You can do what others do, however I prefer to do the maths instead.
Step 1. Is your game a reaction based game or not? I will never beat a chess grandmaster at chess but blitz chess or one with an exceptionally small timer where you can hack the other person's mind is a different matter (some refer to this as a metagame which is kind of is but metagaming means that much more).
If it is reaction based then you need to be under 25. There are a handful of exceptions but generally reactions slow that much more that those exceptions tend to only be able to compete by virtue of tactical and strategic (different concepts) prowess.
On the matter of metagaming an interesting one for me is people seem to think numbers you get for playing for many hours mean anything for one's skill and get upset when "low level" players beat them, some games like counterstrike and seemingly battlefield (though it still has levels) have skill based rankings akin to chess (the ELO ranking system there is a choice thing to look at). My favourite though still has to be tetris ds -- my flash cart would not save my online profile so I started new every time and I am rather good at tetris if I do say so myself. That meant people with high rankings would lose to my low ranking and lose levels which probably took them weeks to build up (it was a slow process once you got up in numbers).
There are fields in which one can study what came before but computer games is tricky -- most people playing at high levels in computer games don't have anything close to resembling the game theory and game design knowledge of a lot of board game types. Or if you prefer see some of the upsets in pokemon and general trash that is the rule sets of pokemon and smash brothers "competitive". Speaking of game theory you will eventually be learning it but as a sort of introduction I can't recommend
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/characteristics-games highly enough.
Do the games resemble real life? If I can get a good team in a shooting game it is a very different matter. Someone doing overwatch, someone doing room clearance, someone doing medic, an obsession with sight lines and cover... all very helpful. On the flip side I don't mind dying in a game, and the movements you can do differ somewhat -- I once watched a top tier counterstrike player learn the maps well enough that they knew all the sight lines and did a very odd looking patrol which encompassed enough to deny the team easy movement.
Training modes can help get timing down. Trouble is most AI is still human designed as opposed to neural network trained (
https://gbatemp.net/threads/mit-dev...-that-can-compete-against-top-players.462500/ ).
Can you fiddle the controls to your preference? Been playing some FPS titles with a PS4 pad of late... I can't do half of what I can with a mouse. You can come the other way as well -- all those games that see you want to look up to fire a grenade -- make a macro that looks up the right amount for your general preference, fires it and then looks back. Some consider that cheating, others argue otherwise, so be aware of that one. This is before we get into the fun and games of factory variables (smash brothers controller timings being a fun one there).
Playing games is fine, however you will want to have said game theory, game design (as in the maths of game design, though some idea of the rest is helpful) and be able to create models a la
https://www.dragonflycave.com/mechanics/gen-i-capturing for it. I will also say being able to run stats and things properly is also useful.
Watching skilled players is also fraught with much the same difficulty, though carrying on from the metagaming thing above if you know what others are doing you may fill a gap in your knowledge more quickly than you might otherwise expect to.
Basically games are still quite low tier fodder when it comes to competitive endeavours and things are frequently upset by people coming up with new strategies, or just countering a dominant one. This happens so rarely in established sports, board games and such like that it says much.
I will end with a warning though. I do a slight tweak on this by default now (I like to play, review and fix games more than play competitively but the heavy focus on analysis remains) and if you learn to do such a thing you will do it by default, every time. This can serve to reduce enjoyment of games quite a bit for some people for I spent time ragging on players above for their lack of maths and design knowledge the game makers are not really any better.
