Ahh, yeah sorry for not being more clear. I wasn’t talking in regards to shape/location. st.hp, cr.mp, st.mp, st.hk, j.hp all have really unique and useful hitboxes and I use all of them more than cr.lp.
“You sure as hell can’t meaty ryu/akuma with it and magically be safe though like you can with cr.lp.”
wait! cr.LP is save vs SRK? whats the setup? max distance?
save only vs. ryu/akuma?
need to test this!
st.lp works better vs. ryu. Max distance for either. Works against a few characters. shrug
goukens kinda shit when he’s on the back foot or neutral, but when you get a chance to go on the offensive he can do it safely with safe divekicks that beat all uppwercuts and reversals, and his punishment and frame traps all lead to massive combo damage or knockdowns to repeat the safe divekick stuff. in fact because of fireball he’s actually better than blanka in neutral, marginally. My game consists of doing fireballs and cr.hp when they jump and basically looking to land a forward throw or cr.hk to start the dive kick pressure, i play really passively unti i score the knockdown.
and his new footsies in AE make me think he’s going to be quite beastly in footsies and frame trapping. ooh, and kongo becomes a tool to use when you can supercancel it for a 400 damage random crouch tech trap or reversal (i dont use it unless i have super). i was planning on switching from blanka to rolento (if he’s in…) but i might actually keep using gouken once i’m done helping my friend improve his
I like gouken too but I can’t get over his cr.mk. It’s like a non-move coming from blanka. Range is very wierd. It’s like having a dedicated whiff button. Btw rolento would be my first choice for a new character too. Loved his multihit baton twirling combos, grenade rolls and his super was cheesily fantastic. 
I’m playing yun for sure. But if they let me choose between AE/Super i’ll probably do my regular rog/blanka.
thing is whilst i’d love to play blanka as my dedicated main he really doesn’t take advantage of a lot of the good stuff in the game, and by that i mean option selects and safe mixups (divekicks post hard knockdown basically).
with sfxtekken around the corner, i figure i might as well play around with a character who enables me to get used to learning to option slect stuff off safejumps and divekick mixup. i’m so behind the pack when it comes to layering my inputs like that.
ves, again thx for the sak stuff dude! There’s a guy in the gouken forum called nevillbamshew he reminds me of you, he just comes out with new tech all the time. good stuff!
for me blanka has very solid matchups vs key characters and then of course horrible matchups vs others.
i mean blanka does well against
chun
guile
viper
gief
ryu
ken
abel
That is a really nice set of characters to have solid matchups against. I mean personally blanka is not a high tier character only because he has too many bad bad matchups. Because i find his good matchups to be really solid against the field.
how does Blanka do well vs. Abel?
He really limits your options when he has meter, and stepkick is very bad for Blanka.
He’s also very hard to safejump correctly because of ex TT. you have to do it late, which allows him to ex falling sky or just simply focus backdash to safety.
Oh also elec whiffs against him.
I dunno, I used to think it was closer then Futile blew me up at WGF.
To me it’s more about the matchups I get to play and practive at that I do good at. Used to be good against Bison, Abel, Balrog, but never hardly fight them anymore. It’s just Ken, Ryu, Akuma, and Guile mostly. I fight more Guys then Abel. I noticed when I play someone good with a character I haven’t had a match against in a long time that I struggle. Also noticed the Ken matchup is harder than the Ryu matchup now for me. Used to be the other way around.
I think Ken’s normals do better than Ryu’s do in the matchup, but genius level Ryu’s can keep you locked down and really limit your options with a smart fireball game especially when you’re cornered. I feel Ken is a bit tougher because of the normals and you can’t beat his dps.
Also Jolthead, yeah I agree. I think the thing with me is not only do i get a better feel for a match the more I play it, but I find myself going into the lab to specifically beat that other character. Losing to shgl got me to change how I approach the mirror, and now I feel the mirror is my best match probably.
People mark this matchup as advantage abel but i feel it’s even or in blanka’s favor personally ;[
Blanka normals > Abel and Blanka can escape with meter. Balling him before ultra is legit as long as you mix it up. Also he can be crossed and mixed up pretty bad on wakeup situations. I’ve played a ton of abels and i do really well vs all of them. This matchup is all about the spacing game.
Blanka can’t escape reliably with meter if the abel mixes up what he does. I’ve got st.fierced out of ex rainbow I don’t know how many times. Abel can also do option selects that will deal with both ex rainbow and backdash, it makes him lose a little damage, but then he’s still in your face.
On wakeup ex tt/ex skyfall is pretty much airtight. Like if you go to cross him up, if he chooses the right one of those you do get hit. obviously both are sort of risky for the Abel player, but if he can tell where you are based on your jump height then he doesn’t have to guess.
Ball is legit how? The two best Abel’s I’ve played were both able to punish meterlessly, so ball was thrown out unless I did os balls off of st.jab, or some tricky counterfootsie stuff. Every other situation is a guess with bad risk/reward.
Your best footsie pokes against him are st.mp and st.lp. st.mp can be counterpoked and is basically even on focus dash ups. st.lp does no damage, and you can’t really combo off of it in footsies because you have to be moving forward a lot of the time to not get cornered. Everything else is slow enough for him to punish in some way or another, and a random guess for him makes him lose 10% if he guesses wrong, and you lose way more+give him good positioning.
No answer for stepkick other than one of the slowest backdashes in the game, and upball, which requires you to be crouching and is risky.
Random match of you vs. an abel you consider good.
[media=youtube]VxQTH6LT2xY[/media]
0:18 doesn’t punish sweep, it’s -7, I think abel can do something there, though your spacing might have been good enough. He can stepkick sweep on block though normally.
0:24 misses ultra, and the ball right before that was counterhit shouldn’t have been and was a lucky guess from you. That should have been free ultra if he wasn’t hitting buttons the second time around.
2:29 jumps after blocked rainbow when an ultra punish would have killed you for guessing he wouldn’t block
2:36 misses his ultra off of your backdash which would have killed you.
2:40 don’t think crossup ball would have chipped. he blocks you die. Also can’t abel just roll through that or ultra?
Also over the whole match he lets you hop for free, when hop is punishable on reaction in neutral situations.
I mean you’re a good player, but I watched a few of the other matches, and I didn’t see this guy abusing Blanka’s weaknesses in the matchup like he should have been.
Blanka needs a fireball that combos off of st.jab in footsie range
Sigh i lost my entire post.
Summary
I play against a lot of top abels but i don’t post videos because some ask to not have them posted, others i haven’t asked. Abel can only punish balls when he’s doing a standing block (meterless) iirc. After a blocked stepkick blanka has solid options vs abel. This match is more about the spacing then anything. I think you’re overanalyzing the data and should put some focus on the mindgame/metagame of a match. In the case of the one you posted i have had 100 games with him. So there are a lot of things we do vs each other that doesn’t happen with other abel vs blanka.
if you know of a abel that is really good that you feel would prove to me his dominance over blanka. Then please point him in my direction so that i can be proven wrong.
So I should focus on outguessing the character who does 2x the damage my character does on similar successful guess?
Want to go over the blocked step kick options?
Offhand I know backdash: loses to option select sweep, option select ultra, option select super, and I think crouching strong.
upball: loses to blocking, anything if opponent has ultra.
ex rainbow: loses to chained jabs, jab-> st.fierce which is a common string post block, a bunch of option selects, ultra
st.tech: techs normal throws, beats ex TT, loses to everything else
cr.tech: trades with cr.jab, loses to everything else. if you delay the “tech” to actually tech throws you won’t trade with cr.jab. If you tech asap you’ll get thrown out of cr.lk startup.
jump: beats throw, tt, ex tt, loses to everything else
f.hop: beats throw, tt, ex tt, you get reset if he hits most buttons.
The thing is if abel doesn’t do risky stuff like raw tt after step kick and simply jabs, it puts you in a way worse position because he can OS and if you block he’s at +3 which makes his options better. I dunno, having a dp FADC escape seems decent, the above seem shitty.
You can st.block balls on reaction.
I don’t know any strong Abels who play online.
LOL Ves. I’ll just agree with you. Abel > Blanka. I can’t compete with your blanka knowledge.
Thats pretty sarcastic. I’m just wondering if there is some crazy shit I don’t know about vs. stepkick and the matchup in general.
I know if I know an Abel player well enough I can establish where he is weak and pray on those tendencies like I can with any player, but if I’m playing against an Abel I’ve never played who is very good, I need to play the character and not the player. You know?
i take a far different approach to the game. You are analytical and understand all these os/options/stuff. I just play the game and spacing, mindgames, strategy are what i focus on. I’m over 5kpp so it seems to work well and i’ve recieved praise from good players. I cannot really argue with your points because they are all probably right. I just think blanka is pretty even or favored vs abel. I just find it easy to space against him while against boxer or fei i do not. But you’re dragging me into an argument that i cannot win. So i’d rather just say you’re right and it’s probably that all the abel’s i play don’t know the matchup well. Because that is pretty likely.
Will you agree that my way is better if I pass you up on the leaderboards again~? P:
And yeah honestly up until 2.5 months ago I agreed on you it was pretty even, then Futile did all this OS stuff to me, and knew how to counterfootsie with Abel, then I was in losers bracket, and I talked about the matchup with him and he pretty much agreed with me that Blanka is screwed if he gets stepkicked, which had been what I thought when I got wrecked.
And yeah our approaches are very different, I think I’m too cautious a lot of the time in Blanka’s not so good matchups, and then I’m not able to really outplay my opponent because I’m not willing to take a chance when I know there is a sure counter to that option.