I’m not there yet, but I’ve been trying to think about what marks the boundary between being a new player and being an intermediate player. (If you like a term other than intermediate, I’m game for a change in terms.)
My present thought is that a big marker for this transition has to do with knowledge of the cards and of the common deck types. When you get to the point where your losses are rarely or never attributed to the fact that you did no know what Card X could do or you had no idea how to deal with Deck Y, then you are moving out of the newbie zone and on to being an intermediate level player.
At the intermediate level, you might still lose frequently to certain decks, but you at least understand, in theory, what they are and how to beat them. The newbie loses lots of games because they have insufficient knowledge of the game. The intermediate player lose because they have insufficient skill.
Not sure if that rings true to you or not. Do you have another way to think about the difference between being a new (or novice) player and being an intermediate level player?
I think I became an intermediate player (tournament wise) when I started to see the ways to win even before the game started. Sitting down and thinking “I can win this”, not just because I know my deck, but I have a pretty good idea of what my opponent’s deck wants to do.
I became a good player when I realized during and after games how close they could be. The realization of “this game will be easier if I put more cognitive effort in” coupled with a healthy respect for most players - because at the end of the day, I am not much better or worse than most other people at tournaments - made me not exactly a better player, but gave me a more healthy mindset and I think it contributed to my winrate too.
A friend of mine put it this way when he played PPVP Kate against my Foodcoats. I had a ton of credits, he legworked me and I didn’t rez my HQ ICE (an Eli which he could break with Lady). He said something along the lines of “When you think ‘I might as well do it’ but then you don’t because you can see it’s the wrong choice, that’s when you have become a good player.”
Good reads are Noah’s (@Nobo715) article on improvement on this very site, and the lovely fan girl freakout by Mark Mothram (unsure about his nick) on netrunners.co.uk