Hey Guys, and welcome to The Flying's Guide to not Getting Good at Melee
So you've decided to play melee, that's great! Before we get started it's time to choose a character. A lot of people worry that the first character they pick won't be the right one, and to be honest, it rarely ever is! The thing to remember is to not be stubborn or hardheaded. If after playing a character for a month you still aren't winning, that probably means the character isn't right for you! Go ahead and switch. When you find the right one it will be easy, almost natural. If beating all star on very hard within a month and half of picking up a character, you are doing something wrong. And remember to be patient! There are 8 top characters, and plenty of mid-tiers to work your way too. It would be awful to commit yourself to Falco when secretly you were a Young Link main all along.
Alright, it's now been a year and a half and you've finally found your main! Time to play tons of friendlies right? WRONG. What's the point of playing if you don't know how to play them right? You are now at the stage where the most important thing is hours of analysis of high level matches. You may not know what to look for, but hey, practice makes perfect! Don't enjoy studying videos? There's lots of high level melee analysis already on you tube. Just play it in the background while doing something else and you'll slowly start to absorb that top level knowledge.
OK great, you should be closing in on your second year now, but don't be hasty about going to tournaments just yet! A large part of melee is tech skill, and playing people without tech is worthless. The most important thing to remember right now is that at your level, there's really no such thing as "good" or "bad techs to learn. All you're really doing is training your fingers to be fast! Wanna learn how to perfect wavedash? Sounds good! Rather learn double shine out of shield grab? Even better! Hell, it's not even a bad idea to head down to the local arcade and throw around some hadoukens for a couple hours. A tech's "usefulness" is irrelevant as you're not even competing yet. If you can do the most difficult tech, then learning every tech below it becomes extraordinarily easier.
OK, so at this point you should have been practicing your superwavedash grapple cancels for around 6 months and are landing them with around 90% consistency on Corneria. You're ready to go to your first tourney. My most important advice is this: if you go 0-2, you probably aren't naturally gifted enough to play a videogame. That's OK, you'll never know if you don't try!