Rocket League is a game which is entirely based on physics, precise movement, tactics, and hand/eye coordination. It plays like more like a sport than a video game and something that any sportsman will tell you is required is confidence. This does not mean just being confident in your own ability to hit the ball, but it is also confidence in your team and the ability to trust in your teammate's ability to bail you out of a tough spot and their ability to hit the ball.

All the way up until the purple ranks, I see hesitation from players who do not have the confidence to challenge a ball up in the air that they think they might not reach, yet at the same time, they have a teammate rotating back to cover should they miss. This is, in my opinion, the absolute fundamental difference between the Diamond and Champion ranks. Hesitation can cause your teammate to cut rotation, it can cause double commits, and in the worst case, you’ll concede goals. It is almost always better to contest a ball than not, as it forces your opponent’s hand. You just need to be able to recognise when it is safe and when it is not safe to challenge a ball by observing your teammates’ and opponents’ positions on the field.

Belief in your own ability is really important in this game and it’s easily knocked by misses but as has been said, a miss is not catastrophic as it can make your opponent rush into doing something that they wouldn’t have done, had you not been contesting the ball. This often means putting the ball into a less favourable position, allowing one your teammates to recover the ball.

Belief in your own ability is not all though. You also need to trust your teammates and have the confidence that they are able to make a play on the ball as the number one worst thing you can do in Rocket League is double commit to the ball. Double commits are an almost guaranteed way to give up possession and allow your opponents to have a goal-scoring opportunity. If they are in an adequate position to make the save and clear the ball, you just prepare for them making that save. Don’t try to make the save yourself. If they miss it, they miss it and you can try to fight back to win the game. What is absolutely imperative is that you do not let your confidence and trust in them suffer because the moment you do, you’ve lost the game as you will start trying to carry the game and your teammate will be forced into bad positions. Just bear in mind that everyone makes mistakes, and you’ve made plenty yourself before.

Never enter your teammate’s area of the pitch. You should be spacing yourself out and positioning yourself somewhere that you can either a) receive a pass from your teammate or b) cover them if they are being challenged and may lose the ball. If you are playing 2v2, then you should be positioning yourself somewhere that you can be able to do both of these things which is usually approximately two boost-pads away from your teammate, to the side but slightly behind. Trust that your teammate has the ability to find you with a pass and have the confidence to anticipate this. Being one-step ahead of your opponents is a key to victory.

Anticipation is something that separates the pros from the rest of us and it is something that mostly comes down to experience. Once you have accumulated the number of hours that the professional players have in the game, you get a pretty good idea of how the game is played and you can read your opponents, your teammates, and the trajectory of the ball to a very high degree. However, you can, and should, actively try to train yourself to anticipate things quickly by paying extra attention to how your teammates and how your opponents take the ball, what they do with it how they hit it, and what happens to the ball once they hit it in the way they are doing so. And you should be reading the play as early as possible.

To train up your anticipation, head into a game. You’ll probably prefer to play casual as it could very well involve you conceding a lot of goals. Once you are in-game, try to read your opponents in every situation, figure out where they are going to put the ball based on their approach to the ball, and head in the direction where you expect them to place the ball. See how accurate you are and just keep trying this again and again until you are able to read the approach better. At lower ranks, this can sometimes be more difficult due to the unpredictability of people who don’t actually have an intention for the ball and are just hitting it for the sake of hitting it.

The ability to read an opponent’s hit can be an absolutely incredible skill to have at the higher levels as passing plays become more and more prevalent. If you can learn to read passes before your opponent’s teammate can, then this will elevate you to heights you did not know you could reach.

As well as reading your opponents’ approaches to the ball, do exactly the same for your teammates. If they’re going to opt for hitting the ball somewhere, instead of controlling it, it’ll do you great in practice to try to read their approach and figure out the ball trajectory so you can get on the end of a potential pass. This becomes hugely beneficial at the higher ranks, particularly when people get more consistent in their ability to hit the ball. Eventually you will be able to read their approach to the ball so well that you will be pre-jumping to a position to receive a pass, almost guaranteeing that you will beat your opponent to the ball.

When you have the confidence in your own and your teammate’s ability, the game becomes a whole lot easier and you will find yourself doing things you never thought you would be able to do and when you reach this level, you need to start improvising and trying to think of new ways to out-fox your opponents. Since the release of Rocket League in 2015, we’ve seen so many different “metas” come about that the developers of the game have admitted, they never even thought was possible.

Tricks like the “wave dash”, air-dribbles, ceiling shots, flip-resets, and the latest craze dubbed “the ceiling shuffle” are all things that either have, or could potentially, revolutionise the game at the highest level and it is in your best interest to put things like this into practice and never stop hunting for new ways to beat your opponents. Even simpler things like dribbling, flicks, and just the simplicity of air-rolling into a shot were all new to players at one point or another. The skill-ceiling of this game is moving higher and higher with every day that passes and there is no doubt that we will see many more new skills appear over the next year and further on.

Imagination is hugely important in this game as, in order to win, you always need to be one-step ahead of your opponents. If you can read that your opponent is going to challenge a ball and you can either fake him or air roll your car to change your flip direction, then this creative way of thinking could be the difference between you reaching the next rank on the ladder. A user on the Rocket League subreddit known as /u/amustycow shot to stardom on the subreddit for his invention of the so-called “Musty Flick”. This skill has fooled so many of his victims and, with his innovative gameplay, he became one of the top 100 players in the 1v1 playlist. His “Musty Flick” was even executed in the Universal Open championship in 2017.

Believe in yourself, believe in your teammates, anticipate your opponents, and dare to dream. With that mindset, you will be able to become the player you wish to be.

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