It’s been a productive week of SSF4 after not playing for a while. I still haven’t played that many people, and have mostly been spending a ton of time in training mode.

I have been doing a basic tuneup of all my basics for Ryu, trying to fix quite a few of my troublesome quirks.

-Repolished my jump in option selects. I was hitting the jump in button too early, and doing the os too late.

-Practice corner juggles, specifically ex fireball to Ultra. Also worked on big fireball fadc corner combos.

-All my plinks, which for me is hp~mp, hp~lp, mp~lp, hk~mk, mk~lk. Spent a couple more hours doing cmk cmk chk and fhp chp srk. Specifically trying to add the mp option select to the first cmp of cmp cmp chk, which is mp+lk+lp.

-SRK FADC. I have been picking up a bad habit of doing the fadc too hastily, resulting in a lot of unwanted things. I have been trying to slow down my fadc, as currently I sometimes tend to release the FA buttons too fast on the 1p side, resulting in no dash. I need to hold it a split second longer. Also, I made it a focus to practice nothing but chp srk and cmp chp srk fadc ultras for one day. I’m sick and tired of missing my punishes on big things like Ken’s SRK and Ibuki’s neckbreakers and Gief green hands. I’m sick and tired of getting back dashes on my big srk fadc punishes. I just kept doing the combos over and over, trying to get my inputs as clean and tidy as possible.
Also, I notice I tend to fall back on the shortcut srk motion on cmp chp srk. Under duress my shortcut motion often hits the back diagonal, resulting in a backdash. So I’m trying to wean myself off the shortcut for that combo and back to traditional srk motion, which I use for everything else anyway.

-Figured out an optimum punish to baited Blanka balls in the corner other than raw Ultra. I have been doing sweep, but walk up cmk lk tatsu srk is an easy meterless 200 damage.

-Recorded Bison’s lk scissors and tried to beat it with normals. Apparently mashing standing jab further than sweep distance beats it every time. Also practicised walk back srk to beat headstomp directly.

-Tried to practice ground option select crouching jabs to sweep that Toxy taught me. It’s still so hard to implement. Imagine if I’m doing 2 crouching jabs, I would have to input 4 inputs everytime I do that, basically clp~chk, clp~chk, followed by my blockstring of choice. If I do cmk hadoken, I have to do the cmk plink after 4 quick inputs, so basically it’s a ton of work. I know I should make it a habit to do it on every block string to catch backdashes, but sometimes I end up playing against a shoto for an hour, and it’s too much work to keep doing that block string with os sweeps against a character that will never backdash anyway. I guess even though it may be hard, I still need to forcefeed it into my game just for matchups like Chun Li.

-Discovered that while Akuma is a shoto, he has a fat ass hitbox. Crossup cmp chp srk works on him, but I guess I’ll just do cmp chp tatsu both on jumpins from the front and via crossup for easy spacing (the cmp chp srk crossup must have tight spacing), and big, hit confirmable damage.

-Ex fireball fadc Ultra. I notice another bad habit I’ve picked up is tapping the FA button multiple times to get my fadc out under duress. Very bad. I need to keep every FADC consistent; press FA one time, and no excess motion on the dash.

-Tried to work on flashy Hakan DNC combos, like jump in rh, fmp dnc, fmp dnc, fmp slide. Not much success. My Hakan execution still sucks.

Then I tried to bring everything into PSN. Notes:

-My ex tatsu corner juggle into Ultra is pretty much back to it’s original consistency. Still drop ex fireball Ultra at times though. When doing fireball, ex fireball traps from underneath the timer, I need to buffer the Ultra motion during the animation of ex fireball to catch the opponent.

-In my sets with FrozenFlare, (who does much, much better against me these days), I was STILL getting backdashes out of my big srk fadc punishes despite my specific training room regimen to eliminate the habit. MASSIVE Fail. I felt so disheartened I did another big session of training room chp srk fadc and cmkp chp srk fadc but it remains to be seen if my bad habit will still rear its ugly head.

-Big fireball fadc corner combos. Hm. Jumping hp, cmp, chp, fireball fadc, cmp, chp, lk tatsu, srk does about 410 damage. A simple Jump in hp, standing hp, ex tatsu, ex tatsu does more than 390 damage and also uses two bars. Is it really worth testing my execution that much with a lengthy combo to get 20 more damage, when a simple 4 input combo with almost 100% consistency will get nearly the same damage?
That’s what I thought when I missed the last bit of the fireball fadc combo on someone; I should just have done an ex tatsu combo instead.

-All in all, my big training room binge didn’t really yield much improvement :(. Hopefully I will do better this friday at Chris’s event.