I think also you don’t quite get the term “Wiff” a wiffed move is one that does not connect. If you stick out a move and it is blocked and you punish it, it is not a wiff punish. a wiff punish is when you punish the opponents poking attempt
He’s talking about doing a setup that baits the opponent into using a certain poke, but it whiffs because the setup puts him just out of range.
If you guys want to see a clinic of someone using exactly that in sf5 (a pokestring designed to bait wiffs and then the guy who did the pokestring, wiff punishing the opponent) just watch punk versus flash metroids laura and ryu at this esl tournament.
Punk does various variations of st.lk,st.lp,cr.mk pokestring, then flash would block it and try to move in with either a dash or a forward walking poke and punk would pre emptively wiff punish him via wiff buffer or some such:
Punk is definitely using a setup here, but he’s not truly wiff punishing reactively. He’s throwing out wiff buffers to catch shit… he’s just got a setup pokestring for it.
Watch 1:17:40 to see a perfectly executed version (st.lk,st.lp,cr.mk walk back st.mp xx mk scythe wiff buffer) then watch the rest of the set to see how punk continues to use it in various ways.
TBH even in other SF style games, reactive whiff punishes (and whiff punishes in general) don’t really happen that often. I can pull up plenty of SFIV matches or Alpha 2 matches where people are just whiffing buttons near each other as well. Lot of variables have to come into place to realistically get a reactive whiff punish in any game. The easiest one is to sweep a sweep, but anything past that requires a lot of work that’s hard to do on just pure reaction.
In SFIV Adon is one of those characters that really simplifies footsies down (he was the same in A2). He can throw s.HK at a range where there’s not much you can really do to whiff punish it and it’s a 2 hit which beats focus armor as well. It takes Momochi plenty of matches to even come up with a s.LP tatsu as some type of whiff punish. Even then the odds are still genearlly in Gamerbee’s favor to keep using it in neutral as it just requires way more work to whiff punish than it does to space it in footsies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikLgac-ekn0&t=350s
Even in A2 with this Rose vs Ken match, you get the Rose player getting a couple close ranged sweep whiff punishes on Ken’s c.MK early into the first round and then that’s about all you really get. Wasn’t any real long ranged whiff punishes going on. Ken is not really going to whiff punish anything she is doing because she has a sweep that is way longer than any of his buttons (especially the ones he could whiff punish with). Otherwise in the mid range there’s a lot of button whiffing or placement of buttons.
@“DevilJin 01”
It’s because, as I said years and years ago… lots of “wiff punishing” isn’t actually wiff punishing. It’s wiff “pressuring” as an easy example, me versus Valle in A3 his ryu versus my gen. when playing he would make me wiff my st.mk then he would walk in on me and pressure me with his blocked cr.mk xx fireball as I was recovering. He did this over and over again to the point of extreme obviousness. So I adjusted and started to do st.mk (wiff) st.mk. Which hit him the first time. After that, he didn’t wiff pressure my st.mk anymore nearly as obviously. He probably only wiff pressured me 1 out of 4 or 5 times after that. But his adjustment was immediate so he knew the situation he was creating before I even made my adjustment.
In sf5 though because of the binary interactions of ground game normals plus the slow walkspeed and lack of being able to really cancel moves into safe specials… wiff pressuring becomes less of a thing. And wiff punishing becomes less of a thing because most wiff punish buttons are super unsafe.
Wiff pressuring should probably come back, but a lot more people are aware of the wiff x2 OS now that I described up above, so wiff pressuring is much less safe and that makes it all about wiff punishing… which is also harder so the game basically has both strategies take a back seat.
That A2 vid just seemed like a matchup where neither player was really concerned with playing footsies.
The A2 match definitely had footsies in it. Kinda have to be concerned with footsies to whiff punish twice that early into the round.
If you look at John Choi vs Justin in A2, it’s more of the same just slower. Lots of placed stuff, but nary an actual whiff punish. Maybe some whiff pressure or whatever other cute stuff, but you’re not reactively getting whiff hits often in any SF really.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfw2fBfErLY&t=201s
Those were both guess punishes in the A2 match, you can tell because of the spacing and timing of both punishes.
But yeah I agree that reactive wiff punishing wasn’t a huge thing back in the day. It was a thing definitely, and was ever present in some matchups, but in most it wasn’t huge reactively speaking.
I mean if we are talking about pre emotive wiff punishes I do tha shit all day long in sf5 with Chuns fmp and her st.hp. But those wiff punishes are weak because they don’t do much damage nor do they give good pressure on success.
I think you guys are missing an important point. One of the reasons it wasn’t a “big” thing was because people knew the option existed. This opened up the neutral game to other options, which in turn is of course what makes SF fun. This is why you didn’t often find characters repeatedly whiffing pokes in neutral (in punish range), and it’s one of the reasons 3S Chun is considered strong. Her cr.mk is quite hard to whiff-punish, and this makes Chun vs Chun matchups play out the way they do. Guile’s cr.mk was also notoriously hard to punish in SFII. But even then it wasn’t unbeatable. Here’s a well-known anecdote from Daigo:
(translation is wrong. FC = Super Famicom = SNES. SSFT2X = HF)
There’s a better interview elsewhere where he says that he thought it was impossible till he saw a Gief player whiff-punish it on reaction every time, and that’s what made him go home and practice with a friend. During the hours of training on speed 10, he never managed to truly punish it even once, but going back to the arcade the move was in “slow motion” to him.
But yeah, whiff-punishing everything on reaction every time is impossible. Just like Anti-Airing every time on reaction. Even top players block jumps when they have time to AA, and jumps are much slower than whiffed moves.
The point is that whiff punishing in neutral is most definitely a “thing”, and some of the reasons you don’t see it that often in older games are (barring the fact that it is considered a skill):
- Because of how the metagame works (ie. good players will play neutral in a way so that you are focused on something else)
- Because good players won’t often whiff punishable moves against other players (in the same way they won’t jump repeatedly).
These are things you don’t generally consider because it applies to everything in the game, not just whiff-punishing.
One thing that players should consider is that if they really find stuff like whiff-punishing on reaction in the course of a match beyond their reach, maybe they are just playing on a laggy setup.
It’s funny but using gief in ST, the only way I could beat guile was to hit guiles cr.mk with giefs sweep. That gave a knockdown into jumpin Spd. But it was super hard to do and I couldn’t do it on reaction. The entire matchup was me trying to trade a boom with a sweep or trying to hit guiles cr.mk with my sweep.
That shits still like a 7-3 matchup… pure torture.
unless the recovery is high then you arent really whiff punishing on reaction that much
thats just the way most 2d fighters work
most moves are actually faster
but yeah it mostly depends on recovery frames
im sure if you were constantly buffering the motion for a fast special move and you saw some body whiff something then you could do it on reaction. but in terms of normals punishing thats few and far between rather its anticipation most of the time
besides you dont want to be looking too long or else you’ll get tunnel vision trying to punish the whiff anyways