I've been playing a lot of Starcraft 2 recently.  I'm not naturally very good at games, and I don't tend to stick with any one game for very long or play a lot, so I tend to suck, but with SC2 I decided to really try to get good.  I played all through the beta, watched replays, watched pro gamers and read strategies, and came out into gold league when the first season rolled around.  At the time, the top league was diamond, and below that, platinum, and then gold.  I was pretty happy with it.  As the game matured I sank like a stone through gold, however, and ended up reclassified into silver.  It felt like the community was getting better while I stayed the same.

So, when the end of season 1 was announced, I decided to try to get back into gold before the end of the season.  I practiced hard and to my surprise, the more I practiced, the worse I got.  The more pro games I watched, the more I tried to work on my macro, the more games I lost.  It took until the start of season 2 for me to analyse my games and figure out what was wrong.

In every ladder game I play, I begin with a clear lead.  I am well ahead for the first half of the game, then, and you can imagine my face as I realised this, watching replay after replay, I do something stupid.  Every single game, I was doing the same stupid thing.

I was attacking.

It turns out that attacking is a messy thing in Starcraft 2.  If you're moving your army, and your opponent is standing still, it is reasonable to assume that they are in a better position than you, and most of the time in silver league, that means that they are up a narrow ramp, on the high ground, and you are floundering around below.  The pro gamers always attack early, but they can get away with it: they have the control to ensure that they move up the ramp carefully.  I don't.  Every single game, I was throwing everything away on that first attack.

So what do I do now?  I sit still.  I slowly build my army. I scout a bit, but essentially, I do nothing and wait for the opponent to screw themselves up.  So far, using this tactic, I've won 3 games in a row against gold level players, and I haven't lost at all.  It turns out that, in all the suggetions about working on macro that I've heard, the important bit for me was not the macro'ing, it's the concious decision to not attack.