How to Improve Your Gamesense (Guide)

Welcome to The Ultimate Guide to game sense and all the information that will follow will be applicable to any game that has this feature of imperfect information or the fog of War where you don't have full information and a lot of the battle that you're uring in every you know round or match is going to be about trying to gather information so you can make more accurate decisions so first things first as you can see the kittens that we're fostering chose violence today so please don't be thrown off by my more rugged appearance um currently

um and and I'll take this moment to also throw in a disclaimer for the video to which is that if you if you sir are here looking for a Magic Bullet please kindly turn away because there will be no such things here on my channel in general sadly with anything that's complex that we're trying to learn and improve at you have to do it the hard way which is to put in the effort in the correct way so those are the two requisites to improving skills putting in the effort at the in the right way

so you can't just put in the effort you can't just have the the right way you got to have both of those elements so let's get into the video how do we get better at game sense all right so what we have to do first of all is we have to define the thing that we want to improve at because if we can't Define it then we're kind of stuck we don't really know what we're doing and and again as I again I'm not sure where Tim Ferris got this from if he maybe if it

originated from him what can can be mentioned can be managed so heroes are doing the mentioning what is game sense we have to start with a definition we have to agree on what we're talking about and so I came up with this definition and this is the premise the entire video is based on so I really hope that you agree with it because if you don't then you should probably not watch the rest of the video so here's here's uh here's my definition game sense is one's ability to predict with high likelihood the next series

of events in time now those are definitely a few important words here I would say you know the ability to predict with high likelihood and then events in time because time is always an operating concept and generally speaking we have to know not just what will happen but when it will happen and that is something that we can read and I think you know one way that we can simplify this definition a little bit more and I hope that that kind of is is is vague but specific enough to cover this topic but one we

can break that down just a little bit more is is we can say awareness plus abductive reasoning equals game sense so awareness plus abductive reasoning equals game sense so awareness is a is a word that I'm sure you'll all be familiar with you may not all be familiar with what abductive reasoning means and that's fine we'll go we'll go through that so but first we'll talk about awareness because again I think defining these things is very very helpful because awareness you know if we're starting off with this is using observations and you know to to

to have something to calculate so because if you're trying to read a situation you're trying to understand what the outcome is going to be you know and and when it's going to happen we have to have information data to do that so awareness is our our ability to gather data now there is definitely an issue here because we can't just be you know Gathering all the data all the time I mean a lot of it is going to be noise if we just we put in all this data into the equation well I mean there's

just too much noise at this point to actually make a calculation it's just just going to be rubbish the output is rubbish so what we need to do is we need to have a sense as to what information is most important now before we go into that let's talk about you know a couple functions of of your awareness so I would split awareness into into two things like conscious awareness and uncons ious awareness so the conscious awareness is this sense of being able to easily describe the situation you know the alt count the player Behavior

what's smoked what's not smoked communicating these to all my teammates just taking in these smaller bandwidth details that are more specific so for example the reer is always away from her team and she playing like quite aggressively on the lur timings okay so I know that that player plays faster timings I know that players a lur so I know if I see that player then it's likely that the rest of his team is probably you know over there so you know I'm able to pick up some specific information consciously or maybe it's understanding that oh

this chamber picked up that operator on round three or you know this like they started out with this type of default so they they're doing this type of default and so you know I have to expect at some point you know they're conditioning me with my their pacing and their openings I have to try to understand where at what point are they going to try to switch the pace or switch the opening um based off this initial information so this is like all conscious processing conscious awareness now the unconscious awareness is super interesting because I

would say it really excels in in the context of of you know playing orts games it really excels in solving the timing piece so I mentioned that in the definition that we need to not just know what's going to happen but when it's going to happen so UNC the unconscious sort of awareness is you know this cognitive system that's super high bandwidth that's operating all the time that's trying to model the the future that's up all these patterns and all this data just flooding in and we can't you know consciously Define and be aware of

that process I mean it's in the you know I'm describing it as unconscious awareness we're not conscious of that but what we get is we get the feeling so it communicates to us with the feeling um oh I'm going to I'm and the feeling is I'm just turning my mouse right now and looking at the flank and lo and behold someone appears you know and I shoot them right we've all had this experience and it's and it's kind of an eerie thing because it's hard we can't really explain it because it's it's an unconscious process

we just get the answer there just like it's like there's this foreign system inside of us it's like yo like look behind you right now it's like it's like the best backseat gaming you ever had so um that's unconscious awareness and and again like I said it's I think it's really really good at reading these macro and micro timings it gives you that little feeling hey hey pay attention to this right now you know so last thing I will say about awareness is that the more attention and focus you have the better all these all

of these systems will operate that said you do have to tune the systems correctly and to one of the best ways to do that is as we move into our next section by having good understanding of theory you know calculating the likely outcomes requires knowing which information is needed to make the read based on the context so again you can't just have an equation this you got to the right stuff in the equation otherwise the answer is going to be incorrect and that's not what we're trying to do so we have to understand what is

information that has to go in the equation so you know one of the ways that we can help ourselves to know what the information is that should go into the equation is by learning more Theory as I said so one way we can do that because I want to give you guys something practical to take away um and I think this is the easiest for everyone and the most entertaining perhaps is by watching professional players so one thing that you can do is ask questions ask the right kinds of questions so what logic justifies their

choices based on the context and the information that's available to them so what information do I think is available to this player what do I think is uh the context is so what type of round and you know how are they like really behind what the economy all these different things like like the player I'm watching what does their role tend to be on the team like there's this like you know context you know that you can kind of put into into that and then what you want to also ask the question of what is

their objective what is their team's objective now sometimes you can work backwards and you can look at what they do and then you can say oh what do I think the objective was do I think the objective was what the actual outcome ended up being or you know just just trying to like engineer this doing you know do some you know reverse engineering on this one um it's essentially what we're trying to do because because all the pro players are operating on lots of um objectives and we can assume that they've minmaxed based off of

good understanding of fundamentals in the game they have minmaxed for that objective so it should in theory be the best available demonstration of the fundamental principles applied to an objective so if we can figure out what the objective is that the players are looking for then we can see how all of their actions logically builds into a achieving the objective so so this is why asking the right questions is really huge um and sometimes you know it it's going to be we might we may not understand everything and I think one of the best things

to do is to get practical experience so the fake it till you make it thing is is kind of the secondary aspect of watching Pros I would say because what you can do is you can watch Pros that you know I mean a lot of people will watch Pros that are playing similar roles or Styles or or or whatever to to you know yourself respectively and what you can then do is you can say oh I really like how they play this site I really like how they play in the midr and so you can

just copy their util setups their behaviors and just try to apply it in the game now you will be applying it obviously you're not a pro for a reason so you may be missing some logic you may be missing some considerations but that will be revealed to you as you put this stuff into practice in in you know in a lot of cases but not all cases and so it's not a perfect process but it is by getting that practical experience it's going to reveal the right like more questions that we need to need to

ask and so when we go back to watching the pro then we can be like okay now I'm equipped with more questions and these these questions will lead me to sort of the the truth of what the fundamentals are in play and so that's I would say a good practical process that anybody can do when they're trying to improve at how they understand the game and how it works all right so we are at the point where I want to talk about abductive reasoning abductive reasoning is an important idea to understand because we're all just

doing it anyway I mean it's how Esports games generally tend to work most of your decision- making most of your reads fit into this this category of abductive reasoning so how is it different to deductive reasoning because I'll be honest when making this video I was initially saying deductive reasoning but then I was like hang on let me let me look at what deductive reasoning actually constitutes in terms of a definition I was like hey actually this does not correct so I must be missing something and then I discovered that hey people actually call the

type of reasoning that we are mostly doing abductive reasoning so let's look at the differences so deductive reasoning is you using a 100% premise and that there's a logical kind of following conclusion from that so in game I see a rais nade come from a corner I therefore know I can therefore deduce that raises in that corner because I just saw the rais come from there so I know with 100% certainty because that initial premise is 100% true what the outcome is alternatively if I'm in a 1V one the bomb is planted and I'm looking

to diffuse the bomb I will look at where the bomb is planted as one of my context clues as to where my opponent is playing but that in no way tells me where my opponent is actually playing it only kind of gives me some good guesses so I I have to use an educated guess to predict what is the play of my opponent and so that is the difference and because of the sheer quantity of imperfect information we are doing a lot of abductive reasoning and a huge amount of the battle in a lot of

Esports games is therefore getting as much information as possible that's relevant to the context that allows you to make the highest quality prediction that is hopefully like you know just correct all the time that's what we're always trying to do but again much like in poker and it's why poker is more analogous than chess is the this quality of the fog of war the imperfect information I have to play this essentially I mean we're not we're not consciously doing the math to work out percentages but we're essentially trying to play percentages U we can't be

guaranteeing any outcomes so that's what abduct uh abductive reasoning actually means and so the reason why it's important to important to understand this is because we want to understand well if we're doing this process well how do we make it better how do we make this process better of abductive reasoning and obviously practice is is good and you're going to be practicing this every single time you play whether you want to or not because you have to make so many reads all the time so well okay what can we do otherwise then well if we're

practicing it all the time well okay what we could do is we as you know we're already working on our Theory so that's going to help us but we can also constrain we can constrain train the context as much as possible and one of the ways that we can do this is by using objectives and and also context this is this is part of what context actually means context allows us to know okay well this is not important oh this is happening all the way on the other side of the map that's not important to

like what's going on right now um right that's right in front of me that that's not relevant so we have certain context clues as to what exactly we should be looking at the other thing that we can put in there that can also constrain you know what we need to be paying attention to is creating objectives for ourselves and I've again already alluded to this with regards to how Pro players operate because that's what Pros are operating on all the time every like stage of the round is different every single round is is in some

kind of a different state and So based on those context or the objectives will change and the objectives changed because both teams want to win and the win conditions changed along with the context so you have to be aware of what these changes actually are and so then as you make you know your own objectives you can then minmax for each objective and as you minmax for each objective you've got this great framework now that tells you what information is valuable or not so that's the abstract explanation but let's think about it in terms of

some practical examples okay so if I'm anchoring a site there are there are maybe like four types of responses that I can have and each of those can be a specific framework um that's based on the objectives so number one could be play to get kills and hold my position on site that could be one two could be play to delay my opponents as much as possible on the site and and maybe I'm also trying to like hold back site control or something so that's like another aspect maybe that's like a you know a a

bonus maybe that is a side quest uh within the main quest or three you know play to hold specific space around the site for other purposes so it could be for purposes of retake or whatever else but but let's say I would say let's say as scent on B um could be one of those where it's like okay I'm I want to play for retake but I also want to make sure I hold this space because I have learned that this is highly impactful for my team um and if my team has this this space

and we operate on our retake with this space at the beginning we're much more likely to win because we can effectively split retake onto the site the opponents have less forward positions to play and so on and so forth or maybe you know lastly you play for retake so playing for retake is going to be you know you need to live because you want a five a five player retake and you want to maximize the amount of util you have for that retake because it makes the retake better so you're not spending UIL on delaying

you're not spending UIL on getting kills you're not spending util on Surviving none of that you just remove all of that from the equation because that's not what the objective is your objective is to play for retake so you leave the site and you do whatever you need to do to optimize for that outcome and so that your team can then come in as a retake and then well now we have a new objective our objective is to is to retake and within that kind of team macro objective you within your role and your utility

your positioning like whatever it is your Weaponry you will have spe a specific role and a specific objective in that retake whether that's to create space for your teammates whether it is to try to get kills whether it is to you know take specific pathing like all of these different aspects are also objectives and so by looking at the game in this way and having these objectives we can min max for the objective uh there are a lot of players that don't sort of think in this way and there's also players that just do it

just they just do it in like instinctively intuitively so so by doing this what we are doing is we're constraining the context we are because now we're saying well th if if this is my objective and I'm not thinking about the entire round now I have a very specific thing that I'm trying to do and I only need the information that is relevant to do this thing specifically and so you know that is a really good way to constrain constrain you know have a constrained framework so it's very easy to know what data you need

the next example here as well is let's say you're in a 1v3 and you're you've planted the the bomb and you've got three opponents to worry about and maybe in the current position one could be on Your Flank one could be on your front and one could be on your side figuring out the timing or the sequence of that is very difficult it's very very very difficult so a good idea in this scenario would be to not be in that situation at all it would be to try to like be in a different situation so

what are our options in that spot because we if we can't if if it's just too noisy there's too much data it's too uncertain well it's going to be way better in that case to also take the initiative there's another reason why you should take the initiative too by the way in this scenario because fundamentally speaking you don't want to allow the opponents to coordinate like a three-pronged push onto you because that's more likely for you to have a hard time so one way you can play against all of this is to just say ah

all that's that noise I'm going to push I'm going to take initiative I'm going to take control of one of these positions so now I can guarantee a 1 V one against you know whichever player is is coming in from that position and and also equally if I deal with that and maybe I'm a little bit lucky cuz I'm going to pick the position that I may guess will get the we'll get the first engagement we'll get the the quicker time of the timings of my opponent's coming to Any Given position this is the one

where my opponent will appear first so I'm going to attack this position I'm going to take control of it I'm going to get the kill I'm going to 1 V2 and now my opponents are all going to be coming from one angle so you've kind of constrained the situation so that now you know my objective is to take control of this spot I don't need any more reads um because because I've already got enough reads to to take this action so so you could there are spots where like you can get yourself out of a

spot which is unreadable this basically my my my uh assertion here the other thing about this too is you could there's a passive option where you're not saying I'm going to take control of like the extremities but you can play in such a a position where you only have to worry about let's say two angles of attack as opposed to three so you're in a way better situation where you're going to be more likely able to kind of correctly get either guess or at the very least it's easier to deal with that kind of a

situ situation all of this is to say that game sense is it's one of those things that people kind of I feel like people think about game sense and they think it's just kind of this passive thing that's happening now it is in in many senses it is but it is also happening for a lot of people because they're they're doing a lot of these processes I just took you through they're doing these things automatically without really thinking about it too much some people just more naturally have better processes and and are just creating all

these Frameworks themselves and they're thinking in objectives and they're you know thinking in in in terms of context all the time there's players I mean I will tell you like the amount of professional players that watch valerin like a shitload of valerant is is a lot of them like a a lot of the guys on hun Thieves for example were always watching and and I don't I actually never really ask them if they have like a process whereby you know when they're watching these other Pro players their peers if they are doing so in just

just for entertainment or if they're doing so more analytically when I was with them is that they would that they would like watch valerant from different regions as well because they would be like trying to pull stuff they they're constantly trying to pull stuff because they need to keep staying on their feet they need to know what people are doing and so by just pulling stuff all the time the process that I took you through with regards to how you know you should watch Pro players and how that can help you they're doing that kind

of stuff all the time because you know they have some different motivations they're already pros and they're trying to you know just find you know more and new ideas but they're also like exposing themselves to different ways of handling these various scenarios and so that is going to be helping them to continue to innovate and make new and better decisions themselves because what often happens with lots of players is you'll get stuck you get stuck in one you know way of doing things and if you get stuck in one way of doing things and you

you know you just just continually repeating that it's really sucks because it's going to be much harder to evolve your understanding because you will be limited to just that one track essentially and so you may get really good at that thing but it may also not be the optimal approach for that particular context so game sense is a tricky one because you know a lot of people might also think about game sense they may think about oh game sense is just that feeling that I just like I just like knew it's like well yes it

is and and you know I talked about the unconscious awareness and how you know a lot of people will experience unconscious awareness where they're just like boom I'm I'm turning I don't know why I just turned but I turned I just respected the feeling I just got a feeling I got a turn and I'm so dialed into the game right now that I just like turned and someone was there and I shot them and oh my God I'm so good you know that is I think how a lot of people kind of feel about like

what game sense is but practically speaking you are able to certainly refine and improve this conscious awareness as well as the conscious or the unconscious awareness you can improve both of those things like I said by also doing all these other things because you'll be feeding your awareness higher quality inputs because if you are telling your brain that I am maximizing for certain objectives it will start trying to figure out what are the things that I can do to try to do that better and what are the pieces of information that are more important and

if you are you know kind of repeatedly iterating on these processes you will actually probably pick up smaller and smaller details to just fine-tune it a little bit more a little bit more a little bit more and then eventually you know you're making big gains there was actually this idea um in uh Legacy uh which is is like called 100 small edges and the idea was that if you improve a 100 sort of almost imperceptible edges you actually have a big Improvement if you improve all these like 100 small things and by creating a framework

that you can kind of refine that's you're kind of on the on the way to doing something like that because you have something an initial structure with which you can build on if you try to build on something that doesn't have a structure at all like which direction are you building in like what like what fundamental assumptions are you building from you can't iterate from something that's not defined at all so that is what we're trying to do with thinking with context thinking with objectives we're trying to define the framework and then we can better

understand what feeds that framework um in the best way and that will give us the best reads so with that said I hope that this video was helpful for those of you trying to understand what the game sense actually is and what are some of the ways in which we can become better at it in both our conscious awareness my our unconscious awareness our ability to you know think in Frameworks our ability to make reads both intuitively but also make reads as I said when with thinking like more consciously because it is both things it's

not just it's not just again like I said I have a feeling cuz my unconscious awareness is like yo you're about to get flanked and I'm going to turn around and kill a dude like that that's that's like not that's not the only thing that's happening with game sense so I appreciate all of you for listening to me and for watching and if you enjoy this kind of content Please Subscribe check out my patreon to support me as I'm trying to do this full time and also if you have any any suggestions as to things

that you think I should discuss or ideas you want me to expand upon that you cu cu this this with this video I was thinking okay people are searching Game sense all right I'm going to make the game sense video that no one wants to watch that I feel like defines it and actually really goes through it but I feel like this is not a sexy video to for people to to actually watch because it's it's very hard to this this is like very hard to actually apply all of this stuff um and it's also

not let's say flashy in any way whereas at least the aiming stuff is like okay you can go and you know do an Aiming routine and it feels good and your aim feels a bit better and that's fun with this it's like hey man are you asking the right questions it's like who wants I mean you know what I'm saying okay so but someone's got to do it someone's got to do it and it's me hello so I hope you guys enjoy this one I'll catch you on the next one cheers