Thanks for the help.
But, how do you fight Zangief players? Vega can’t really get close to poke and his command grab range is huge.
Well there is a certain distance you can use to hit him from barcelona when he is using his lariat. A lot of times you may trade blows though if the distance isnt right but other times the claw will just scrape the edge of his hitbox. Also your slides will destroy his lariats as will ultra 2 which is recommended for thid matchup. Against skilled players though it becomes a more patient battle since you do not want to whiff because they will grab you and they will crush Claw’s puny health. But a big save is that you can bait them into doing lariat and obviously meddle with our slides. We can also attempt to cross and mixups which can add to the confusion and gain a bit of damage but soon they will catch on and it becomes a waiting game again.
Anyhow I will check my replays of the battles against the A ranks and check my tactics. Hope what I pit so far helped.
far st.hp and st.mp will break his st.mp.
don’t fall into the trap that he’s trying to play footsies with you, he’s just trying to make you whiff so he can counter hit.
don’t always poke, restrain yourself and expect jumps, knock him out with neutral hk or jump back hp/mp/mk.
watch him trying to get in with st.hk, cr.hk and green hand, it will whiff you ( if you space yourself to be as far as st.mk range) so you can punish with cr.mk combo
anti air with st.hk if you have a tonne of health and he’s on his last bit of health. he can’t trade hits for long, but at least you won’t risk yourself being ultra’ed.
if he has around 100 point of health left, you can jump in on him for free if you want, his lariat will trade with your j.hp (with claw only). if he’s smart enough to not anti air, jump back hp to seal the game. ( unless he knows you will do it O.o, then go for a low)
don’t ever use rfc unless it’s the tip of the lp rfc, or you have super and you know he will spam spd after a rfc.
watch out for his knee attack because neutral hk will whiff and he gets a free grab.
once you anti aired him with neutral hk, be ready for another jump in, just in case, or you can st.mp when he lands
if you’re risky, after knockdown, you can go for a cr.mk combo or instant overhead. watch out, instant overhead can be countered by him blocking and then ex green hand, if he knows that. if he’s smart enough to always block up and you don’t want to risk being spd’ed by doing a low, you could just jump back and see he’s reaction. if he green handed, you can catch him with j.hk on your way down
his ex green hand fadc back dash can be punished, but be careful, he can let the focus go, ready your ultra if you have charge, he has no escape. watch out if he has 3 bars, so you can prepare yourself for either an ultra punish or a normal punish, it’s -9 on block. if you have go like 1 frame punishes, you can just go for them fancy ex rcf combos
when he knocks you down with a spd, choose between focus back dash, jump back hp or kara throw. this is how i play gief, you can just block if you want.
kara grab > greenhand > focus back dash > spd > kara grab
gief st.mp > everything except focus back dash
he’s lariat can be ex fba’ed if he’s trying to build meter
if you going to safe jump him, he can ex spd. you can counter with a low air grab, it stalls you in the air, so his ex grab whiffs. ( i wouldn’t want to safe jump him if he has ex, but it’s an option if you like to play that way)
been playing against super high level gief for so long, this is my most comfortable matchup
Damn! This advice will be useful.
I can’t wait to try out what Niah said about that safe jump.
But if I can’t use RCF. How am I supposed to keep pressure on him?
Nice writing Niah. Just about beating Gief’s stMP, i would use caution with stHP : it’s slow, punishable, and the hitbox isn’t that good.
I’ll add that his fstMP is +2 on block with 4 frames startup, so I would really use caution against it, as they can frame-trap you with it. =)
The rest you wrote is very interesting. ^^
crHP is used to deal with that move.
It can beat clean if spaced REALLY well, but its most likely to trade. Which is good for Claw damage-wise.
No one saw that ft10 between makoto0124 and Itabashi? 
Share the link to that ft10 this instant please!
It was on makoto0124’s stream. It went 10-7 for Itabashi. The guy is incredible indeed.
Makoto whored crHP in footsies.
hmm, now that i think about it, i kind of counter poke with st.hp or i use it and he just runs into it, i guess it won’t technically “beat” it. cr.hp is interesting though
to keep pressure, use your normals to push him back. he has a hard time moving forward towards your normals, so he will jump, that’s when you anti air him, and that’s when you move foward. slowly move him into the corner. what’s funny in this matchup is that whoever moves who into the corner decides the skill level. if you are both evenly match, you’ll be in mid screen most of the time
cr.HP has a hitbox of limited size in a weird spot, and it also has a long recovery.
However, as a 5-frame move it’s very fast on coming out, for a heavy attack. The other key aspect of what makes it potentially good is how the extended hitbox sort of teleports into position between the 4th and 5th frames. Vega does not spend frames 1-4 reaching out a vulnerable arm, he stays mostly compact until the final animation where the hitbox for his extended attacking arm appears. Although the hitbox is small and vulnerable, the quickness of it can let you spear it in and easily force a traded hit.
Finally someone understand hows AA crHP works.
You disregard me Haztlan. I’ve supported, used and proved to myself how AA cr.hp works long time ago.
?
You made no sense.
I didn’t insulted crHP or something, I said that meteo2 also understand why crHP works as a AA: "key aspect of what makes it potentially good is how the extended hitbox sort of teleports into position between the 4th and 5th frames. Vega does not spend frames 1-4 reaching out a vulnerable arm, he stays mostly compact until the final animation where the hitbox for his extended attacking arm appears. "
Sure he was talking about a ground to ground situation, hence the “potentially good”. But the same principle applies to ground to air. Its works because hitboxes doesn’t interact all the time. Actually, most of the time they “pop” inside each other, from there comes most of the trades. Thats how you get crHPs trading with jump ins and shit.
Truth to be told, Rufus’ jiHP SUCKS really hard. crHP antiairing that is nothing more than its “obligation”. Standing jabs AA that thing, here we see our stMP anti airing Rufus: .
If the Rufus player jumped properly (with jiLP, for example) … but no, the “let me jump with jiHP, if that hits I will land a big combo!” mindset is just too stronk.
So using crHP against someone that really knows what they are doing is a actually a big risk. It MUST be spaced and timed REALLY well in order to deal with the jump. Don’t forget that in your video you ate a full jump in Fierce because you tried to AA with crHP.
tl;dr crHP is a bad AA.
ok… now I did insulted it.
crHP’s hitbox has been obviously weakened for it to be effective only against distant jumps, of opponents jumping-in from very long ranges. There is a spot there where crHP has only an hitbox sticking out, and no hurtbox, so it could aa anything provided distance is correct. However, temptation is to use it as a multifunction anti-air, against regular jump-ins… against which it has been designed to fail.
The information Meteo gave us informs us that it is more likely to trade when used from an intermediate distance, so appreciating the right range might be a little easier. However forgetting that distance is so dangerous that air to air would feel more reliable to me, when charge is not available. =)
Why would they give an upside inclined animation but a horizontal hitbox to it is beyond me.
Because that is Vegas trademark animation since SF II’ (besides FBA of course).
it’s a useful aa against hakan at least 
Intentionally flawed, there is nothing more to say. Though it is understandable why they wanted this flaw. =)
who else does cr.hp work on?