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Esports
These 5 tips from Ryan Hart will help turn you into an FGC god
The veteran gaming star breaks down his advice for becoming a hero of the fighting games community and gives some top insider tips on how you can level up your performances whatever title you play.
Ryan Hart is a legend in the fighting games community. He’s been holding it down in arcades since the 1990s, was the first ever sponsored fighting game player and pioneered international travel in the scene, and is a Guinness World Record holder as well as a two-time EVO winner.
A lot of great things in life definitely come with a degree of risk and fear
Hart is just as comfortable KO’ing you in Street Fighter as he is at paying Tekken. It’s only natural, then, that we turned to him for his advice on how to get better at fighting games and be a top contender.
Ahead of the Red Bull Kumite Street Fighter V tournament in Japan, we caught up with Hart to shoot this video (see below) in Cologne, Germany, where he talked through his 20 most effective tips for becoming a pro at any fighting game. But there’s only so much you can say in two minutes, and behind every concisely formed pearl of wisdom is a story of loss, graft and invention. Continue reading to hear from Hart himself as he explains how he figured these rules out the hard way, so you don’t have to.
1. Keep an open mind
The moment you drop into a game, you should always expect to be beaten in new ways, according to Hart. You need to be prepared to react to this. “I don't want to be too clichéd, but my earlier years were met with a lot of challenges, lots of disappointment," he explains. "Keeping an open mind is how you keep things moving in that situation.
“The first time I won DreamHack was Winter 2009, and I was in the Grand Finals on the losers’ side in Street Fighter 4. I was playing against Xian [Ho Kun Xian], a very well known player from Singapore, and he was the player that put me into the losers’ bracket in the first place.
"It wasn't long before we had to then play again in the Grand Finals, and when he beat me in the winners’ bracket, it was very convincing. I didn't have a clue what happened. It's very easy to let that kind of loss affect you, but I decided to just be positive. Try your best. This mindset produced a type of confidence in my gameplay. I was so confident, I was just making reads and I was going for things.”
Hart won back to back games to take the tournament.
2. Link up with your local community
You don’t get better at multiplayer games without meeting other players. Once upon a time, this was easy: you just went down to the arcade – that's how Hart started. The problem, as he puts it, is that “we used to have a tonne of arcades. We don't have those anymore. Globally there's been a massive reduction in the arcade culture.”
To meet in real life now, you need to go online first. “These days it's about using the internet,” he says. “I think for a start Discord is a great communication tool for meeting fellow players. Facebook groups, Twitter Reddit, forums. There are so many community initiatives out there and I think if you're a new player or even an existing player that hasn't been in the mix yet, it's about getting involved and jumping in.”
Try not to be intimidated the first time you go to a tournament or fight night, either. “I completely get that sort of fear," he says. "It’s definitely a terrifying experience if you're someone who's not used to being around a lot of people. But everyone else had their first event and everyone there will understand what you're feeling. A lot of great things in life definitely come with a degree of risk and fear. It might just open the door to something really special.”
3. Accept you’re going to lose
Undefeated streaks don’t last, and Hart would know: he holds the world record for longest undefeated streak in Street Fighter 4. You will lose, and when you do you need to learn from it.
“Learning how to accept loss is very, very important for progress because it's going to happen, no matter how good you are, no matter what championships you've won,” says Hart. “You're going to come up in situations where it's just not your day. When I went to Japan for the first time in 1999, I was already the champion of multiple games in Europe. Tekken 3, Virtua Fighter 3, The King of Fighters ‘97, ‘96. I was a very confident young teenager, but the way that I lost in Japan – the degree of destruction was so bad. I even considered not playing games at all anymore, it was so devastating.
"There are going to be times where you think you're the best in your area, you beat everyone in your neighbourhood and then you go to an event and you get beaten badly.”
Hart has won tournaments all over the world – and lost them too.
© Katya Mokolo / Red Bull Content Pool
4. Turn those losses into wins
What you can't do, Hart stresses, is stew on those defeats for long; you need to incorporate them into your playstyle instead. Hart’s resurgence at Final Round’s Street Fighter 4 tournament is a prime example of this.
As he tells it: “I'm at Final Round 2013. I had developed my style to a really good place. And I got to the Grand Finals in the winners’ bracket and I came up against [Evo and Red Bull Kumite winner Lee Seon-woo] Infiltration. He managed to reset the bracket against me, win two sets and the tournament, and I came second. That loss lit such an intense fire up my rear end that I decided to train up for the entire year. All of my events, all of my tournaments went into focusing on winning that event.
“When it was time for Final Round 2014, I almost missed the registration because I didn't have a lot of money. But I decided to book the ticket last minute, and I went there and I met Infiltration, who had beaten me the year before. But I had a new strategy, a new character and a new direction, and a new mindset for how I was approaching the match versus him, and I managed to beat Infiltration and actually won the entire event.
“There's that little bit of time where you're disappointed, but don't let that last too long. Get back on your horse and continue the journey as soon as you possibly can, and watch your video where you lose learn from it.”
5. Create your own combos and strategies
You can’t just be inventive on the fly in matches. You need to come armed with new ways to attack and counter.
“In terms of creating your own combos and strategies, this is all about forming your style, the personality that you want to emit in the game, and I think that one thing that's important is to be an individual,” he says.
“It's quite easy to get caught up in common trends and popular strategies that you see top players using. But while that can happen, simultaneously it's important not to lose focus on you developing the you that you are. Ultimately the best player that you can ever be is a stronger version of yourself.
“It's really important to let your brain have room to be flexible and be able to create from nothing, because it's the best way to becoming your own master. You don't need anyone to teach you, you can just create yourself and that's the best position to be in – because then you can play any game you want.”
