest of a file.

Round 3: Tough ending on this one. Other competitors made some improvements, so now I'm at risk! I will try to grind this one out to a low SDG.

I think this is as far as I'll get this OT! Was really hoping to see the next round. Can't see myself beating 10.0 raw goods on attempt 24; good luck to everyone in the next round!

With a shiny blue {Advanced} MP label :D

The format incentivizes AAA/PFC, which is not really a personal goal I set when practicing songs. Nonetheless, looking forward to see how I shape up with my bracket and building the patience to PFC 40+ songs.

Round 1: I can PFC this. Nerves are a thing. Seeing that AAA as been done already and I need to do the same to best compete. My AAA will come. [edit]: Not, quite feeling it. Could be a weird funk where I'm just not playing too accurately. I'll just try to get a couple more points, but I'm somewhat ok with my score. Expecting next rounds to be a lot harder, so will probably just aim for a low SDG ratio, we'll see!

Round 2: Freakin annoying file selection. SDG won't be enjoyable to get so I'm stopping here. I'd like to see a nice 50+ song next round.

Round 3: Lol, I'm soooo bad at this file. The files so far haven't flowed me with, they've all been very fast, precise stream bursts. I'm not quite good enough yet to compete with that. At this point, my objective will be to compete for top 8 minimum.

Round 4: I have a few prior reps on this file so lets see if I can improve on the score. 2x improved scores. The player currently in #8 is a slightly better player, so not sure if I can maintain #7 with 4 more rounds to go.

Round 5: Oh boy, we're really in the mud now. I've been very inconsistent getting between 21-40 goods with variations in parts I usually do hit/miss and that's extremely irritating.

New word came in today with IRL stuff coming up. Not going to be focused as much on the tournament.

Round 6: bleh

Round 7: This will be the most rough round so far. Worse than my round 3 haha

Round 8: Well, I'm f***ed. And the skill gap is too far so I'm good!

7th place finish. I'm ok with that as a fresh D3 player

2/26/23

The fruition of undoing one handed muscle memory!

Stepmania forced me to switch to playing with 2 hands. Coming back here to practice jump and hand streams while undoing 1 handed muscle memory.