So you've taken it upon yourself to get good at some fighting games, and you watch tons of videos and devour forum posts and spend hours in training mode...

... and then that one scrub who doesn't play like the experts in the videos just ends up dominating you.

"WHY does he play like that?! None of the experts play like that! It's stupid! I should be winning!"

I thought the same thing when I tried to get into Starcraft last year. I had pristine timing for modern build orders, but I would still lose to people with terrible build orders.

What happened?

In a "standard" game of Terran vs. Protoss, as Terran you skip your beginning units to build these really mobile motorcycles, before you decide to either rush quickly or expand. The Protoss understands this, so they skip their initial melee units and decide to either expand, play sneaky with cloaked units, or try to blow open the backdoor. (It's much more complicated than that, but I'm being simple.)

I was overwhelmed by the initial melee units. What happened?
In theory, the motorcycles should be able to take out the melee units without even being scratched--and at the same time, maintain the same timing. Once the melee units are taken out, the motorcycles can cover the map in land mines and the Terran can expand and win easily.

But I didn't have those skills! I was overwhelmed trying to micro manage my motorcycles, build more construction, build more units at the same time, and stay on time. My motorcycles would die and I would fall behind and die. I didn't have those skills in the middle to play the metagame.

You see it all the time with internet experts too. All of us playing Tekken, we say, "Don't bother learning 10-hit strings. They're useless and you can easily low parry or block." Well guess what? There's 41 characters in Tekken 6. Chances are that you haven't seen all 10-hit strings and neither has your opponent. I wouldn't be surprised if you can clutch out a win in a tournament on a 10-string... it's one of those things that everyone is "supposed to know" but really doesn't =)

So while you learn a competitive game, be mindful of your own skill level. Sure, the pros may do it their way, but they've gotten through the learning curve. You haven't. Learn how to deal with what they don't.