^Topic
In general, what would you say is the most important technical difference between the average (Silver) players from the below-average (Super Bronzers like me)?
Sincerely,
Mr. Desperately-trying-to-improve
Bunch of gold rank players ragequitting on them.
They have more LP. Instead of worrying about your league, worry about your performance. Look at each loss and see if there are patterns.
Do you lose consistently against a specific character? Study the matchup.
Do you lose against throw mixups?
Are you getting punished because of too many unsafe things?
If you won the match but dropped a round or had a close call figure out how to improve that.
Once you find a weakness try to improve it, even if you find many weakenesses make sure to focus on one at a time.
That’s what I’m saying, I don’t know exactly what my weaknesses are. I mean, I make plenty of mistakes, but even when I don’t I just always feel like I’m at a disadvantage to my opponents somehow. Like everything they do always has priority over whatever I’m doing.
I’m maining F.A.N.G, btw.
I also wish I knew how to get better with blocking and tech throws.
It’s all so very disheartening.
Difference is they are better with fundamentals. In other words they know how to block, tech throw, anti air. I could probably go to silver by picking any character and just throwing people and anti airing, with no other combos (maybe give me 1 bnb combo).
Practice by going into each game and focusing on one aspect such as Anti-Airing.
Just go in a game and move into a space where your opponent will likely jump in and make sure you punish him everytime. Just use the cr. roundhouse for fang mainly, but learn the use of cr. mk and st light punch. After the anti air you can apply pressure. Don’t use any fireballs, dont use any special moves. Just anti air him until he doesn’t jump anymore. You will lose the game likely, but you are actually winning by mastering your spacing for your anti air.
Next game pick another aspect and master it. Go into a game and block the entire game. See how long you can last by just blocking. If you are below silver I promise i can block or tech for the entire 99 seconds, can you? (of course there is chip dmg in this game).
Dunno.
I’m silver and I’d say that I have a general understanding of the game and often understand what my opponent tries to do, but I lack consistent execution and anti-airs, varied frame traps, hit-confirms and most of all discipline in both training and under high pressure (tend to uppercut or jump in on low life).
I beat most bronze players by reading their approach and stopping it or just rushing them down.
Mostly by anti airing crazy people and tick/dash up throwing hesitant people. Most bronze players dunno what to do once they can’t rely on their strategy anymore since there’s only one thing they know, that works for them and they don’t think about what their opponent is doing.
I lose to the same shit though. People exploiting my ignorance, or me just fucking up on execution.
The first rule of thumb to figuring out your weaknesses is to look at all the times you got hit, then ask yourself:
How did I get hit?
What could I have done to not get hit in that situation?
Why was I in that situation in the first place?
Once you are accustomed to asking and answering those questions comes the actual hard part:
Now once those things are learned (you will never stop using them, they are the baseline questions that even tournament people have to ask themselves)
You will need to refine the questions:
What could I have done better?
The answers to that question will vary per player and per character but some common answers are:
Punish harder when the opponent makes mistakes…
Example:
Your opponent does a blocked sweep to you that is close range.
Let’s say you are using ryu and have full meter and v trigger. Now normally you can ALWAYS just sweep back, but in this case, that’s a weak punish for what you COULD get. If you are close enough, and let’s assume you are, you could actually get cr.mk xx fireball xx super. I don’t know if that’s optimal or not, but it’s much better than just a sweep.
Now take this thinking to Anti airs and wiff punishes as well.
There’s also the fact that in sf5 at least you have huge amounts of choices as to what combos you can do. The combo you do should have/take into account the character you are playing against as well. So like against gief you might want to pick a combo that knocks far away, or against a character with weak wakeup game like claw, you may want to knock them down.
To answer your question, the biggest difference between silver league and bronze league… Well everything is better in silver, but the BIGGEST difference in my mind is that bronze players rarely use grounded anti airs. They either do jump attacks or don’t AA at all, even when the opponent is jumping in very frequently.
At high level you might notice some people getting away with jumps on occasion but you will never see that if an opponent is jumping alot. At higher levels on average it’s possible to get away with 2-3 smart forward jumps a round.
On silver it’s like 4-6
On bronze it’s basically however many you want cause the AA is infrequent and even when it does come it leads to nothing and so, isn’t scary.
Frankly there is none. I find myself getting sandbagged by bronze players and absolutely tearing apart Silver-gold. Right now it means nothing due to how shitty the matchmaking is. Wait a bit when they fix it and actually match you up with guys in your skill bracket.
Thanks for the responses, everyone. Particularly Dime_x, thanks for that in-depth exposé.
While watching high ranking players with key display info turned on, I notice that I definitely hit fierce and roundhouse way more often than they do. Maybe that’s my biggest issue? I certainly get punished for my sweep attempts entirely too often.
This. I have seen silver player thats r terrible and bronze players who r decent. There are a lot of things 2 factor in when u think about it. Lag, rage quitting, also some people have quit playing ranked altogether.
If u r struggling I suggest u go 2 the fang boards and post some match videos or something, or maybe go onto youtube a look up some high lvl fang players
Thanks! And yes, I have been watching a lot of high-level F.A.N.G play, both on CFN and YouTube. But even though I learn a few tricks here and there, I almost wonder if watching such high-level play actually hurts me more than it helps.
I got Rhyllis to join me in a coupke battle lounges last week, hoping i would learn a little, but I bored him to death. I took one round off him, and aside from that he just completely cleaned my clock and I didn’t really walk away having learned anything… 
As a low end gold player, I would say the main thing (other than the rage quitting heh) is willingness to bully people.
I’m about 4300’ish as a Mika and what I do is FORCE THE ISSUE. I like to open by walking forward, dashing forward, taking people out of their comfort zone. No Nash projectiles, no hadoukens, It’s MY game immediately and I want to make the opponent uncomfortable. Walk forward jabs, dash forward jab, something that makes the person want to block and just stop what they’re doing. As Mika I don’t have the greatest tools to stuff zoning other than hard reads, so I want to skip it entirely and make people shy away from everything.
Decide who you play and learn what your characters strength is. Then force your strength on your opponents. If you don’t know what your character’s strength is, look harder.
I’m hovering around 1800lp constantly so I’m on the verge of silver. I think patience is one thing I’m lacking and also I tend to panic and do reckless things in certain situations. I play dhalsim mostly so my struggles are probably different for the rest of the cast. At its core, this really is a character specific question as skill levels result in different strategies and playstyles for each character to emphasize.
Most bronze players I play against apply no pressure. I can just stand on the other side of the screen and pelt them with sonics; and then maybe decide “Okay let’s do this” and rush in on them.
Honestly the real reality is to have a short memory. If you lose; don’t get frustrated and carry that into your next match; you’ll just lose again and again and again. Forgot the fact that you loss and learn why you loss.
Nothing i have ever read in this forum had me laughing like that. You sir are a genius.
As “the average bronze player” watching high level play will do absolutely nothing for you. You may learn a few tricks here and there but just repeating what someone does without knowing why will lead to a quick plateau.
The better approach would be to “check the tapes”.
Commit to the learning process. Do ranked matches until you lose one.
Go to watch that replay immediately and analyse why you lost. Watch/Rewatch situations where you’ve got hit by a jump in or a poke confirm or whatever. Look out if you have a tendency to do the same thing in a certain situation
(for example: I tend to go for meatys too much, which leads to my opponent abusing his inv. reversals. So I mixed it up more and got rewarded with crush counter combos)
When you’ve found a glaring weakness like “wait, im not anti airing at all!!” hit casual mode (or ranked if you dont care about points) and JUST anti air. Punish with a single button if the opponent leads himself wide open but aide from that just walk into jump in range and focus on anti airing. Yes you will lose. But you will gain confidence and routine in anti airing. You may lose points (in ranked) but you’re building up a habit of staying ready for anti airs which is way more valuable.
The same can be applied to other stuff. Get counter hit too much? Block and tech a whole match. FORCE timeouts.
You’ll obviously lose but it will improve defense.
Last but not least, if you cant find such a glaring weakness (very well possible that you havent build the “eye” for that yet, which is normal) upload a video into your characters forum and ask for criticism.
The most important part is actually committing to the learning process, dont just jump from match to match in ranked. When you lose, analyse why. Once you know, find a counter and try to apply that.
I just became Super Silver after speding some hours watching Pro Tour. I jumped quite easily beating opponents with higher LP from 2100 (having to suffer to maintain the category) to 3150. That wasn’t a coincidence, I think that I assimilated some concepts without being aware by analising, in a quite relaxed way, how the pros play.
Right now, I suck even more at executing some Karin combos (instant tenkos in particular), however I play more patient, more smart, but on the top of that, the main reason of my improvement is that my fundamentals have become stronger.
It’s stupid to spend time in the training practicing combos, or even resets! Why an UltraBronce or even a Silver needs to learn how to reset ¿¡For what!?
Just with some basic combos of your character is enough.
Everything is useless if you are not able to trick an average player while doing some mixup or if you don’t know some basic concepts about spacing which is the fastest way to eat cross-ups all the time. Really, the winner is who just can trick his opponent more consistently.
Maining Karin is something that gave a more clear path. She is deep character with so many things to learn, even right now I can’t see the end of the road. She don’t have tricks that you can just spam in ranked matches and win. Ressenhas works at the begining, but after 1200± LP, throwing a random ressenha is a clear suicide. Because of her specials are highly unsafe, her main strengh are her normals, so in order to win, you need to improve your footsies, you need to learn to poke with sense and you need to know how to AntiAir without having a DP. It’s an honest character that rewards your fundamentals, and this is useful for any other character, for any level (you will use them even when you become a Platinum), and even for other fighting games.
- thinking that constantly jumping backwards is a defensive strategy
- random reversals
- thinking that constantly jumping into opponent is an offensive strategy
- random reversals
- using “jump in hp or hk - lp - throw attempt” tactic as the only can opener.
- random reversals
…
and again random reversals.
On top of what everyone said, I would add: don’t throw out random gimmick stuff even if sometimes it works (looking at you random online karin with your full screen overheads). In the end, solid and safe gameplay nets you more wins
Usually the higher the player is the better they understand pressure.
For example, a bronze Ken puts you in the corner > it’s not dangerous.
A super gold Ken puts you in the corner > it’s very dangerous.
A silver Ken puts you in the corner > it’s kinda dangerous.
This game is not scary at all against someone who doesn’t know how to press you on wake up, but it’s extremely scary against someone who does. Two wrong reads and you can be stunned and loose.
Bellow silver level player and low silver tends to be scared to get close a lot more. A LOT of them start with backdash regardless of the matchup for example so they give space for free. Most bronze Ryu oppener is backdash > fireball.
Obviously this is overall not every player is the same.