I got in a real nice set against Sabin’s Dhalsim and Seth and JChensor’s Cammy last night, aka probably the best Dhalsim and Seth in the country and probably one of the top few Cammys. Here’s my report. The first number is an approximation of how I actually did, not necessarily how I think the matchup should go.
V. Sabin’s Dhalsim: 4-6. After having extensively played Cantona and KOG and Zangitan in Japan, Sabin knows this matchup really, really well.
He has all the spacings down extremely well, especially the range where he’s right outside of my green hand and can do back+mk xx flame or back throw on reaction (I think his choice of which to use depended largely on where he was on screen, like if he was near the corner he wanted to throw me behind him). It took me a while to get my own green hand range right and even longer to figure out how to get into it. Like, to go from just outside my green hand range to just inside it was really hard because he uses Sim’s back+rh, back+short, and back+mk so well. He really didn’t want me in that range for fear of random ex hand or lariat or spd.
Most annoyingly for me, he also has all of Gief’s mixup options down really well too. Usually when I play, even against very good players, I land my 720s like probably 1/2-2/3 of the time I go for them, but the whole night against Sabin, maybe like 30 games against his Sim, I think I landed ultra 3 times. At the same time, he caught me in a bunch of his ultra mixups; it took a bunch of games before I started guessing right a respectable amount of the time. He’s really good at predicting what’s coming next.
He has the whole wheel of options thing totally scoped out too. His jump mp beats my jumps but my early jump jab beats his jump mp, his just slide and low fierce beat my jump attacks including jump jab but my empty jump beats those, his stand rh beats my empty jumps but my short jump and jump mk beat his stand rh, his jump mp beat my short jump and jump mk, etc. His super and ex up flame beat or trades with all my jumps. If he has no meter, it’s just a straight guessing game, and if he does have meter then I need to be more careful. Each individual guess is weighted in his favor, but of course each time he guesses right he only deals so much damage and each time I guess right I deal big damage and (almost more importantly) push him backwards into the corner. Having played Dhalsim for a while, I knew this wheel of options for the most part, although I don’t think I ever used ex up flame as well as Sabin does. But like I said, he’s very good at predicting, so I had a tough time.
He also reacts very well. Several times I tried far st rh and he hit me with ultra on reaction even before I could recover. I can’t do jumps from certain ranges because he reacts with back+mp xx fire or back+rh at those ranges every time. The result is that the match has to be more about prediction and spacing than tricks.
I think the real problem for me was not capitalizing enough when I did get in close, which honestly happened at least once in most matches. That should be a killer situation for him, but I let him get off the hook by not mixing him up well enough and not completing a bunch of low short combos. Sabin said that he saw so much crazy stuff while playing in Japan that he pretty much knows all the setups out there and doesn’t get flustered if something big or crazy happens. And it’s true. Usually I can tell when my opponents get mindfucked and that happens with some regularity, but at no point did I feel like Sabin was flustered at all.
I actually thought I would do a little worse than I did considering that Sabin is the first very high level Sim I’ve ever fought against (I’ve fought against good Sims and used to use Sim myself, but never played against a top tier Sim user), he’d just come back from playing the best Giefs in the world, and I’d just gotten back into the tourney scene a little more than a month ago. Sabin thinks this matchup is just about even with maybe a slight advantage to Gief, and I tend to agree. I think I’ll do just that when I get my combos and mixups and ranges down a little better. I know that sounds kind of ridiculous (what, all I have to do is improve every aspect of my game, that’s not a big deal right!), but I don’t think I’m that far off from getting there. This matchup is all about knowing ranges and reading your opponent, and right now Sabin does that better than I do.
V. Sabin’s Seth: 2-8. Sabin is the only Seth player I’ve ever played against. I played against him half a year ago a little bit so this was kind of a rematch, but it’s been so long for either of us (after all, Sabin’s been in Japan and hasn’t been able to use Seth in quite a while) that I felt this was really more of a learning or re-learning experience. He missed some combos at first, I didn’t know my ranges at first, etc. I took the first couple matches, then he took like seriously 10 in a row, and then I took a couple more.
Essentially I want to be in one of two ranges. The first is outside of his jump fierce range where my stand strong beats it. If I do stand strong there it beats his fierce and he can’t do anything about it, and it’s not like he can even mix up the timing on it; the jump fierce just loses. There I can build meter and ultra doing kick lariat and focuses through his booms (assuming he doesn’t have super or ultra, in which both lariat and focuses will earn me a trip to Seth’s belly). The second range is right next to him (obviously). Seth has more ways out of Gief’s shenanigans than anyone else, but his escapes are more annoying for the post-escape positioning they set up than for the damage they do, and if I do guess right that can be the end of the round.
Where I don’t want to be is mid range, because it’s very hard to get through Seth’s defense there. Lariating or focusing through a fireball earns me a stand fierce, jumping toward over a fireball earns me a jump fierce, and even neutral jumping over a fireball earn me a jump fierce if he’s spaced right. And if he has super or ultra, then again, any of those options buys me a trip to Seth’s belly.
So, how to get around this? A couple ways. The most important imo is just bulldogging (ie, walking forward, blocking a fb, walking forward, blocking again, etc). Seth can’t hit me with fierce, jump fierce, super, or ultra that way. It takes a long time to get in that way and Seth can mix it up with st fierce, which is much harder to block on reaction, but if he starts doing st fierce then you can start jumping toward, doing ex hand or lariat, or focusing, since again the damage output differential is so gigantic that doing unsafe things can make sense. If at any point while at mid range you see Seth neutral jump without there being a boom in front of you, you can do a couple different things. One is throw out an immediate cr. mp to beat or trade with jump fierce or to get no advantage if he just empty jumps. If you expect him to empty jump for fear of your cr. mp, do antiair stand rh, cr. rh, or ex hand instead.
To be honest it’s hard and annoying to get through Seth’s mid range wall. Several times I got stunned while trying to beat it and lots of times I’d lost half my health bar before getting through. This is the biggest reason Gief loses to Seth imo.
So, what to do about Seth’s ultra? I think the best idea is to just pretend like it’s not there. If he throws a fireball and you do anything to get over or through it, you’re gonna eat an ultra for like 15% life. But if you try to bulldog through Seth’s fireballs and st fierce and jump fierce, you’ll end up eating some damage at least via chip if not through hits, and then you’ll probably still eat ultra later anyway. So why not just take the ultra without also taking chip damage and hits? Jump at a range where he can’t hit you with jump fierce, and if he does ultra, ok, and if he doesn’t, ok, he just gave you free positioning. I don’t know, that’s my current take on it.
I had the same problems with Sabin’s Seth up close that I did with his Sim, that is, I didn’t take advantage of the situation well enough. I cornered him and then let him out of the corner a bunch of times and ended up losing those rounds instead of taking them. I missed combos and I didn’t mix him up enough. I feel that if I’d done those things, they would have been worth at least one extra win out of ten.
The thing is that I wasn’t exactly sure how to deal with Seth’s wakeup (which is stupid of me since I spent so much time trying to figure that out for every character over the summer). I tried to trade fierce headbutt with his dp, which would’ve been sweet since it would have been an auto-dizzy on the counterhit. Doesn’t work though, at least not from the ranges I tried it from. I know short knees on his shoulder works o-s green hand is tasty, but I didn’t count on the fact that Seth can do ex spd when I land and basically catch whatever I try after the knees (including meaty, throw, or command grab). Backdashing probably works, but backdashing loses to dp and in any case that means I’m giving up my advantage. So I need to take better advantage of up-close situations, but I’m not sure I can do THAT much better in meaty situations specifically.
Sabin thinks this matchup is probably 3-7. I think it’s at least as good as that for Gief, maybe even 3.5-6.5 or so. The ten or so straight he got on me were full of me trying to rush in finding a jump toward normal to beat his jump fierce, and I lost entire matches that way. I lost a couple more rounds to his footsies, which shouldn’t happen cause Seth’s footsies are kinda crappy and which, I think, won’t happen once I learn his footsie normals and ranges (I had to ask him what buttons he was pressing for his normals, that’s how unfamiliar with them I was). In the end I think Gief wins up close, wins in footsies, loses at mid range, wins at max range when Seth doesn’t have super/ultra, and loses at max range when Seth has super/ultra. At no point did I get the impression that this match is anything like unwinnable, only that it’s a loss for Gief and that I didn’t know it very well. Like virtually all matchups in SF4, I expect that after a while it’ll end up more even.
V. JChensor’s Cammy: 6-4. This is also the first time I’ve used Gief against Cammy (I’ve played JChensor’s Cammy before, but only as Dhalsim and Gouken). I know some Cammy basics, like dive kick set ups, post-fadc tricks, and hooligan setups, so JChensor didn’t really go for shenanigans much because he knows Gief can eat most of them with punch lariat and command grabs.
My default gameplan when playing Zangief is to use my footsies to get in, push the opponent toward the corner, or knock the opponent down so that I can start my command grabs and meaties and whatever other nonsense I have. If I know my opponent’s character’s footsie normals and ranges well, I usually do well playing footsies with them. Suffice to say, I did not know Cammy’s normals well (like with Seth, I had to ask JChensor which moves were which buttons for Cammy). I still did ok in footsies, but JChensor knows Cammy’s and Gief’s footsies well (Gief is his backup) and he plays footsies well in any case, so he went about even or so in footsies with me.
Cammy’s buffered st mp xx drill and cr. mk drill were real nice. Another thing that was really hot was that he kept walking into my footsie range, focusing, and then backdashing. The result was that more than a few times my buffered short/jab xx ex hand touched his focus thereby triggering my ex hand, but he backdashed away from and through my ex hand and got a free punish. That’s a huge hole in my usual footsie game (and one that thankfully few other characters, if any, can take advantage of; I don’t think anyone else has Cammy’s combination of great walk speed, backdash speed, and backdash length), and it means that I can’t mindlessly buffer all day like I usually do, resulting in less dangerous footsies. I tried random ex hand on reaction to his focuses, and it worked once or twice, but another once or twice it paid for my ticket to dp xx fadc pain town. Anyway, this is something I’m sure I’ll do better at once I get more familiar with Cammy’s footsie options, but that focus backdash thing could be a real annoyance for me.
I kept trying to safe jump her dp since I know it’s possible, but it’s hard even in training mode let alone a real match, so I gave that up after a while and just went to doing short knees option-select green hand on her to stuff or whiff over her dp. The o-s worked several times on her whiffed dps and moved me immediately over to her for a free punish, so that’s cool. The proper location for doing meaty jump short is a little unclear so it took me a while to remember that you have to jump from farther away than you do against most characters.
So that’s basically how the match went. We played footsies, I tried to capitalize on knockdowns and messed up a bunch of times, and he didn’t really capitalize on knockdowns much because he’s rightly worried about pressing on Zangief too much.
After we played, JChensor said what he’s most worried about is a turtle Zangief, and another good Gief and good Cammy I know confirmed that that’s how they play slash are worried about Gief playing. There are situations in certain matchups here I turtle, but in general I’m wary about that because most characters typically have ways to make it annoying, like by doing chip damage if nothing else. But oh well, next time I’ll try that out.
JChensor thinks that Gief is one of Cammy’s worst matchups. If I played wrongly yesterday then I guess I can’t really talk about that, but just as far as how I played yesterday, it didn’t seem lopsided. Even if playing defense is more effective, I can’t imagine that it’s a bigger win than 6-4 for Gief.