Glad someone made a post about this. I was intrigued by this statement, too. I know that the Japanese are big on “play against the character, not the player” type approaches, but being the yomi master, I would not have expected Daigo to take such a strong stance against reading your human opponent.
After some thought, though, I think I know what he is trying to say in that excerpt, and my interpretation is similar to what a couple of other people have already described (and like others have said I think that reading the rest of the book or that chapter or whatever would shed a lot of light). Basically, what I think he’s warning against is not only waiting on your opponent to make mistakes but also relying on guessing or prediction in order to win. Obviously, Daigo does use prediction/guessing to win sometimes. A whole lot of what happens in a match of any SF game is at least partly a guess - even something like sticking out a cr. mk that is safe on block is a guess that your opponent is not going to “randomly” SRK or super/ultra at the exact moment you press the button. I believe Daigo’s point, though, is that you can never count on guessing to win any particular game because a guess is always just that - a guess. Plus, the best players playing at their highest possible level are going to be essentially impossible to read and will not have flaws to exploit because they will constantly mix-up the way they attack/defend and will exhibit such strong fundamentals and knowledge of their character and the match-up that they won’t repeat the same mistakes.
His point is probably also related to efficiency in learning and improvement. Say, hypothetically, you’re playing against an opponent who is extremely skilled at SF4 or 3S or whatever but after a few rounds, you realize that his throw game is non-existent. He never goes for throws in obvious situations, he never crouch techs, every time you do a tick throw or dash in and throw or empty jump throw, it’s successful. Daigo would probably say that even though you could beat him down and win if not every game then close to it by throwing constantly and never worrying about the threat of him throwing you, he would advise against taking such an approach, because if you rely on exploiting this weakness, you are wasting an opportunity to learn more about your character and to improve on things that you should be working on (footsies, anti air, hit confirms, combos, meter management… anything) because you’re using strategies that you know won’t usually work and therefore setting yourself up to fail later on.
