[Note: The names in the video below may seem confusing to some readers. In the original Japanese version, the character on the left was named Vega, and the character on the right was named Balrog. The names got shuffled around a bit when the game came to America. To avoid confusion, I will refer to them as Dictator and Claw, respectively.]
What exactly happened in this video? Why did Taira, playing Dictator, keep getting hit by Claw's wall dive attack? Couldn't he just block?
The short answer is: no, he couldn't.
What you're seeing happen here is the very simplest form of mixup that exists in Street Fighter: the left / right mixup. Although simple, it is incredibly deadly; the Dictator player has no way to tell which side (left / right) the Claw player will end up on, and so he has to guess which way to block. If he guesses wrong, he is knocked down, and the situation repeats itself. If he guesses wrong a couple of times in a row, he is dead. And that is exactly what happened here.
There are many different kinds of mixups, and each one presents it's own lethal guessing game (of the RSP 2.0 variety). Most are much more complicated than this one, but the basic principle remains the same. They are extremely powerful, because they create a guessing game where the Risk / Reward ratio heavily favors the attacking player. Consider the Claw mixup above - he risks virtually nothing, while standing to gain a substantial amount of damage and a knockdown. The risk / reward on this exchange is extremely high.
In addition to left / right mixups, there are also high / low mixups, throw / counter-throw mixups, reversal / reversal-bait mixups, fast / slow / fake fireball mixups, and some that make use of multiples of these at once. I'll be discussing all of these in greater detail as the blog goes on.
At the very highest levels of play, Street Fighter boils down to a complicated guessing game. This guessing game is often likened to rock, scissors, paper, because each of your many options will win in some situations but lose in others. That analogy, though flawed, may still be useful in illustrating why a solid understanding of risk vs. reward is so important to winning at Street Fighter.
Let's pretend that a new game just came out, which we'll call RSP 2.0. In RSP 2.0, you play classic Rock, Scissors, Paper, but there's a catch: each "game" consists of 100 throws. And you get different numbers of points depending on what throw you win with. The breakdown looks like this:
Win with Rock - 10 points Win with Paper - 5 points Win with Scissors - 1 point
Obviously, each throw is no longer equally good, since they are worth different amounts of points. My question to you is: if the three throws are no longer equal, then...
"Which of the three throws is now the best?"
Take a few minutes to think about it. Seriously. Then come back once you have the answer.
Paper is the best because the value of a throw isn't determined just by the reward it gives you if you win, but also by what you're risking if you lose. In the case of Rock, it's true that you stand to gain 10 points if you win, but you also risk losing 5. That exchange is only 2:1.
But paper is WAY better. Think about it - it's true that you stand to gain fewer points (5), but you're also only risking one. That makes this exchange 5:1 in your favor, meaning your opponent needs to throw scissors FIVE TIMES for every one time you win with paper, just to stay even.
But what about scissors? Throwing scissors is downright suicidal. You only stand to gain a single point, but you risk giving your opponent 10! That is NOT a good risk to take. Throwing scissors should be avoided at all costs.
Which, ultimately, is why paper is the best. It's high reward, low risk, and in fact forces your opponent into making risky moves in order to deal with it. If they ever want to score points against you, they have to throw scissors repeatedly...but throwing scissors is a really, really bad idea, since it opens you up for a devestating Rock!
So what would a match between a pro player and a casual player look like? It would start with the pro player calmly throwing paper over and over, while the casual player makes all kinds of throws. The pro player would steadily gain lots of points, while the casual player would gain almost none. After a while, the casual player would see what's going on, and try to counter the constant stream of paper with his own stream of scissors...
...but then, out comes rock, and the game is over.
With that in mind, I leave you with this video of Mike Watson playing an absolutely immaculate Guile against a random Ken. Watch just how effectively paper works its magic.
An interesting thing happens when you pit a pro Street Fighter player against a casual player: the casual player loses. A lot. In fact, if the two were to play 100 games straight, the smart money would be on a 100-to-0 winning streak by the pro player.
Why is this? Both players start on equal footing. They both have the same character, same health, same moves. All the buttons do the same things. The tournament player doesn't get any kind of bonus or special advantage - in fact, he might even give the opposition a handicap (Seth, for example, likes to show off by beating people one handed)! So why is it that one side wins so consistently?
That's because tournament players have a magic secret. And now, for the first time, I'm going to make that secret publically available here on the internet:
They practice. A lot.
That's it. It's not that their reflexes are better, or that they psychically "know" what you're going to do before you do it. It's not that they have better small motor skills, or that they have some kind of special knack for fighting games that just makes them good. What the tournament player has that the casual player doesn't is just two things: knowledge, and practice. And boy, do they have a lot of both.
It's important to note, though, that the quality of practice is just as important as the quantity of practice. That old saying, "Practice Makes Perfect" is wrong - or at least, incomplete. Practice doesn't make you better by itself; it just makes you more consistent. It takes the motions that you're doing and burns them into you, until they become muscle memory and you don't need to think about them any more. Until you can react to a threat with your chosen response without needing to think. Practice, in other words, just re-inforces what you're doing; it doesn't, by itself, actually make you do things better.
And that's why I said the other piece to the puzzle is knowledge. In order to play the game well, you need to know which tactics are actually effective, and how to counter them yourself. You need knowledge of what moves to do in what situations, how to best take advantage of an opening, and how not to provide opponents with those openings yourself. You need to know how people think and react when they're pressured, what their possible counters are, and how you can counter those counters.
I can help supply the knoweldge. You'll have to supply the practice.
I've decided to try and turn this blog into a resource for aspiring fighting game players who want to take their game to the next level. This blog series is aimed at the casual player; someone who already knows the basic moves, who knows the buttons and what they do, but is maybe a little fuzzy on how to do the powerful combos and devastating mixups that mark high level play.
If you're just looking for somewhere to start: I reccomend the beginning.
