I Coached Hundreds of Players — This Is the #1 Sign of Growth

A lot of people think growth in video game is linear.

But when I look at the students who grow the fastest, the ones who actually skyrocket, most of them start with a significant drop.

They don't just dip, they actually crash, going through 15 losing streaks or going all the way down to ranks they haven't seen in years.

To most people, this probably seems like a failure, to me, it's one of the best signs of growth that I've ever seen.

And I call this the Bounce Back Effect.

Now, let's talk about one of my League of Legends student, he spent over $10,000 on League of Legends coaching.

He went to four different gaming academies in Korea, which, by the way, is not so uncommon, and some even run by this prestigious, famous professional gaming teams.

And he also had 10 different freelancer private coaches that are challenger level teaching him all the League of Legends game knowledge, but despite spending all the time and money, he was still hovering in Diamond, not really going past or below Diamond, so essentially, he was not having any change over a year.

But once he started getting coaching from me, within the first three weeks, he dropped all the way down to Emerald, which is a tier so low that he hasn't been in the last four, five years.

So in my view, he was finally starting to change.

So what happened to him? In about a month after him dropping down, he was not only able to bounce back to Diamond, but also he was able to finally break out of Diamond, reaching Master tier.

And just a few months after that, he was able to reach Master 500 LP, which is his new lifetime peak, and which is also equivalent of top 0.06% in League of Legends Korean server.

And again, this isn't just one student, I've seen at least dozens, if not hundreds of students like this, and that's why I have to come up with this phenomenon, the bounce back effect.

So, the bounce back effect is when your rank and skill drops temporarily in order to learn a fundamental skills.

So, why does this happen? Well, let's first talk about the difference between marginal improvement and explosive growth.

The example of marginal improvement would be going from Gold 5 to Gold 3 or going from Diamond 1 to maybe Master 2.

I will call them marginal gains or marginal improvement, and to get that, often just acquiring tips or bits of knowledge.

For example, on King's Row, that high ground is really, really powerful, or against Mundo or Sion, buying that item can be really, really helpful.

So, all of those information, all of those knowledge can be very helpful, but they are situational and they are click and done.

It's not something you master, you just have to memorize and you just have to do it.

It's really simple, but if you want to have an explosive growth, and when I talk about explosive growth, I'm talking going from Platinum to Master in two months, or going from Silver to Grand Master, top 500 in maybe less than a year.

I would call that explosive growth, and in order to have that significant change, you need to really work on your fundamentals, which is not click and done.

Which takes longer time to master and which is much harder to master, and those are procedural knowledge.

So, procedural knowledge is more than just theoretical understanding, it is something that you have to master and learn with your own experience. So, for example, if a father is teaching his son how to ride a bicycle, and on his first try, his son wouldn't be able to ride the bicycle perfectly.

He would be making mistakes of like balancing and he would not be able to do any crazy, you know, bicycle flips whatsoever. And in that exact same sense, if you're learning how to aim from the best aim coach or the best aim player in the entire world, going into the next game, you're not going to be aimbot 100% headshot in your next game.

So, without working on those fundamentals or procedural knowledge, if you're only relying on those quick tips or click and done knowledge, you're probably not going to have explosive growth, at least I've personally have not seen it yet.

And when you're working on those fundamentals truly, you start to play worse and you start to lose your rank, and that is because of your brain capacity, you have a limited brain capacity when you're playing video game, and let me explain that to you.

So, imagine you have your computer on, and now you have 10 different games running on your computer at the same time, and they're all really high spec games, what's going to happen to your computer? Basically, your computer is going to overheat or your computer is going to crash because it is surpassing that the RAM, the current task that they can handle as a computer.

On that exact same sense, when we're playing video games, we have the brain capacity per each task.

What I mean by that is, let's say we have 100% of our brain RAM, when we're focusing on our aim, or when we're focusing our mechanic, like dodging and all that, we might be spending 40% of our brain RAM, you might be spending maybe 30% of your brain energy on tracking your support and tank location.

And maybe other 15% might go into cooldown tracking, and then other 10% might go into, you know, arguing with your teammate or something like that, right?

So, their brain is already at max capacity, most gamers are really overwhelmed with what they're currently doing, and now, imagine adding a new big task on top of that.

So, you know, most people think learning how to use cover is easy, it's very straightforward and simple, and it is true, it is straightforward and simple.

But most of my students, if not all, really struggle to use cover because their brain is already at max capacity.

So, what happens when you're trying to learn a new fundamental skill like using cover? You need to turn off, you need to exit some of the current task, so definitely you need to stop arguing with your teammate so you can use that mental energy on using cover.

Or, you might even have to give up a lot of your mental energy on, you know, your mechanics, so for example, if you're using 40% of your mental energy on aim, then you might have to, you know, give up half of that.

If you're truly doing that, if you're truly focused on that, your other performance, like your aim, your positioning, gets really, really worse, um, therefore, you're going to be losing a lot of the games, and this is exactly when my students get confused and frustrated.

They're messaging me like, "Hey, Wiz, I don't know this new playstyle is working for me, I'm losing so many games, I just don't know what to do with this." And despite me telling them, they're doing the right thing and it is to be expected, they're still freaking out and they even revert back to how they used to play.

Instead of actually recognizing that this is a start, the beginning of a good progress.

Maybe they just really don't want to go back to Silver or Master or whatever, but I'll say this, losing the old way is bad, but losing in a new way is progress, and I think there's no better story to illustrate this bounce back effect than Rayner's story.

So, about five years ago, I did a YouTube reality TV show called Wizard and the Chosen 10. Basically, the premise of the show was me and my coaching partner, Sugar, were coaching the Chosen 10, the 10 of the amateur students for 60 days, and Rayner was one of the participants.

Rayner started as 3400 SR, which is equivalent of Diamond 1 or Diamond 2 nowadays, but he didn't have a lot of experience as Zenata before, so he was definitely underperforming a lot on his first day after the coaching.

In fact, he lost over 200 SR right after the first coaching within the 24 hours.

Which is basically losing 13 games in a row right after the coaching.

I think I've been trying to implement all your notes in comp and stuff, but I'm having some frustrations, I feel like my team isn't getting enough healing, am I right to feel this frustration? Should I be expected to get more solo kills? Should I practice right clicks more? Or should I try to play around my team more and try to win every game rather than getting better at Zen?

And as you can see, this is his response, he was definitely nervous and he wasn't sure if he should be actually keeping this playstyle, but to us, he was clearly improving and he was almost getting there.

So we encouraged him to keep doing what he'd been doing instead of reverting back to his Moira or Anna, the healbot style.

You can probably guess his storyline at this point, but he was able to go 3750 pretty soon, which is equivalent of mid-Master tier nowadays, and he was actually carrying a lot of the games as support.

And when he was around 3900, he dropped down again significantly, but at this time, he wasn't worried about it because he knew, in fact, he was progressing, he was getting better.

And he went through the same thing, and now he understands the bounce back effect process, and what happened to him?

After dropping down to, I think it was around 3500 or maybe he dropped down to Diamond or something, he was able to go 4200, which is Grand Master, top 500 level, in 60 days of the first coaching.

So he was definitely one of the biggest gainer in the Chosen 10, and he definitely went through the bounce back effect, having the explosive growth.

And that was actually the case for other biggest gainers in the show, like Gihun, the 12-year-old kid who spent $5,000 in gaming academy prior to meeting me as well.

He went from 2800 to 3600 in two months, and later he also became top 500 after the show, so basically, a lot of the people that I see, a lot of the people, pretty much almost all of the amateur students who's having explosive growth are going through the bounce back effect.

Really enduring their frustrating time when they're heavily underperforming, so if you think about it, Rayner has a great mentality, but even for Rayner, after the first coaching session, he was very frustrated.

He just couldn't handle the 13 loss streak, and he had to message us immediately, you know, I don't know what's going on, I don't know if this is the right thing to do, maybe I should go back to playing Moira, play Anna.

But if it wasn't for our coaching, he probably would have went back to his old playstyle, but because we were there to confirm him, and because he has a strong mentality to endure that, you know, bounce back effect and, you know, underperforming process, he was able to have the big gain and actually became a completely different gamer, becoming top 500 and top 200 later on.

Most people, when they're learning a video game, they usually don't have a clear focus, and even if they do, they usually cannot tell if they're actually getting better at that, like, oh, am I actually getting better at my aim, am I actually getting better at my cover usage, they cannot really tell.

So, naturally, they're more relying on their rank as the key indicator for telling them if they're doing well or if they're playing bad, but we really need to shift our focus from winning to learning.

And there are players in Chosen 10 who didn't make any progress at all, one of the example is Cheogapsangtan, he is pretty famous YouTuber in Korea, I think he had a 50 to 60k subscriber back then, and whenever he was making a mistake in his comp game, he had this false belief of, oh, what if people think I'm a fraud, and what if people think I'm bad and they unsubscribe and never watch me again.

So, he had a trouble playing more than two to three rank games a day, and that was very difficult to coach, so this would be an extreme opposite example of going through bounce back effect.

And this isn't just Chosen 10, there are so many players who are really obsessed with wins and losses and can't really tolerate their mistakes, you know, they feel really guilty or they cannot really tolerate any mistakes they're making, or if they have a bad aim, two games in a row or three games in a row, they just really cannot accept that in order to have explosive growth, in order to gain a have a big gain, it is a very natural phase that they need to go through.

It's kind of like, you know, when you go to the gym for the first time, you're going to have a lot of pain in your body after working out, so just like that, it is your growing pain, but some people just really cannot handle that.

Now, there are some exceptions to the bounce back effect, and the first exception is the professional gamers, when I coach professional gamers, they usually are able to execute the concept pretty soon, if not immediately, and that's because for them, their aim, their tracking ultimate, their tracking team's positioning, it's their second nature, so it doesn't take up a lot of their mental energy.

And that's also the case for students with great mechanics, I had a student who started Master 4 when he first started working with me, and his mechanic was already fantastic, especially considering his rank, he had a background from competitive Rainbow 6, and he was able to just literally skyrocket to Champion 3 in about three months.

And if you are playing mechanically less demanding heroes, like Mercy, Symmetra, or Brig, you are probably going to be able to have explosive growth without sacrificing too much of your ranks or gameplay, I've seen one Brig one trick student who went from Diamond to Grand Master one pretty much immediately, and another Symmetra one trick student going from Plat to top 500 without thinking too much.

And one more thing I forgot to mention is these students who went through explosive growth, they played a lot, realistically, if you're playing only 10 hours a week, I say it would be pretty difficult to have explosive growth.

These students who skyrocketed, they played around at least three hours a day, some playing, you know, five hours or more per day, so it's definitely something to think about, I don't want to set false expectation, it's important for me to give you the realistic expectation, no bullshit, but at the same time, I don't want to discourage you if you have limited time.

So, if you're gradually working on your fundamentals, it might take maybe a few weeks or even a few months, but over a long span of time, you can reasonably get to pretty high level in the game because most people just autopilot and don't really learn, I recently had a student's message that actually made me smile a little bit.

He said, now, he not only feels okay about losing, but sometimes he even feels good about losing because he knows he's actually getting better, and that's the best version you can be, losing, but still feeling confident because you know you're getting better and because you know the process is working.

So, what's the takeaway here today? Explosive growth requires fundamental change.

And fundamental change steals your mental capacity, so you're going to play worse in the beginning.

And that's the tax you have to pay to get better.

And it's hard.

Most people can't tell if they're actually getting better or not.

So, pick one fundamental that you want to work on for one week and ignore your rank.

Only focus on your improvement.

And if you're losing your games while doing that.

That's absolutely fine.

And here's the single most important thing to remember today.

When you're inting your game, please don't say Wizard, you're talking to that.