how do u get somebody to play footsies with you in a match as a laura player
You don’t. Most players spend the match at arms length from you because they are terrified of your instant damage moves or long block strings. And you’ll lose if you try, because of her stubby normals.
Laura is not a character that does footsies. You gets in and destroys. Make that your mission.
Even though her buttons are short and stubby, her empty buffers are some of the best in the game, imo. Her lp elbow is the perfect fire and forget special so you can abuse her cr mk. Her cr mp combos into ex fireball or mp elbow and you can whiff punish tons of moves with that button. St lk is also amazing
yeah i get alot of mileage out of her st hk and st hp in whiff punishing.
Kind of wrong. The way to get people to play footsies with you is to not be a gold jumping bastard, and instead of try and setup your fireball to get in. Once you start to throw your fireball most people will try to stop you from doing that and that’s when you get to play footsies.
But if all you are doing is jumping and dashing around trying to get that lucky break, no footsies will be played against you.
So basically if you start to back up, people will start to come forward, at least the better players will.
But lauras best game isn’t in her footsies per se because her footsies are short ranged. But as Los said, her reward for correct footsies is pretty good.
She doesn’t have the walkspeed or the range to play footsies like Karin or Chun, but the fact most of her normals make her move forward compensates for that. Buttons like st. HK, st. MK or cr. MK are very good pokes to play with.
I took this to heart. Been trying this a bit more and I am getting better results even after a few days of practice.
Kinda missed this.
You have to look for patterns in your enemy’s defense, and constantly ask yourself questions about the round.
Did he tech the throw? If yes, next time try a shimmy. Did he take the throw? Then keep throwing him until he starts to tech.
Is he respecting your plus frames? If yes, try to squeeze in a command grab. Next time he will be more likely to jump and your frame traps will do the rest.
Is he very buttonsy? That means he’s afraid of your dashes and you can start to buffer specials into your normals to catch a limb. If he throws out lots of heavies you can try to jump one of them. Is he patient and tries to react to what you do? Then you can set up fireballs and walk him into the corner.
Same goes for your defense.
How does he close the gap on you? If he’s jumping a lot, focus on anti airing and don’t go for a lot of fireballs/heavy buttons. Is he dashing a lot? Reacting to that is kinda hard, but you can prevent it by staying outside of his dash range and sticking out your buttons a bit more.
He knocked you down. Block. Is his meaty timing correct? If not, keep that in mind and be ready with a wake up st lp, cr mp xx ex fireball/vtrigger so you can shift the momentum back in your favour.
Are you in a throw loop situation? It’s really hard to defend against that, but you can try to backdash out of it. A good amount of times you’ll flip out and if he has commited to a button you can punish his recovery.
That’s like a general mindset you can apply to every character. Mixups and resets come later imo
Thanks for the input. I’ll take this to heart for the next one I go to, and just some regular matches at home. 
I got destroyed by the way. Everybody was really cool, which I found surprising and supportive. There were a few twitch celebrities too there as well. But I was outclassed by a wide margin. At the time of the tournament, I was a nothing 4800 gold player, probably the lowest ranked person there. But I learned a lot in a short while… despite not winning a single match in during casuals. 
Mostly, my ground game improved. I’m getting better at approaching with out being a bouncing monkey all the time. I shot up from 4800 to about 5800 in a day as a result. I probably could have gone higher but my daughter told me ‘all done’ and we had to go get some ice cream (she is 1.5 years old). I also broke a plateau with playing turtling styles, which are my current Kryptonite.
Anyways, I think I’m going to try to hit Wednesday Night Fights at E-Sports Gaming Arena (Santa Ana, CA) about once a month and just go compete. Even if I do badly, just playing peeps 5000 points above you just to know how a player like that fights does lightyears for leveling up more than 5 hours of playing ranked at home.
@thisRalf
I can help you improve your Laura play if you want
I improved immensely by playing against my friend and his gameplay
I can imitate it and help you out like I’m doing @TWINBLADES
Let me know I don’t mind playing long sets
Out of curiosity, what style is that? The “Ryu wall 101” Twin’s crowed about in General?
Similar to thisRalf really defensive players can give me trouble too. And its hard to get practice against it outside of BLs because the online default is usually yolo-aggression (at least where I’m at). I got lucky and ran into a really defensive Dictator a couple times online. Those fights were educational.
Wanna try it?
Be happy to. If I somehow do better than Twinblades I can troll with that. If I do worse, I can live with that. 
Lining up times for me is a pain in the ass sometimes but if we can ever lounge it up I’ll gladly take the opportunity to learn.
lmk whenever
just tag me on SRK
For people who played SFV more than me in the past months, what do you think about Abigail and Menat MUs? I’m under the impression that the first one is manageable, but that the latter is a nightmare for Laura.
Haven’t played any Menat’s that have her down yet, but I think it’s like Dhalsim but a bit better. Like always, getting in is a struggle, but she’s pretty free on wakeup. Correctly guess one jump in and she’s basically done.
Abigail, idk, I find his hit box to be weird visually and his armor can be annoying. I fight him like I fight birdie: clap when you can and force him to rush in. The damage is insane though. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve basically won the match only to eat a combo into his super lol.
I thought Menat could be annoying because she could cancel claps and still get the ball out to trap you but I just realized that if the ball clashes with clap it won’t go out.
Good point about Abi. He’s indeed very close to Birdie in terms of MU.
Abigail brings out the worst out of people. They start doing random runs from half screen and yolo sweeps…and it works!
Other than that, I don’t think Abigail is a big problem against laura. Gotta be careful when he’s in vtrigger because he has armour on frame 1.
Right now, Menat seems like a lesser version of sim. Though I feel that with time she will be more optimized and harder to face
More on Menat:
I do think when people get more comfortable with her various anti airs (she has one for nearly every situation, it’s just knowing the distance)it will be a bit tougher, but right now I’ve been scrubbing through them by predicting her sweep orb (for lack of a better term), jumping over and murdering. You might take a few orbs to the face on the way, but once you get in you can pretty much do whatever you want. Also, I find her overhead is particularly easy to react to. Don’t know the frames but it’s slow and the little step is an obvious visual cue. Her only real reversal is her super so, like scrubby dictators, they are a little more abt to wake up with it than some other characters. Her v-reversal is also one of the better ones in the game so expect that often. I do, however, think she could be an Akuma killer in the right hands with her reflect and ex soul throw that goes through his air fireballs.
I have a hard time understanding where I can press buttons when Menat does her orb toss and recall stuff. Sometimes I can interrupt her but many times even if there’s a gap I get frame trapped.
I feel that overall you want to put pressure on her when she has the orb out because she loses the ability to zone you out with st. MP/HP, but that’s also when almost every one of her normals becomes a frame trap.
P.S. also since her orb st. HP has no hurtbox (why Capcom?), you absolutely can’t throw fireballs against her from anywhere but max range as long as orb is not out.