Study the replays

Watching StarCraft replays for fun is absolutely ok – but if you want to learn and get better, you have to study those games. Get a lot of replays where one of the players plays your race (are you playing Terran? watching Protoss versus Zerg replays won`t help you that much).

Start watching them, but do not hurry – study their build order, unit selection, strategies, tactics, timing.

• What upgrades are they using?

• When are they expanding?

Replays are better than videos at this point of course because you can watch any place on the map you want, set the speed as you want and track whatever you want (my favorite is Production).

Normally, the more skilled players you watch the better. But there is one exception – imagine you are an intermediate gamer, play Terran and struggle with defending against mutalisk rush. Watching how pros deal with this threat won`t help you because their micro and multitasking abilities are beyond your reach. So in this case it makes more sense to get some replays of players with similar or slightly higher skill and take a look how they manage to counter mutalisks.

Watch replays with only one player vision

This technique even improves the efficiency of watching replays. Just switch off the vision of one player and leave only that one who plays your race. Now you can easily see his reactions, decisions and changes in playing style and strategy.

• For example he has just scouted that his opponent is going to rush him with Dark Templars – how did he respond?

You can really understand the player`s thinking by watching replays this way.

Watch your own replays

This point is one of the most overlooked and underrated ways of getting better at playing StarCraft 2 – so get an advantage over the others!

Whenever you lose a game, watch the replay and find out why you lost – you will be surprised what you see! Very often you will find out that you could have won that game with a slightly better scouting, not making some mistake etc.

I developed a habit of watching replays of most of games I lost and some I won – you can too.

These are just really simple hints but I can guarantee that from every replay you watch you will get a lot more information and knowledge than you got before.