So I've realized that my old tournament report strategy is fail. What I've been doing is after a tournament, instead of posting immediately, I want to wait for youtube videos to come out so that I can analyze the matches and write about what I did wrong/right.
However, what happens is that by the time the video comes out it's old news (to me), and I don't have the motivation to post anymore. So I'll write up my backlog of reports now.
Pacific Northwest Majors (6/28/08)
Round one, I played against a Dhalsim player and almost lost. Holy shit! That was kind of a kick in the ass for me, and I think I "woke up" and played better.
In the winners finals, I played LTB's O. Ken on my very own ST cab. He just flat out raped me (I went with Boxer). However, I did notice something -- the way that he was raping me. What was happening was that he was throwing out fireballs from long range, letting me jump over them, and then walking up and throwing me. I know that's a basic as hell strategy but it's also very effective. I use it myself all the time when I'm playing against Boxer.
So I thought a lot about my loss, and came up with an idea of how to beat him if I was lucky enough to make it to winners finals.
Then I was in the losers finals where I played Alex Kelly. His Guile has gotten a lot better. He's pretty consistent about landing his crossup short combo, and that can be pretty scary. I decided it would be too risk to play Boxer or Dictator against him, so my choices were Claw or Chun Li. I feel that although Claw can dominate more, it's also an easier match to lose than Chun. In other words, I see Chun Li vs Guile as a 60-40 match with low variance, while Claw is like a 70-30 match but with high variance. I decided I preferred the more consistent match, so I went with Chun.
I ended up losing the first match, which was another kick in the ass. I think I was playing too conservatively, and letting the match become 50-50. I realized that I had to take more risks, but that those risks would be in my favor. I changed my gameplay and was able to win against Alex.
Then I had the finals vs LTB. I started with Claw, which was a bad idea, and got raped. I then went with Boxer where I had a new idea. My idea was to jump over his slow fireballs, but use jumping strong, which would hit his head if he started to walk up to throw me. If that didn't work I would immediately crouch and be ready to hit low fierce, because I noticed LTB liked to do an immediate jump RH to set up his throws. I figured even if that traded, it would put me in a great position of knocking him down. Plus more importantly, I wouldn't lose ground. My ultimate goal was to get him to be in the corner, where he likes to do jump up and jump back roundhouses. I figured that if I can get him to play that game, I've won -- it's just too hard for Ken to guess right every time.
I was able to do that and you can see the video here.
http://zachd.com/mvc2/matches/seattle/Pacific%20Northwest%20Majors%202008-06-28/footage%20from%20RayBladeX/SuperTurbo.wmv
I'll follow up with a post about Evo, and then one about this weekend's Random Select Fall showdown.
