Update: Shadowloo’s Recap at http://www.shadowloo.com/?p=2287
and video:
I’ve been quite excited about this CW after missing the last one. I’ve been training specific areas in my game, and after a few months of being scrub food for the community, this time I was actually hoping to place better in ranbats. Hopefully the practice would pay off.
I get there at my customary early time of 1230. People are already playing, and I talk to Carlplight, PSN viper for the first time in person. We get in quite a few games, and I get to know him better. I’m always trying to get better in the Viper matchup, and I was gratified to see my safe jump option select DP consistently beating out his reversals. One thing I wasn’t happy about was using low forward to avoid burn kicks on wakeup, but not following up after. I asked Pyro about it, and he told me to DP that ass. Time for some more specific training room practice!
This time I actually didn’t get to play that many casuals, because a lot of the setups were being used for the new Blazblue. I actually got to try it with Spoony, and it seemed like a lot of fun! Even though I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I’m not one of those guys who believes playing other games ruins your execution, in fact I believe it can help your execution and improve various mental aspects of your game, such as patience, reaction time, dealing with different paces of play etc. Which is good, because there’s so many new fighting games coming out; MVC3, SFxTekken, Mortal Kombat 9, TeknnexSF, and I definitely will try them all. The only limiting factor for me is that I don’t have the time to play so many fighting games; being an SSF4 scrub takes up most of my gaming time.
I dunno about you guys, but I can't wait!
Being a Scrub 
Street Fighter Commentaries: Traps by UltraDavid
One of the only things I like better than watching match videos of top players is actually listening to detailed match commentary/analysis by top players!
The Godfather of Zangief option selects and Hakan pioneer UltraDavid has been putting up a nice series called Street Fighter Commentaries that offers some great insights. In particular, I learned something today as a Ryu player.
In the video he analyses the match between Mike Ross and Daigo at EVO 2010. When watching the match myself, I noted something funny in the second round where Daigo perfects Mike Ross, and it was great to listen to UltraDavid clear that up.
In this instance, Daigo has been working Mike with some nice tick setups in the corner. When suddenly, he backthrows Mike out of the corner with a tick of life remaining on Mike’s bar. What?
When watching this, I felt surprised because normally you want to keep your opponent in the corner, not throw him out.
Daigo then throws a meaty jab fireball, and Mike does a buttslam to evade dying by chip damage. Almost instantly after recovering from the fireball, Daigo does a DP that beats out Mike’s buttslam for the KO and perfect. He does the DP so quickly and unexpectedly that when watching I was taken aback. It seemed that it was impossible that he did it that quickly purely on reaction and afterwards, I put it down to a psychic DP from Daigo predicting a buttslam.
Thankfully, UltraDavid reveals that it is actually an option select!
As you know, in SSF4, Ryu cannot have two fireballs on the screen. So right after Daigo did the jab fireball, he actually did a motion that could produce both an fireball or a dp thanks to SSF4’s lenient input system, and presses punch. So if Mike had blocked the fireball, a second fireball would’ve come out in the usual jab fireball fierce fireball trap. If Ryu had the meter, super would’ve come out automatically linked to the jab fireball and chip Mike to death.
But since Mike evades the fireball with the buttslam, super or a second fireball cannot come out, and the DP is the only option left to the game, and comes out to smack the buttslam. So what looks like a godlike psychic move from Daigo, is actually a sneaky option select!
Check it out:
And be sure to watch the rest of the series, much props to UltraDavid!
Note to self: Ryu’s overhead is -2 on block. So if other Ryus keep doing cmk hado over overhead, my sweep will beat them everytime. Saw Daigo do that against Choi, and immediately looked up frame data.