How do you 1v1 as a blue?

I'd watch your replays but I'm not allowing myself to have the client installed while my workload is this high. It's a topic worth discussing anyway. Text wall it is.

First up, 1v1 ladder is skewed toward higher skill.

I'm strong blue in casual, but barely silver in 1v1 despite having a similar rating for both. This is because ego cost of losing in 1v1 pushes weaker and less resilient players away, skewing the competitive player base. MM rating will give you a higher position on the ladder, but a weaker percentile (and therefore star colour).

Second, 1v1 stat-checks nuanced decision making in the early game which is a skill with next to no value in TAW.

In 1v1 your win % shifts much more drastically as a result of each early action you take. Something as simple as correctly judging you have the space to make a mex before lotus with your worker gives you a measurable eco advantage (approx. 35 metal assuming priority). In TAW any such advantage is diluted by team mates making them meaningless (it doesn't matter if you each have 2 metal more). These advantages add up quickly into meaningful positional advantage and anyone not used to this level of agency will fall behind by default.

Third, 1v1 is about exercising soft control over a large area, as opposed to exercising hard control in a small area like TAW.

This again is a different skill set. Early on, raiders will do the bulk of fighting because nothing else is fast enough to cover the ground. Raiders require constant attention, decision making, and multi-tasking in a way you'll rarely experience in TAW. You can't just sit behind statics/riots because your opponent will take the map. There is an emphasis on tempo over value, because tempo results in value over time through restricting expansion.

Fourth, mid-late game is very different.

In 1v1 you can expect to get much larger incomes and in combination with point 3, this means success requires a macro skill set (again, unpracticed in TAW!). You will be making units a lot faster than normal, and you will be having to control those units on many fronts at once. In contrast to the early game where each 10 metal represents a second of tempo, now you're trying to do many things okay rather than any particular thing well. You'll still make big units sometimes, but doing so is highly intentional and contextual and is not mutually exclusive with controlling an army, costing you additional APM rather than saving it like in TAW. A long game of 1v1 can be exhausting in ways TAW isn't. It's not uncommon for me to have to take a break after a half hour game.

So overall the skill-set is different requiring a different approach. There is a learning curve. If you're good at TAW, chances are you'll be at least decent at 1v1 because the faculties for adapting to a strategic context are the same, even if the implemented skills are not. It might just take a bit to feel you've found your feet.

I recommend not worrying about rating - not until you're feeling confident and want proof of improvement. Focus on developing the above skills (there is no end point to this improvement cycle - I'm still working on them). 1v1 is unforgiving but also probably the best way to improve overall, and one of the more reliable modes of getting good games.

There is another key skill to 1v1:

Understand that the most important units to micro are your builders. The state of a 1v1 game is much more fluid than even in small teams. Constant raiding means you constantly have to be willing to lose at least some territory in exchange for something better. So, rebuilding is also a constant part of the game. Together with the economy as a general factor, that means:

- Learn the shortcuts for all buildings, but only a few at a time, else it's too overwhelming. Start with mex, solar, lotus and go from there. It takes a bit of time, but as your friend DeinFreund told me: "You instantly gain like 300 rating just by learning that, because it saves you time on a scale you can only underestimate." At least in my case he was right, so I will happily share this advice.

- Learn the full functionality of the build-queue system. If you know how to do it, you can pump out really long build-queues in 5-10 seconds. [Example: Area-mex, then insert lotus with shift + space afterwards: 8 mex + 8 lotus queued in 4 seconds or so.] You see how this is extremely important. It is easy to overfocus your micro on combat-units and forget about expansion and eco. But ofc you want to focus as much attention to actual fighting as you can, so being able to take care of eco/exp very fast is what even enables you to focus your attention to the front. Don't hunt when your house is burning.

- Builder management also entails the distribution of buildpower around the map. You usually don't want to have all your builders in one spot for example, but not have half of them idle in some remote corner of your territory. On the other hand, having at least 1 in each of your remote corners means that you don't have to send builders from somewhere else there with long travel times.

So, with all of that, I personally consider builders to be the most important units in most 1v1 situations, maybe with the exception of super small maps. Should be talked about more often I think.

Addendum:

In 1v1, attention is a ressource. If one player does something, the other one needs to find out about that before they can respond. That makes distracting your opponent a valid tactic, as well as attacking from multiple different directions at once etc.

I don't think team games are worse in terms of the skill required.
I think team games require a slightly different approach to combat. In team games, you work on strategic advantage. Your primary goal is to find the best solution, but you have much more time to consider your moves.

1v1 is primarily about speed and initiative. I'm also the type of player who struggles in 1v1. I can only recommend building more raiders. :)