How to Use This Book
The book has six parts. Part I is the map: the skills, how they feed each other, and where the coaches agree and disagree. Part II takes the skills one at a time, starting from your first hundred hours. Part III covers setup: tablet technique, hardware and accessories, drivers and firmware, audio and skin, your hands and eyes, and playing on lazer. Part IV is mindset. Part V is the trainer: diagnosis, the practice loop, replay review, session structure, programs, weekly templates, and tournaments. Part VI holds tables, a glossary, resources, quick answers, and sources.
These are condensed notes in my own words, not transcripts. The videos and guides have the full explanations. Bracketed numbers point to the Sources list at the end.
| Box | What it does | Labels used |
|---|---|---|
| Fact check (green) | Compares a claim from the chart with the osu! wiki, game data, and research | Confirmed · Adds detail · Nuance · Lazer · Research · Real-world data · By the numbers |
| Take (orange) | Restates a named creator's claim, then gives a verdict | Supported · Partly supported · Not supported · Contested · Agrees with the chart · Differs from the chart · Doesn't transfer · Experience-based · Dated |
| Drill (blue) | A practice routine you can run as written | Source is named in the title or first line |
- Experience-based means advice from a player's own practice that no study or game data can confirm or refute. It isn't a criticism; much of the best advice in osu! is like this.
- Labels combine where a claim needs it, and an "agrees with" label can name another creator instead of the chart. Contested marks a claim that other strong players dispute; Doesn't transfer marks advice that is sound in the game it came from but not in this one.
- Stable is the classic client and lazer the new one. Values are for stable unless a box says Lazer.
- Game mechanics and pp change. This edition was checked in September 2026; the osu! wiki is the authority for current values.
How this book handles its sources
Every claim here carries one of three weights. Game mechanics come from the osu! wiki or the game's own code and are stated as fact. Research comes from published studies, which are named so you can check whether the study actually says what the box claims. Coaching advice comes from named players, and is labelled by how far the evidence goes, using the labels in the table above.
The coaching material is not evenly distributed, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. This edition carries about 880 citations, of which roughly 450 are research, official documentation, or tools. Of the coaching citations that remain, one creator, Tonehh, accounts for about a third, because he has published more structured improvement material than anyone else working in the game. The remainder is spread across Korilak, DigitalHypno, khz, BTMC, ferret_irl, bloo, Almost, ScarletStory, jesse1412's thread, several unnamed video creators, three top players interviewed together, osu!'s own interviews with seven more, and community forum guides going back to 2012.
Every source in the list also carries a validity tier, from A for official documentation and B for peer-reviewed research down to E for unverified or second-hand material, so you can see at a glance how much weight a citation carries. The scale is explained in Ch. 41.
Two habits keep that imbalance from becoming bias. Where a claim rests on one person, it is labelled Experience-based rather than dressed up as consensus. Where two sources disagree, both appear, and Ch. 3 collects the disagreements rather than resolving them. When an older source turns out to have said the same thing years earlier, that is noted, because independent arrival at the same advice is worth more than repetition of it.