Tournament reports - PNW majors

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.

Old A3 tournament report from Japan

While I was looking up on google groups for my old postings about Kurahashi, I stumbled on this:

Japan A3 Tournament Report

I thought it might be good to post for some laughs :)

Landing combos more consistently

One of the nice things about GGPO is that you can watch what other players do, and pick up tidbits that you haven't incorporated into your game yet. I was watching Hentaikamen, who is very strong (at least by my standards :) ), and who pretty much took me apart with his Dictator.

One thing I saw was that he was starting a lot of his jumpins with jumping jab. I thought this was a little bit wierd, as usually my Dictator jumps in with

a) Roundhouse, because it does more damage.
b) Strong, because I can hit once on the way up and once on the way down, for more chances to hit if my opponent jumps back at me.
c) Forward, because it has hitting frames all the way to the ground.

So it seemed wierd to me that this great player was using what appeared to be a suboptimal jumpin. Why was he using jab?

I experiemented with it, and I found that jump jab lands you much closer to your opponent than the other options above. This has a real effect on gameplay, because it's very easy to be out of range for your favorite combo with Dictator. Specifically, one thing I absolutely hate is when I jump in from the front, land my jump in, then follow with a standing short, low forward, scissor kick combo -- except the low forward whiffs out of range. That's really annoying and can often lose you the round in terms of opportunity cost.

When I tried with jumping jab, I never whiffed my low forward. So by using jumping jab, you're giving up damage for consistency, something that is totally worth it.

It might seem really obvious to some, but I'd never really thought of mixing up my jumpin attacks (Why use anything other than the "best" choice?).

It's the same "aha" moment I had when I first saw Kurahashi playing boxer in Japan

And saw him playing against Dhalsim too.

Kurahashi would just jumping strong (what I call his "curly punch") to jump in with instead of roundhouse, for the exact same reason. Jump strong lands you closer to the opponent, letting you do low jab x2, low strong, into a series of options (at least that was what Kurahashi mainly used). Back then, I would only jump in with Roundhouse, because it did the most damage. It took my seeing a superior player using something else for me to question my basic assumptions.

Looks like almost ten years later, I still haven't learned my lesson.

GGPO

Last week I discovered GGPO. I'm amazed at what I've been missing not playing on this. There's some really top caliber players there, including Graham and Alex Wolfe, Alex Valle, and some very good Japanese players.

There's also been nightly tournaments at 9pm PST, which are great practice for Evo. I find one problem on GGPO is that I'm always tempted to play my "fun" characters instead of my tournament characters, but the tournaments are a great way to force myself to play my real characters.

It's also very nice because you can watch other players. I highly recommend it for everyone, whether a new player or an experienced veteran!

Leaning back with Boxer

Here's a little tip I learned from Graham Wolfe.

Boxer leans back really far when he's in the standing block position. His sprite is actually a few pixels further away than when he is crouching. So if you have your super charged, and are waiting for your opponent to throw a fireball, you can use this to your advantage to get a few extra frames.

What you do is sit in the crouching back position, as you normally would (to charge down and back). When you see your opponent throw a fireball, move the stick to the standing back position, and THEN do your super motion. You'll have a few extra frames to do the super before the fireball hits you, and a few extra frames is a big deal!

Pacific Northwest Summer Majors

Tomorrow is the pacific northwest majors! It will be a lot of fun! It looks like last winter's tournament attracted enough attention that we will have some Canadian players coming down.

Since the event is in Seattle, I'll be bringing my cabinet there. The thing is *very* heavy, but I have two friends coming to help move it. Sacha and I barely got it up the stairs when I first had it delivered over a year ago, but we were only two. Hopefully having three people will make a difference.

I'm still not sure who to play. It's been about a year since I started playing Dictator. He's by far my favorite character, but I still don't feel really "tournament worthy" with him. I still feel that when push comes to shove, I'm better off playing Claw or Boxer, my old staples. Case in point, at Evo I didn't play a single round of Dictator. Now if the tournament were on my cabinet, I might seriously consider playing him. I've found that I land my combos much more reliably on the cabinet. I'm pretty sure that there is a speed difference between Dreamcast and Arcade, and since most tournaments are on Dreamcast these days, but I only have the cabinet at home to practice, my timing is off. Combos matter much more with Dictator than they do with Boxer or Claw, so I really feel that my expected win percentage goes down a lot on Dreamcast.

I'm also interested in following the news of the ST:HDR beta on 360. I don't plan on getting the beta, but I'll be interested in seeing it at Zach's tournament tonight. From what I've read on SRK, it sounds like Ken is pretty ridiculous. That's funny, because Ken seemed really scary when I read about his list of changes :). Hopefully he will be toned down in the final build -- then again everything is changing so much that it's hard to find a point of reference. Who knows what "too good" means when everyone has been buffed up to the "too good" level anyways?

Random Select Winter Showdown

I've been meaning to write up a post about the Random Select Winter Showdown (Pacific Northwest Regionals), after Pablo wrote a post about the experience. I wanted to wait until videos were up, so that I could look at them, and analyze how I could do better.

First of all, I want to congratulate Pablo and Alex for doing an amazing job. Pablo went undefeated through the winners bracket until the finals. Alex beat RayBladeX, an excellent Boxer, and previous top 8er at Evo, not just once, but twice -- in the winners bracket and in the losers bracket. In fact, I think I owe the tournament to Alex. I played Ray Boxer v Boxer in the 5 on 5 exhibition match afterwards, and he trounced me. Alex's Guile has improved dramatically in the last 6 months. Congratulations.

Here is my winners finals match with Pablo (I am playing Dictator)


Here is the grand finals, with Alex (I am playing Dictator/Chun Li)


Reviewing these matches, one thing I notice immediately about my play is that I'm missing a lot of combo opportunities. There are several points where Alex whiffs a flash kick, where I should be able to do standing short, low forward, scissor kick. Even just low forward into scissor kick would be simple and damaging. Yet I find myself not doing this basic combo properly -- a combo I can do in my sleep in casual matches.

One way I can improve then, is to simply get better at execution. It's easy to fall into the trap of only practicing high end, difficult combos. But failing bread and butter combos like the ones I mention above can cost the match. I think my problem is that since I "know" that I can do them already, I don't bother practicing. But then when it's tournament time, I miss the opportunities I am given.

When I played in Japan, I remmeber playing against Kurahashi and getting *one* chance like that a game, if I was lucky. High end play requires maximizing these chances every time, and I need to do better there.