Understanding Why You Lost: Part I

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…

1. You got baited
   It sure looked as though you could jump over that Fireball safely and combo them, but then you got a Shoryuken to the face.  If this is the case, learn exactly what went wrong.  Did you misjudge the distance?  Did you think he was going to attack on your wakeup?  Well, now you know, so write it down and don’t make the same mistake again!
2. There is an information gap
   This is usually an easy one to fix.  Maybe you didn’t know that Ryu’s LP Shoryuken will trade with a Blanka Ball, but his FP Shoryuken will beat it clean.  That’s okay, now you know!  Or maybe you don’t know what to do about Vega’s Wall Dive; that’s okay too.  Chances are someone you play with regularly knows and if not, for sure someone in your character’s thread or sub-forum on SRK knows.  All you probably have to do is ask and someone will probably know and tell you.
3. You have bad execution
   Having bad execution is sometimes hard to realize.  It’s easy to blame moves not coming out on the controls, but if it’s happening more than every once in a while, chances are your execution could use some work.  If your moves outside a combo aren’t coming out the way you want them to 99.9% of the time, you have bad execution and need to put in the time in training mode until you’re there.
4. You don’t know the match
   This one can definitely take a lot more time to fix.  In your area, there are probably several players that use the same character, a couple that use everyone else and one or two that use a few obscure characters, depending on how large your local community is.  Chances are, though, there are at least a few characters of the cast of any game you’re playing that nobody uses as their main, or at least competently.  Because of this, if any of you guys run into a player that is even halfway decent with one of these locally unplayed characters, you could easily have some serious problems beating him.

   The only thing you can really do is to take inventory and really see what characters are underrepresented and then either:

   • Make an effort to watch videos of that character versus your main character
   • Learn that character yourself so that you will at least have a firsthand understanding of how he works
   • Convince someone else to learn that character so that you won’t have to, but you’ll all benefit
5. Time ran out
   Time running out can definitely be a frustrating way to lose.  But you really have to look at whose “at fault” here.  Did you turtle really hard for most of the match and then make one mistake that your opponent capitalized and then he ran away and turtled?  Did the other guy turtle really hard and by the time you got your opportunity, you didn’t have enough time to do enough damage to get the life lead?  Either way, get to the bottom of it and make it a point to correct it next time.

   A pretty good example of this is a match I had with Mike Ross a few months back.  He was using E. Honda and I was using Balrog.  I won the first round by turtling and staying patient.  At the start of the second round, he decided to sit there and not move or press any buttons.  After walking back and forth for a little bit, I decided to do the same.  So we sat there for the ENTIRE round, up until about 93 seconds had passed, at which point I started walking backwards since I knew that he could chip me with a Headbutt unless I was able to dodge it.  Lucky for me he waited until I was already far enough away so that I would see the Headbutt coming and have enough time to do a Jump Back FP right before timeout.

   In this case, Mike was “at fault” so to speak because he was the one who had to make a move first since he was down one round already and if the round ended in a draw, he would have lost the game because Street Fighter 4 gives both players a round and so I would have won since I was already up a round.  Since then, Mike has never turtled against me again and changed his game and now he’s beaten me the last few times we’ve played in tournament.

Stay tuned for part 2 coming soon…

Tagged as: Mike Ross, SF4, Strategy, Understanding Why You Lost