I adore standing MK. It’s a Claw’s secret best friend.
Also, crouching MK is damn useful too when you shoudn’t commit to a slide.
jchensor’s post makes the most sense to me too regarding footsies. Very informative!
Quoted for truth. It’s amazing what you find when you use all six buttons for something other than spamming special moves. 
By the way, I love special and super spammers. I practice combos on them a lot!
Thats funny, I just saw that today in the recent Evo video, will definitely have to try that out more against shotos.
Ooh, ooh, I do I do!!!
i honestly dont use any of that other stuff except with ryu…
but yeah, i’ve been in love with vegas standing mk against shotos ever since i saw the effect it had versus valle at evo.
and SJV we need to play again, my one and only session with you was DOPE and lasted for hours, plus you had the best connection to a good gamer that i’ve had.
-dime
james, you couldn’t have explained it much better than that. However, will this definition vary from OG to OG?
Yeah, for sure. I definitely have to say that is MY interpretation of the Footsies. The interesting thing is that Footsies CAN last a long time. Whenever you watch, say, a Choi vs. Valle match in Alpha 2 or Alpha 3, there is a TON of Footsies going on because both players are so good at avoiding being at a disadvantage.
But more thank likely, many OG players will describe Footsies a bit differently than me. And I’d imagine players who are MUCH better than me might even say that my definition is not very accurate. And a lot of good players will probably agree. It really is just the way I see it, the way I define it.
- James
I don’t really have much to add, but I appreciate that this kind of thing is being talked about. It’s a real shame that there’s such a ton of information on combos and mixups that the vast majority of people seem to think that’s all there is to SF strategy. Outside of s-kill’s ‘Controlling Space’ and ‘Critical Beatdown’ articles there hasn’t been much formal discussion on this sort of stuff.
One example: I used to see people talk about ‘training’ and ‘reading’ the opponent and think I understood it, but I was really thinking in very simple terms. “I did a tick throw the last 2 wakeups, so this time I’ll tick then sweep!” Obviously there’s something to this, but far more important (but much more difficult to appreciate and understand) are these concepts’ applications in footsies.
In the B3 Choi vs Valle matches you can see Valle recognize that Choi is trying to use spacing to bait him into whiffing a poke (probably a sweep) that he can sweep back. Problem is when you’re focusing so intently on looking for that one move (and you need to focus, because reaction punishing a whiffed sweep isn’t easy), something like a st.Short can look a hell of a lot like a sweep. So Valle does whiff st.Short -> Fierce Fireball, and hits Choi out of his cr.RH.
It’s very easy to look at the concept of reading the opponent as simply “I thought he would do that, so I did this”, but the true skill is in being able to say “I knew he was looking for me to do X, so I made him think I’d done X, then punished him.” or alternatively, “I knew he was using all his attention to react quickly if I did X, so I did something totally unexpected that normally he would’ve punished easily, but his reactions were slowed because he was looking for something else.” And, of course, it goes even deeper still: “I knew he thought I was looking for him to do X, so when he did something different, I did something different too, then punished his attempted punish.”
The last one is, I guess, another reason why good players throw out a ton of ‘useless’ moves during footsies… simply to jack up the signal to noise ratio. If you’re very focused on looking for that cr.RH so you can land your counter-sweep, but your opponent keeps throwing out a ton of jabs and shorts, it’s going to be much harder to immediately recognize that the thing you’re looking for is actually the thing you’re looking for, and not just some totally safe thing that you will get fucked up for trying to punish.
Just a scrub’s thoughts…
Thnx for passing the knowledge down james. Not many players are willing to do that these days since everything has become STSFN.
I ask this question from time to time to different players I know and I get different responses all the time. I even run into players whom are VERY good @ a particular game but can’t exactly articulate a good response which drives me insane lol. The whole “footsie” concept in particular is what set things in motion and it can be done a multitude of ways. Personally, I try to pull from everyone’s input and take what I feel like would work best.
since we’re on the subject already, can I ask some more questions about the offensive and defensive states?
Feel free to ask. Again, I’m not the greatest of players, so I dunno if my advice is up to par of those who have more knowledge. I just know how to articulate things better than most, I think.
- James
that said (kinda skipping over the rest of the thread), I believe in an offensive footsie for sure.
A common tactic against a disadvantaged opponent is to bait merely by walking. I walk into a certain range, crouch, then walk out of range and make you whiff a poke (a footsie yes?) I definitely do that vs. wakeup uppercutters and/or bait low pokes in the same fashion on a knockdowned/reset opponent.
To me, that’s just Footsies, where you bait pokes and hit them back. If it’s a sweep you hit them with or moves like Chun’s Stand Strong, yeah, then you’ve transitioned into offense, for sure. So that is definitely Footsies used to begin offense. Other characters like Sakura in CvS2 can use Footsies to facilitate defense (see “My Defense Is Better” from tihs past year’s Evo DVD trailer with Ricky Ortiz). So while I agree that there can be “offensive footsies” and “defensive footsies”, I tend to just call those both “footsies” and whether they are offensive or defensive all really just depends on what you do afterwards.
The situation of baiting wake-ups on a knocked-down opponent, to me, is wake-up games (or Okizeme if you want to go into Tekken terms, though Okizeme usually implies stuff a LOT more complex than the Wake-up games in ST).
Again, this is just how I see things.
- James
So true
damn! this is the first thing you’ve posted that offered some valuable insight instead of the usual flame crap… BRAVO!
this is just the EXACT the same way i see it. the concepts you talk about, like slowing peoples reactions and shit, i’ve NEVER seen anyone post besides me or james. GOOD JOB.
one thing i’d like to talk about with you and chensor… if possible, is an old school footsy tactic thats been around for ages. i’ll just call it “neutral pausing”
but it’s just basically standing still at neutral both within your opponents attack range and just outside it. however the form of neutral pusing im talking about usually comes with some “down fakes” if you have ever played against this it’s VERY disconcerting. the down fakes make it look like they are doing a crouch move, when they do them from a close range.
i cant neutral pause for shit, neither can i down fake well, but these are things i’d like to learn as they look SO FUCKING RAW when mastered.
also down faking the right way from a distance is a “jump fake” and i cant do that for shit either. is there anything i’m missing here??? the movement is really unorthodox and FEW people i’ve ever played can do it well.
i came across an opponent on xbox live that used this form of movement and it brought me back to the good 'ol days.
heres a match of DGV where he makes an ever so slight use of neutral pausing and down faking in the final match:
[media=youtube]jYgsjzA-ck0[/media]
notice how DGV steps back ever so slightly then jumps forward at 4:12, thats the kind of thing i’m talking about, the step back makes it seem like hes going into safe range for fireball and probably freezes guiles mind into what steps to take to deal with that, butthen he jumps forward and the guiles too mind fucked to cr.fierce.
at 4:40 DGV uses the neutral pause (kinda) combined with down fakes to get another free jumpin and own up the guile some more.
now of course the guy on xbox live i played against was nowhere as good as DGV, so i was able to actually see how he set it up: usually off a blocked jumpin, he would immediately walk back wards then stick out a poke when i reacted to him walking backwards. so i immediately stopped poking him when he did this again, so he just sat there in neutral for a sec (totally obviously in range of my cr.mk in a ryu mirror) then quickly walk backwards, i’d wiff my forward then he would walk back in and make me block his forwardxxfireball and use some more neutral pausing… the variations would repeat until he eventually would just walkin throw/ DP with a very high consistency… i was definitely outclassed as far as footsies were concerned.
I WANNA LEARN HOW TO DO THIS!
-dime
My one thing is to never become too predictable. It’s OK to establish something, like if during a game of footsie with Ryu (using my main for example’s sake) you inch forward and go for a cr.hk about 70% of the time, so long as you have a certain percentage of the time where you do something else that will punish him for trying to punish your habits. (inch a little more forward and throw which will work if he decides to hold down-back to block your cr.hk, or inch forward like you are going to go for the cr.hk and hope he jumps in at you trying to hit you from above while you are recovering from the cr.mk, which you can punish with a shoryuken)
The one thing I would say is that it can be better to lean towards being offensive at certain times. Leaning too much towards defensive will result in both of you walking backwards until you are in a corner, which is not where you want to be. Plus if you are both moving left/right you will never move in relation to each other until you hit the corner, so you can’t just back up into your sweet spot. You need to inch forward and present offensive threats. This will do two things. First, it can force your opponent to play less offensive than he might if you were playing defensive. You might be able to back him up into a corner. Second, even if you step back, your opponent might hesitate to step forward and push you back into the corner because you have shown that you will present offensive threats to him as he inches forward. Pick some times to step forward and present a threat; even if you don’t land hits on those attempts you may make your opponent aware that you will present offensive threats to him, which can make him change his play.
I play a lot of online poker, so I bring an odd sort of outside experience to double-blind situations like this. If you go for something 100% of the time your opponents will always find a way to punish it. It’s quite common for someone to make a note of what you did in round one, and wait until that situation re-occurs all the way at the end of round 5 to punish you for it. If you are mixing everything up with a completely different distrubtion - say, fp hadouken 33.33% of the time, fake hadouken into shoryuken 33.33% of the time, and throw 33.33% of the time, you are losing out on damage, because that throw will do more damage than the shoryuken or hadouken. You will do less damage on average. It’d be better to do, say, throw 60%, fp hadouken 20%, f.mp overhead 20%, in which case you still maximize your damage in the long-term but still present threats to your opponents attempts to punish you for throwing a majority of the time. They’ll be forced to think about whether they really want to risk eating a fireball if they try to poke you as you come in for the throw, or whether they really want to risk eating a shoryuken if they try to jump in at your throw / hadouken.