i am pretty surprised so few people identified what is by far the best way to quickly get better at (virtually) any game: watching a very skilled player play.

i am pretty surprised so few people identified what is by far the best way to quickly get better at (virtually) any game: watching a very skilled player play. especially if they are introspective / able to explain why they are doing what they are doing. literally, just watch Twitch streams. all the other metalearning stuff the other commenters point out works even better when watching the gameplay of someone who "knows" the things that to you are still "unknown unknowns". when the skilled player makes a choice that you yourself wouldn't have made, stop and ask yourself why she did that-- was it a contextual decision? was your read on the game state just categorically wrong? is there some underlying principle that eludes you, or is the difference more a byproduct of her inhabiting a competitive universe of equally highly-skilled players that plays by different rules? in terms of the "micro" aka "hands-related" aspects of video games, the only way to improve those specific skills is via practice/doing, although it doesn't necessarily need to be practice specific to that game to be generally quite helpful, much in the way that playing any sport improves hand-eye coordination. i have found that time i put into mastering any specific game tends to have positive externalities for my gameplay in other games as well. once you reach a certain level, however, it is definitely valuable to identify key high-leverage mechanics and mastering them via more specific practice (e.g. difficult, but highly impactful ability combos)-- even a little goes a looong way compared to other players at your skill level, who usually don't put in that dedicated of practice (until you reach god tier). and one more point on watching skilled players play: while you might think that it's impossible to glean much from observing someone who just has wayyy more raw mechanical skill than yourself, oftentimes you can actually distill a lot about how to put yourself in the best positions to succeed with minimal amounts of risk (minimax / maximin thinking). it's usually a sign of bad play to put one's self in a situation that requires raw-outskilling one's opponent ("<something something Art of War something winning the battle before it even begins>"). that said, while you're learning, it is very valuable to put yourself in these sorts of scenarios, even if it leads to worse results in the short term (they call it "limit testing").