If you’ve been playing Super Street Fighter IV since spring or summer, you’ve probably run into a few oldschool players with rock-solid fundamentals, who seem to adapt very quickly. These guys are seriously tough to beat, and it may seem like an uphill battle which only gets steeper the longer you play against them.

There’s a number of obvious reasons behind their immediate and continued success. They’ve gone up against just about every play style in existence. They’ve learned to use more characters than you’ve fought against. They’ve entered more tournaments than you’ve seen. Suffice it to say, experience is a major advantage.

However, if you’re a relative newcomer to the fighting game tournament scene, you shouldn’t worry about that gap too much. That’ll be there no matter what competitive arena you walk into. The people who have been around for a long time will always have the benefit of experience, but your motivation and your enthusiasm for the game can trump that.

When you hear old-timers talk about SF4, oftentimes they can seem grumpy – like they don’t enjoy it as much as their favorite game which nobody plays anymore. But that’s natural, right?

Everyone has the game that made them fall in love with fighting games, and that’s the one they played to death. Three or four releases later, they’ll certainly have experience, but they won’t have that same desire to explore every little detail. They won’t commit the slightest surprises to memory or cherish tiny innovations they see in combo videos.

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When you try to block a fireball, have you noticed how your character starts blocking before it makes contact? This phenomenon is known as proximity blocking.

Dating all the way back to Street Fighter II, every attack has its own effective range which triggers proximity blocking. If the opponent holds Back while within that invisible range, they’ll stand still in defensive stance instead of walking backward.

Using this knowledge to your advantage is a key element of advanced footsies. The easiest offensive application is whiffing a jab while your opponent walks back and forth at mid-range. This will momentarily cause them to get stuck in place.

Now that might not seem like much of a difference-maker, but when they’re focused on the tiniest details, it’s enough to completely throw off their bearings – however briefly. Especially when their eyes are fixed on your character, they might even lose track of where exactly their own character is located. If they try to walk backward and their character remains in place, they may not realize how close they’re standing.

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People have been drawing analogies between rock-paper-scissors and fighting games since the beginning of recorded time – mainly because it’s easy. This has become an increasingly popular trend, whether for describing move priority (throw beats blocking, DP beats throw, blocking beats DP) or matchups (giant beats pixie, pixie beats beam, beam beats giant).

Truthfully, RPS metaphors are only useful for deconstructing fighting games to illustrate the challenges presented by human competition. RPS models are great if you want to entertain people by translating your successes and failures into academic terms.

It’s much harder to go the other direction – from RPS theory fighter to developing a practical gameplan. Converting game specifics to RPS babble and back to game specifics is so much extra work that you’d be better off sticking with game specifics throughout.

However if you’re new to the competitive aspect of fighting games, it is important to grasp exactly what you’re getting into – and RPS comparisons can be useful in that regard. The rest of this article is a look at fighting game strategy from the familiar perspective of RPS tradeoffs.

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