I really agree with the talk about neutral throws here. Not only is it important for your offensive strategy, but all too often I get neutral thrown myself and want to kick myself for not teching but I’m almost never thinking of or playing for tech opportunities because I’m going for big damage throws. I’m sure using more neutral would vastly improve my game.
I’ve been doing a bunch of practice with using normal greenhand for fireballs and finally fought agains a decent Sagat today (there aren’t as many in the wild on the EC as you’d think) and had moderate successwith it, however I wa curious if other have had any long term success with NORML GH in the Sagat fight. The timing feelsa bit weird because of the ts speed and the height, but it worked for me and helped me keep pre4ssure on, one solid gh ‘throw’ setup and he gets timid throwing them out right outside of s.rh range.
- :bluu:
CHAR OCT 5 NOV 5
Abel 7-3 6-4
Akuma 4-6 4-6
Blanka 4-6 4-6
Boxer 6-4 6-4
Chun 6-4 6-4
Claw 5-5 5-5
Dan dunno 7-3
Dhalsim 6-4 5-5
Dictator 5-5 5-5
Fei dunno 6-4
Fuerte 5-5 4-6
Gen dunno dunno
Gouken 6-4 6-4
Guile 5-5 5-5
Honda 5-5 5-5
Ken 6-4 6-4
Rose dunno 5-5
Rufus 6-4 6-4
Ryu 4-6 4-6
Sagat 3-7 3-7
Sakura dunno dunno
Seth 3-7 3-7
Viper 5-5 5-5
Zangief 5-5 5-5
Changes: Abel to 6-4 instead of 7-3, Dan to 7-3 instead of dunno, Dhalsim to even instead of 6-4, Fei to 6-4 instead of dunno, Fuerte to 4-6 instead of even, and Rose to 5-5 instead of dunno (although maybe this should be 6-4).
Is this chart based of what you think or from some magazine?? Just wondering cause I’ve been looking for an up to date one.
Heh this is just my opinion, although I’d like to think it’s not that far from reality.
CHAR OCT 5 NOV 4 NOV 7
Abel 7-3 6-4 6-4
Akuma 4-6 4-6 4-6
Blanka 4-6 4-6 4-6
Boxer 6-4 6-4 6-4
Chun 6-4 6-4 6-4
Claw 5-5 5-5 5-5
Dan dunno 7-3 7-3
Dhalsim 6-4 5-5 5-5
Dictator 5-5 5-5 5-5
Fei dunno 6-4 6-4
Fuerte 5-5 4-6 6-4
Gen dunno dunno 6-4
Gouken 6-4 6-4 6-4
Guile 5-5 5-5 5-5
Honda 5-5 5-5 5-5
Ken 6-4 6-4 6-4
Rose dunno 5-5 6-4
Rufus 6-4 6-4 6-4
Ryu 4-6 4-6 4-6
Sagat 3-7 3-7 3-7
Sakura dunno dunno dunno
Seth 3-7 3-7 3-7
Viper 5-5 5-5 5-5
Zangief 5-5 5-5 5-5
Changes: Fuerte to 6-4 from 4-6 (and maybe to 5-5 in the future) and Gen to 6-4 from dunno (and maybe to 5-5 in the future).
Friday night I played in the live-streamed Specialists exhibition at Cicada’s house and I thought I’d write up something about it because some of the matchups were really interesting. There was Alex Valle @Ryu, Yeb @Gen, Keno @Balrog, JChensor @Cammy, Shane aka aka Shizza aka WhaWhat (I’m not really sure which he prefers at this point) @Chun, Kai aka Happytang @Fuerte, ShadyK @Akuma, and me @Zangief. You can watch at least part of it here. Most of this is just gonna be me trying to digest my performance, so sorry if it comes out rambling.
v. Yeb’s Gen: 5-5.
This was my first ever set against any Gen player ever. I’ve seen Yeb a few times now but never actually played him, and each time I’ve seen him play I’ve come away with a little more basic info (and when I say basic, I mean really basic; I didn’t even know that Gen had an overhead until recently). So this was a really fun set because I had to learn from extreme scratch. Yeb’s a really nice guy and coached me quite a bit, which was very helpful. I would have been really confused about some of the things otherwise.
Who knew that a dive off the opposite wall into the diagonal kick hits as a crossup? Definitely not me. I didn’t realize that his standing mk moved him forward or that its range was so nice. I assumed that his jump attacks ate lariat. I didn’t realize that his crouching fierce was such a nice antiair in some cases. I didn’t know that his jump roundhouse can hit twice like Chun’s jump fierce and that I have to block both high. I had no idea what crouching mk even looked like. I figured all divekicks were unsafe on block, but from far enough away they’re safe even against ultra. I had no idea that his punch ultra could beat late crossups effectively. As you can imagine, the first several matches didn’t go very well.
But after that I started doing better. Basically my goal and implementation of it was pretty ordinary: bully Gen into moving backwards or getting knocked down by setting up a wall of grounded footsies, jumping mixups, and antiair lariats. Gief’s standing mp and jab/shorts xx hand are good against Gen’s footsies (like against most characters). Gen’s crouching fierce has a sick hitbox at the hand that beats Gief’s jump mk but from the same range loses to Gief’s jump fierce because with fierce Gief’s hand reached beyond Gen’s fist to his vulnerable back; once that guessing game is established, the addition of empty jump spd starts working as well. Lariats work well as antiairs, albeit usually in trades and mostly if you wait to press the punches until he’s pretty far down in his jump arc. Gief’s normal antiairs like cr. mp and far st roundhouse are too slow to work well on reaction and he just doesn’t jump high enough for close st jab to work either. When Gen is knocked down, you can safe jump splash or knees, and non-crossup safe jump o-s hand worked really well against backdashes (just regular hand, it knocks him out of the airborne part of his backdash).
Yeb said that he goes back and forth on his estimation of the Gief matchup, so that sometimes he thinks Gen wins, sometimes he thinks Gief wins, and sometimes he thinks it’s even. From playing against him for an hour or so, I’d have to agree. Sometimes I blew him up, sometimes he blew me up, and sometimes (mostly, really) the games were fairly even. When he won it was mostly because he played good footsies and landed his shenanigans and when I won it was for basically the same reasons. Regardless, it didn’t seem lopsided either way… My 5-5 result includes the first games we played where I was learning basics, but once I’d learned things I had a slight advantage in wins.
v. Kai’s Fuerte: 9-1
I’d never played a good Fuerte before either. He switched to Fuerte at about the same time I originally stopped playing, and this is the first time I’ve gotten a chance to play him since I came back. I assumed that Gief v Fuerte was either even or a loss for Gief because I’ve heard and read a lot of talk about that, but that’s not how our matches went at all.
In my view this match has two phases that have to be played differently: when you’re standing and when you’re knocked down. When I was up, I basically played the walk forward game. Walk forward, jabs/shorts xx hands and strongs and roundhouses, no jumps, react to what he does, look for a place to knock him down. If he’s playing runaway, just take it slow and easy, try to react while pushing him towards the corner. Once he gets near the corner you have to expect that he’ll eventually try a wall jump to get out. Don’t follow him all the way into the corner, keep a range where you’ll be able to react to or predict a wall jump with jump headbutt or whatever.
After you get a knockdown, feel free to pressure him. Worst he can do is ex run to immediate splash or tortilla. Ex run is throwable, but in general rely more on neutral throws than command grabs; if he does a guacamole to get out of the throw, you’ll recover in time from your neutral throw to still punish his recovery, but if you did command grab he’ll recover in time to punish you instead. When he gets ultra, you can still do a meaty jab/short, but throws become a little riskier because they lose to ultra.
When you’re knocked down and he wants to play meaty pressure, it’s just a plain ol’ guessing game. He has run-splash (which requires high block, dash, focus, or ex hand escape), run-grab (dash or jump), slide (low block, focus, ex hand), nothing (nothing), etc. Be careful about jumping because it loses to everything but run-grab. It even loses to nothing, because he can do ultra or guacamole on reaction to your jump. If you block a splash high, you get free spd. Take this phase easy, understand that you’ll lose most guesses, and make sure that when you do guess right you make him pay for it with spd or ultra or something.
But playing meaty games is risky for Fuerte against Gief. He has the advantage on each individual guess, for sure, but the damage output and intake differential means that you as Gief only have to guess right once out of every 3 or so guesses to keep things even. Instead what he might do is just run away. If he does then your whole game will be about the first phase.
Kai kept expecting me to jump because he really wanted to land ultra because that’s Fuerte’s only really damaging option against Gief (the run-stop-fierce loop is really hard to set up on Gief). The best way for Fuerte to land ultra is to punish Gief’s jump, but after he punished my jump early on with ultra, I didn’t jump nearly at all and didn’t get hit with ultra once. I could have jumped out of some of his run-grabs instead of just dashing back and forth (he can pilot run-grab to beat a dash, but can’t do it to beat a jump), but I’d rather take that extra minimal damage than leave myself open to lose 40% life from Fuerte’s ultra.
I don’t think these matches are representative of how the matchup really goes; I think if I played a bigger set against Kai in a more serious situation he’d probably do a lot better. But I don’t think the result was entirely wrong either, definitely not so wrong that it should actually be a loss for Gief. I think it’s probably a slight win for Gief, and today I talked with other high level Giefs and Fuertes who secretly agree.
v. Alex Valle’s Ryu: 1-9.
Since I came back a couple months ago, I’ve played Alex’s Ryu a bunch of times. My average win rate against him has probably been about 4-6, although there have been some nights and even consecutive weeks where I’ve come out ahead as well. But last night he threw up a buzz saw on me to the tune of something like 20-3 or 20-4. Some of the individual rounds and games that I lost were close, but then again he also perfected me a couple of times. After the first few games, the final result wasn’t really in doubt.
A big part of this is just that Valle is extremely good. The wall he puts up with Ryu is really strong and his footsies, guesses, and reactions are second to none. I had a really hard time getting in or knocking him down, and when I accomplished that, he guessed out correctly a very high percentage of the time. His use of low medium kick, low strong, fireball, st short as a fake fireball, and a couple random other normals like st rh and st jab were very precise and took up space very well.
But another big part is that I didn’t play as well as I could anyway. This came out in a few ways.
Probably my biggest problem was insisting on trying to play a footsie battle. In general I feel strong playing footsies and in the past I’d done well with them even against Valle. I could react well to random fireballs with ex hand, react to whiffed normals with toe xx hand, and I knew the ranges well enough to be proactive as well. But Valle’s using standing short for a fake fireball now, which really throws a wrench into my attempts to react with ex hand, and he’s gotten the ranges down for green hand and my normals extremely well. He tries to only press punch for buffered fireball out of low medium kick when he sees low medium kick connect, so I can’t really block low mk and then ex hand through the fb.
So I have to rethink how I deal with Ryu’s footsies, but really I have to rethink how much I even want to play footsies. I’d begun relying on footsies nearly to the exclusion of everything else, but that’s not a plan for victory in this matchup; Ryu’s footsies are too good and Zangief is too good at dealing damage up close for me to concentrate on footsies instead of being up close. Instead of playing a safe spacing game, I think I should spend my time really trying to get in and only use footsies as one of my tools in doing that. Alex is really good at making seem like jumping is impossible, but he told me he thinks I need to jump more. Gief wins a trade with dragon punch when Ryu has no meter, landing a jump-in leads to a huge payoff (damage plus knockdown and meaty mixup), and even having a jump-in blocked leads to a nice mixup. I’m gonna have to figure out a way to force him to let me jump more, and I think making him concentrate more than he should on footsies and fireballs might be one way to do that.
When I got close, I was entirely too predictable. I even knew while we were playing that I was being predictable, but I don’t know, it was like I couldn’t apply that conclusion (see next para). I must have gone for low short into immediate mixup like 10 times, and 9 of them he dragon punched out. I should have stopped going for a mixup there, right? Right, except I didn’t. Honestly, if I had played more effectively up close I probably could have doubled my win count. Not that getting 6 or so wins is acceptable when the opponent has 20, but I need to improve everywhere I can after all.
The worst thing about the set was that I eventually began to start shutting down. For the first time I can recall since I started playing seriously and at all well I became discouraged and stopped doing things I normally do automatically. I consistently screwed up punishments by both punishing with the wrong things (ie low short xx ex hand instead of ultra) or not punishing at all, even against easy stuff like whiffed dragon punches. I’ve always had terrible execution and tended to pick characters who don’t require huge combos or hard inputs, but that’s not really what this was about. It was about me leaving behind the even-headed analytical play style I’ve built and reverting to a less effective emotional style, and my confusion and discouragement came out in more confused, turtle-y play. It got to a point where I almost felt like I was playing in lag, so that I even had a hard time walking up and just blocking fireballs on reaction. I think that last night was an aberration as far as this response goes, but then, I can’t remember ever having been basted like this either. It’s not something I’ll let happen again.
I’d become complacent in this matchup because I was satisfied with the fact that I was going evenish with Alex Gosh Dang Valle and isn’t that fancy exclamation point, etc. But Alex didn’t view it that way, he worked to find ways to get better at it. That’s a good lesson, and one I’ll take to heart. Most things, including Street Fighter, come very easily for me, and that breeds a complacency that just doesn’t work well when I want to be very good at something. Eventually I run up against someone for whom the thing comes easily as well, and if that person is also very motivated, then complacency is ineffective. Time to stop being complacent.
Good write up. Thanks for taking the time to do it.
Yeah Valle has the best Ryu IMO (At least in the states anyway)…We play a lot and I know he gives you trouble… Last timewe played which was this pass weekend it was 20-18 him but b4 that it was 20-15 me… I would have to see those matches to see what u were doing wrong… but you should never get complacent, each time I played Valle and I beat him he comes back next time a lot better but that goes the same for me. Being complacent is most US players down fall IMO. But anyway’s sounds like you just had an off night so just step it up next time around.
What’s the best way to punish Gouken’s wake up ex demon flip? I tried headbutt but that didn’t seem to connect… maybe my timing was just off. It seems that he can escape for free with it. Often times, if I try to splash, it seems he would land with a cross up. I haven’t tried the cr.jab o-s sweep yet though. Maybe I’ll go home tonight and see what I can come up with in training mode.
I think his ex demon flip has enough start-up invincibility frames to get him off the ground safely every time. So, meaty attacks on wake up are not going to beat this move. Instant air headbutts will beat this move and all of its follow-ups (including air focus) if gouken is performing it as a wake-up reversal, but I think you’d need a good read on your opponent before this can be a viable option. Mixing it up between the three meaty options in the o-s guide (Crouching jab o-s sweep; Cr. short o-s sweep; Throw) is your best bet, since you can punish his ex-demon flip follow ups with either ex green hand or lp SPD once he’s whiffed over you. Adding the instant air headbutt into the mix creates more guesswork for an already complicated meaty situation. These o-s sweeps are not that hard, and they really help Gief out against Gouken.
Im trying to learn how to do a standing spd, not a zangief player but just curious. Any tips on how i should be practicing the motion, where should i start on the stick so i dont jump. tips?
Yeah, I’m starting to practice the o-s sweep. The timing takes a little getting used to so that I’ll still combo into my jabs if they block or get hit. I think I’m pretty good with the o-s SPD, o-s hand, and o-s lariat now. They really help on the wake up game.
As for standing SPD. Just start do a yoga flame motion and end with up and punch or kick. You’ve got a lot of time to push up and the attack button before you get off the ground. It’s really easy to do in SFIV. With the short cuts, you can even just do the old school tiger knee motion/Fei Long chicken wing motion and it’ll come out.
I’m sorry, but what does o-s stand for?
I agree that Gief wins over Fuerte. Fuerte just can’t do enough damage to win out. Fuerte has to guess right like 15 times to win a round, but gief can land ultra (which i land more often vs. fuerte than anyone else) and a couple of combos for the win.
Anyhooo i just got an xbox - playing matches online feels good. Come get me 
Ya but elf completely controls the pace of this match up I think. We dont have to take away all your life every round I’ve timed out countless giefs its kinda sad really. Its all just opinions though Ima elf player sooo of course I’m gonna be biased and just go off all of the scrubby giefs I destroy online.
Good fuertes that know how to zone are very tough.
I’m just curious why Cammy isn’t in that match-up chart? As a Cammy main/Geif second(helluva combo lol) was wondering if that was easy for Geif, even or in Cammy’s favor. For me, it can go both ways depending on the player. Yeah, that’s obvious, but you guys know what I mean.
Heh this is just my opinion, although I’d like to think it’s not that far from reality.
CHAR OCT 5 NOV 4 NOV 7 NOV 21
Abel 7-3 6-4 6-4 6-4
Akuma 4-6 4-6 4-6 4-6
Blanka 4-6 4-6 4-6 4-6
Boxer 6-4 6-4 6-4 5-5
Cammy x x x 5-5
Chun 6-4 6-4 6-4 6-4
Claw 5-5 5-5 5-5 6-4
Dan dunno 7-3 7-3 7-3
Dhalsim 6-4 5-5 5-5 5-5
Dictator 5-5 5-5 5-5 5-5
Fei dunno 6-4 6-4 6-4
Fuerte 5-5 4-6 6-4 6-4
Gen dunno dunno 6-4 6-4
Gouken 6-4 6-4 6-4 6-4
Guile 5-5 5-5 5-5 5-5
Honda 5-5 5-5 5-5 5-5
Ken 6-4 6-4 6-4 6-4
Rose dunno 5-5 6-4 6-4
Rufus 6-4 6-4 6-4 6-4
Ryu 4-6 4-6 4-6 4-6
Sagat 3-7 3-7 3-7 3-7
Sakura dunno dunno dunno dunno
Seth 3-7 3-7 3-7 1-9
Viper 5-5 5-5 5-5 5-5
Zangief 5-5 5-5 5-5 5-5
Changes: Boxer to 5-5 from 6-4, Cammy from being forgotten about for some reason to 5-5 (either 5-5 or 6-4, but I’m leaning 5-5 right now), and Seth from 3-7 to 1-9.
So this Seth thing. I thought I’d played a good Seth when Art/Sabin came to town after he was in Japan. Art’s a really smart player and even though he hadn’t used Seth in months I assumed that he still represented high level Seth play. Like I said in a previous post, I went about 3-7 with him and thought that I’d learned things I could apply against good Seths generally.
Well, yesterday in a tournament I played against OnlineTony’s Seth and got double perfected. Yep, double perfected. No offense to Art, but he’s much better with Seth than post-Japan Art. And here’s the biggest problem: I don’t know what I can do to improve in that match. Typically when you lose it’s because you didn’t stick to your gameplan or you had trouble forcing your gameplan on the opponent, but in this case I didn’t even have a gameplan in the first place. I got double yellowed the first game and then the second game I just started trying buttons to see what I could do, and I hit him a couple times and learned a couple things (jump roundhouse seems good air to air), but I didn’t get nearly enough out of it. And granted, yesterday was some of the worst SF I’ve ever played; I did terribly against everyone I played, no matter how good the matchups were supposed to be for me. But Joe Dubbs, another SoCal Gief, lost to OnlineTony as well.
The reason I’m even putting Seth at 1-9 right now is that I assume that Gief can win sometimes just because… that’s what I assume. And I also assume that I only had this much trouble with the match because yesterday was my first game against a very good Seth. But in talking with a couple other Seth players, like Mr Wizard and Jinrai (and I think Magus? I don’t remember, it was late at night), they said they thought it was 0-10 or 1-9 for real.
I talked with Tony after the match and we’re gonna set up some casuals so I can learn this matchup, but right now I’m at more of a loss than I’ve been in a long time.
Nice commenting last night by the way.
Yeah, the Seth match sucks. My game plan is to just stay full screen away and try to build meter. Super and Ultra without taking too much damage in the process. Also s.mp works pretty well as an anti air at the right distance against his j.HP. I’ve tagged some Seth with j.lp as well. Once I have meter, I try to find some sort of pattern in what they do and I pray for that one dizzy with headbutt. If I land it, I win. If I don’t, then I lose. It pretty much just comes down to that.