Calculating risk/reward in Street Fighter 4 is critical to winning against good players. This is because during the course of the game, we are put in many situations where we have to calculate whether it’s worth taking a risk in order to land more damage to end the round or gain a substantial life lead. Considering multiple options as well as your opponents options are and what he thinks you will do should lead you to making better decisions during the game.
The most common situation where both players must calculate risk/reward is when a character with a good wakeup Special Move gets knocked down. These special moves include Uppercuts, Flash Kick, EX Messiah Kick, Headbutt, etc. When you knock down one of these characters, you put yourself at risk by getting close enough to them for the opponent to consider doing a Wakeup Uppercut. Calculating the risk/reward payoff is crucial to winning.
Here are some factors to consider when calculating whether to Wakeup Uppercut/Headbutt/etc…
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Tagged as:
Risk/Reward,
SF4,
Strategy
THESE ARE NOT BIG DISCOVERIES! If you’re a Sagat player, I’m sure you know all of these, so this article is not for you. 
Recently because I’ve been training students, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to learn new characters from scratch. I thought to myself, “if I were trying to learn a new character, what would be the most systematic way to do it?”
That’s not really what this post is about though, but one of the things that I did think about in terms of character mastery was that you should at least be able to go through all of said character’s combos in Trial Mode. Not to say that all of the combos that Trial Mode makes you do are good or useful, just that if you have mastered your character’s execution, you should be able to do most of them relatively easily.
So I went through Trial Mode with Sagat (or at least tried to until I got to Stage 4 on Trial Mode Hard lol) and realized that even though I’ve played a million of them, there was still a lot to learn about him and I realized some of it while playingTrial Mode.
More after the jump…
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Tagged as:
Sagat,
SF4,
Trial Mode
Note: If you are not a beginner, ignore this post, this is not for you.
Lately I’ve been working with several people who are very new to SF4. One of the biggest issues I’ve found is that they don’t think of the game the same way as veteran players do due to their inexperience. In order to help bring those of you who may be in that category up to speed, I have created a list of questions to ask yourself while you’re playing, pretty much before you do any move on offense or on defense.
Offense
- If this move hits, what will I do after?
- If this move misses, what kind of damage will I take (or where will it leave me on the screen)?
- How can this move be evaded?
- If this move blocks, what can they punish with? Did they punish it last time or is this the first time I’ve shown it to them?
Defense
- What move are they most likely to throw out right now (taking into consideration their lifebar, the range you are at, the character they’re playing, etc.)?
- What move, if any, can I punish with if I block?
- What are they most likely to follow up with if this move hits me?
- What are they most likely to follow up with afterwards?
- Is it better to block or try to counter?
Wakeup
- What is the risk of blocking?
- What is the risk of doing a wakeup move (such as Shoryuken, Flash Kick, etc.)?
- Did they attack me last time?
- How likely are they to throw?
Hope this helps some of you beginners out there.
Tagged as:
Strategy
I got asked a question recently about what I consider to be “good practice.” Earlier tonight I was playing Ryu in Championship mode and played a Blanka in one of the rounds. I’m trying to learn Ryu to complement Balrog and counterpick certain bad matchups that Balrog has. I was in the corner with my back to the wall and blocked Blanka’s Ultra. I held Up Forward as I blocked so that I would jump as soon as the block stun was over and then cross him up with MK. The only problem was, I didn’t know what to follow up with because:
- I wasn’t paying attention to my meter because I’m still a Ryu noob
- I didn’t know if a combo existed that would allow me to end it with an Ultra in the corner
What ended up happening was that I did something to the effect of D+MK xx Fireball and probably ended up losing the match. But afterward, I still wanted to know if I could end the combo with an Ultra so I went into Training Mode to find out. This was the hourlong process:
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Tagged as:
Blanka,
Quality Practice,
Ryu,
SF4,
Strategy,
Training Mode
This is part one of an ongoing series that will last as long as I have ideas for it called Understanding Why You Lost. I’m going to write about reasons why players including myself lose and what we can do about it. Enjoy!
Part of becoming a better player is understanding why you lost so you can learn from your mistakes. If you don’t take the time after every lost to really think about why you lost, you’re doomed to continue repeating the same mistakes, probably against the same player, for much longer than you really need to. Plus, learning from your mistakes will force the other player to change their game, which will force you to repeat the process and come up with another idea, and so on and so on…Here is a short list of reasons you may have lost along with some ways to get past them after the jump…
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Tagged as:
Mike Ross,
SF4,
Strategy,
Understanding Why You Lost
