Hey, if you can react to a single attack with either a combo or nothing, more power to you, but my guess is that you’re like everyone else and you can’t. You can probably react to whether jumping fierce to standing strong works, I can at least, but by the time you’ve thrown out standing strong you’ve already committed too much, since if it isn’t connecting, you can’t do anything else. And this is just for jump ins, there’s no way you can start and verify a standing strong into ex hand, it’s just not doable. So yes, verifying is extremely important.
The only time you can do the close strong/forward normals is when you’re right next to the opponent, which means you actually got in. You cannot gamble that your close strong/forward will hit, because if you mess up, you get punished and have to find your way in with one fewer ex bar (which is extremely important in lots of matchups). Not to mention that by pressing those normals you lose a pretty serious opportunity cost. Zangief needs to be all about keeping his options open and dangerous up close, and if you throw out a close strong/forward, you’re being neither. You’re losing the ability to tick into spd with jabs/shorts, the ability to verify into a combo, the ability to verify that your combo is not hitting and try spd or leaving a hole for the opponent to start jumping that you can punish with a further combo, etc.
Also, if you do jumping fierce to close standing forward and it doesn’t connect, some characters will punish you. Close standing forward is -3 on block, just enough for some characters to jab you into big combos, and if you cancel into ex green hand on block, you’re in even worse shape.
The close strong/forward combos are really only usable when you’re certain your attack is going to hit, and you’re only certain when your opponent gives you an opportunity to punish something big (like a whiffed ultra). But if you get a chance to punish something, you have better options than that. You’re almost certainly not going to be able to land a jump in combo on punishment, so your combo is reduced to standing strong/forward xx ex hand for 250 damage. You could have done fierce spd for 240 (which builds meter instead of using it), close 360+k for 200 damage and excellent post-grab positioning (while building meter), ex close 360+k for 220 damage and great positioning, level 3 focus xx any command grab for damage in the mid 300s, buffer into super for 500 damage, buffer into level 1 ultra for 400, or buffer into level 2 ultra for 600.
The only situation where jumping fierce/roundhouse, close standing strong/forward xx ex hand makes sense is if you’re already jumping and you’ve already pressed or you’re just about to press fierce/roundhouse and you see your opponent whiff something he shouldn’t (like a fireball or crouching kick or whatever). You know your attack is gonna hit, and it has to be an actual combo, so you might as well use this one. This is extremely rare.
I’ve almost never used strong/forward xx ex hand in serious play and almost never seen anyone else use it either. Why’s that? Because verification (ie making sure your combo is hitting, and if it’s not, keeping open other options) is most important when just throwing something out, and because you have better options when you know for sure that you can hit your opponent.
Like I said, I’ll update the combo list with those two combos, but just for the sake of completeness. They’re not very good combos for serious play.
Giving up guaranteed damage for a tick into spd is very much not a good idea. Your opponent can jump, backdash, or reversal special attack out of your tick, which means that there’s a good chance he’s going to escape. Again, you can’t verify the jump in to make sure you can press the close standing strong, so you’re just gonna press standing strong anyway, and if it’s blocked, you’re at -2 and the opponent can totally escape.
So how do you ever land tick into spd? You have to make the opponent afraid to try to escape. As above, if you’re doing crouching jabs and the opponent is blocking, you can leave a tiny hole after your jabs for the opponent to jump out of, but while he’s still in his prejump frames (different characters take from 3 to 6 frames to actually get into the air after pressing up, during which time you can’t block), do another couple jabs/shorts into ex hand to take advantage of the fact that he’s no longer blocking to punish him. If you think the opponent is mashing dragon punch while in blockstun, start comboing with crouching shorts, since the opponent can’t both input the dragon punch motion and hold down-back to block crouching shorts. If you think the opponent will dash back or jump, stop jab/shorting and press standing roundhouse.
The close standing strong to spd thing won’t help you with any of this.
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