I'm in the monkey house with Zangief :(

Classic Fighting Games Ultra Street Fighter IV
1

“Monkey house” is a term that best describes that time when you start to stagnate. In essence it’s essentially when you start to form habits and stop putting thought into your game. When you first enter the monkey house, you say “oh my god this place stinks” because of all the monkey shit. But after a while you get accustomed to the stench. After an hour you’re unable to notice the smell, while anyone else walking into the monkey house immediately notices the stench.

I train a lot online with Zangief. I considered myself a top contender in my city and one of its best representatives in AE. However, recently, I started to run into bad luck. I began training online one day a week before today (the start of Canada Cup) and I started losing badly. I basically just went into autopilot with my gameplay and stopped respecting my opponent. Oh look, he’s gonna do this, lariat. He’s gonna do that, EX RBG. It goes without saying that this made me get my ass kicked handily, by players who aren’t even that good, which made me angry, so I continued to play until I got back onto a winning streak and I started losing more and more and getting angrier each time I lost, turning into a vicious cycle of shit.

So today came, the Team Canada qualifier before Canada Cup. The day I was looking forward to showing off my skills and landing that spot. Except because of my latest losing streak, it didn’t happen and I got defeated by two players (one Dictator, one Blanka) who I would’ve been able to destroy at the top of my game, for the same reason I get my shit ruined online. I didn’t show my opponents the proper respect and thought they’d fall for the same crappy tactics I’ve been using, somehow losing all my matchup knowledge in the process. However, even with awareness of the fact that I’m not doing things right, I’m still unable to shake my habits during my gameplay. I’ve fallen enormously from grace and my latest defeat has left me psychologically beaten and depressed for tomorrow.

Does this ever happen to you guys? You’re on top of the world, and then suddenly you get on a terrible losing streak that ruins your life? It sucks for me that this had to happen now when the biggest tournament of the year in Canada is happening. How do you guys eventually pull out of this slump once it happens? And do you have any tips for me to get over it quickly so I can at least make a decent showing tomorrow instead of getting my ass kicked?

2

Nope. That’s because I never win. :slight_smile: Honest. But when I fall off the horse, I get back on. I congratulate my opponent for outplaying me. I show respect, remain calm, don’t take things personal, and make friends.

What you said about disrespecting your opponent and that. You’ve just become complacent. There’s a fine line between playing to beat Average Joe, and playing to beat a vast number of opponents. You should always prepare for the worst scenario, even if your opponent’s skill level can’t deliver it. Exploiting weaker players does nothing to your game, when you meet the real deal.

To become a complete player, there’s 3 concepts I would recommend:

a) execution
b) knowledge
c) adaptation

a) comes with experience, every clown at the arcades gets to this level, given enough practice.
b) is definitely the most hardest and commitment testing of the three, knowledge of the systems (mechanics), your character and in depth match-ups.

This is so extensive, that I would imagine, in order to beat another character. You have to know so much about them. Then take that amount and multiply it by 28, then you can see, you definitely need a qualification to play this game.

c) is all about your brains, how fast you can think, recognize patterns, and predict your opponent.

Just remember, winning isn’t everything. Sometimes you put your opponent into a low percentage play, and they get lucky. Winning a match because of a lucky guess, isn’t anything to feel good about.

3

Talking honestly, I’ve had that slump twice, my way to get out of it was to take a break, one week, some days, anything. Take out one of your other hobbies for a couple of days and get invested in it, when you come back you’ll have a different mentality, and everything will be more clear. Hope it helps.

Right now? I’d say one of your best bets would be to focus on your match, take mental notes on what’s not working and avoid them for the most part. Don’t trust your instincts so much, try to react to the stuff instead. Block like a motherfucker instead of going for the high risk high reward stuff and keep your head in the game. Patience.

4

The biggest disadvantage of playing online is the infinite amount of random scrubs that just have no clue how to play. Personally I always play better when playing better players so when I have a little slump it’s mainly due to playing so many horrible players over and over again. I just really play bad when playing scrubs and tend to get really frustrated at how bad they are and all the stupid things they do and thus just lose patience and play dumb cause I just want the matches to be over asap. Bottom line is play good players and you’ll get better and develop really solid habits. Play online scrubs and you’ll only get worse and more frustrated. Also like Macho said, taking a break once in a while can really help as well.

5

you are only human my friend. It happens. just take a week off and get back to the basics

6

This is to Mr Phsychojosh. I can relate to your post 110%, besides the curses in the post it felt like i was the one who posted this up. I related so much to this post I even made an srk account just to comment. I been playing AE now for about 1 year now in November, the last fighting games a played was marvel vs capcom and some St at the arcades until now. I started with fei, gouken and finally now gief which I have been playing for a couple of months. I picked him up because in last fighting games a Gief was like a wack character and no one liked him because he really didnt look cool or anything, And I dont like playing the characters everyone plays (cammy or ryu), so i picked him up and found out that I was actually having great success at the beginner level , playing with my cousins and so on. Now to the point my personal best has been 2500 pp a coupled with some victories over much more higher pp apponents and i felt very confident in my gief abilities. Now to the truth it currently stands at around 1200 pp. Now explain to me how do you go from 2500 to 1200 and it keeps fluctuating like crazy. I get into like 7-0 loosing streaks witch are devastating to moral, and trust me I know part of winning is loosing and you do learn alot from it but when you loosing to what I call “grasshoppers” jumping all day or ken’s doing dp’s all day, you defenetly get down. I mean I don’t mind loosing but i don’t like loosing to people who I know i am 100% sure better than they are. For some reason I am not the only gief this is happening to but It just gets really frustrating when you are a competitive person and you just keep loosing specially when you know you are better than that. I have gone to the point as to even think about just going top tier because of some of the horrible match ups gief has I mean it gets bad. I might be that gief players go through a transion period or something but what ever it is, it not fun. I still main gief but i have been playing other characters now, but you know I still enjoy blowing up people just not when I encouter the 300 pp “grasshopper” get me mad. lol. keep playing and God bless. peace

7

Your losing to them because of point. 3 - adaptation. Their knowledge or execution or both, is less than yours, but you’ve failed to adapt to their game. To the game system, they are the better player. Playing weaker players should be easy, because you play the obvious line, with little or no, nth level or yomi thinking.

I can see how, playing weaker players is frustrating, because THEY ARE NOT supposed to do certain things, especially if they were a better high level player. Best not to underestimate your opponent. They will know the liability of random shoryuken soon enough :wink: