(Taken from Air’s Youtube channel. Thank you Air for uploading these Dakou matches.)

I find Dakou’s Ryu to be very helpful to watch. Compared to say a Daigo or a Choi, whom I also enjoy watching, while their styles are more centred around their extremely strong fundamentals, his style seems to incorporate a lot more specific matchup specific tricks and setups.

So while I admire Daigo and Choi’s play, I cannot simply emulate and be like them right away. It will take me a couple more years of playing to get my basics somewhere close to their level. But with Dakou I almost always come away with some useful new nugget to apply to a matchup.

I was already experimenting with cmp buffer fireballs against Chun, into FADC stuff, but I never really tried to buffer EX fireball into it. I was noticing that the places that Dakou was putting his cmp buffers were extremely smart, and come to think of it, were exactly the places where I probably would hit a panicked cmk, and get scissors kicked for it. Instead, the Bison runs right into Dakou’s cmp EX fireball FADC Ultra. In this match where the life lead really dictates the match, spending so much bar to get a decent chunk is definitely worth it.

I also noticed how Dakou spaces himself just out of EX scissors range and chucks plasma. But even so, when the Bison bulldogged his way into his optimal range, even Dakou was finding it extremely difficult. But I need to learn to apply this same spacing without panicking, and emulate how Dakou puts himself out of range rationally. And learn to not take too much damage walking forward or standing at neutral.

I keep losing to Dave (Bosslogic) at tournaments. And Bison in general. I know I haven’t been playing AE much, and have probably become worse at the game. But a few months ago I came close to beating Dave, which was progress. I don’t want to fall even further behind. I wanna beat Dave at least once before SFV comes out goddamnit!

Time to study up and start working on that Bison match again.