Blah blah blah mechanics techniques blah.
No. Don’t listen to these guys. Hahaha. (I’m trying to be goofy here so please no one take my shit talk seriously, please!! 😅😅)
The main separation at this point will be learning and executing at a moment’s notice your ability to read and assess your opponent’s habits and tendencies. Are you playing early in rounds to assess your opponent? Is every decision they make in your “tests” being remembered? Can you categorize the opponent into a specific playstyle that you already have strategies for?
I’ll bet your techniques and stuff are fine. But are you trying to whiff punish a player that doesn’t whiff? Are you putting mental stack into consistently anti-airing someone who isn’t jumping? Are you shimmying against someone who is willing to always take the throw?
This is the level where building the psychological profiles of opponents in one round or two becomes the most important skill. You could be reading your opponents, but you might not be reading them correctly or not reading them deep enough. Build up the giant database of player personalities. Remember everyone you fight and if you lose to them or beat them, and find solutions to personalities — like the ADHD player, the back Jumper, the 4f masher, the never-thrower, etc. — you are losing to.
And you’ll continue gaining matchup knowledge naturally that way. Play against a Blanka that uses Rainbow Roll all day and it messed you up? And you can tell they aren’t a scrub but they figured out that *you* are of the “personality type” that can’t stop the Rainbow Roll and had no answer, so they abused it to victory because they didn’t need to use anything more advanced? Well, the forever Rainbow Roller is a personality type. Figure out how to beat all four variants without guessing. And best time you run into them, they’ll adjust to a different personality and now it’s time to learn how to beat that.
So focusing on learning matchups more intensely will help, but at the level you’re at, that will come naturally with the proper psychological profiling and problem solving mentality.
Good luck! And you’ll be on the verge of 1900 in no time!