Stats have become a central facet of postgame analysis in almost every televised form of competition, from professional sports to golf. Personally i watch basketball and i don’t believe modern statistics are a reliable metric for guaging performance, but they can certainly be fun to browse. In that spirit, i thought it might be cool for us to present and discuss some numbers gathered from tournament match replays.
Shortly after Evo, i posted this on SRK where it quickly faded into oblivion. I can understand where some of the apprehension came from, but i still think it’s a promising idea that could develop in interesting directions. Of course it needs a little support and development to reach practical usefulness, but i’m down to do more if people show enough interest.
With everything SF4 has done to revitalize our community, it seems like a good place to start. My friend omni and i were discussing Ryu’s Ultra, and i started wondering how important it was for him to be able to land it. So i looked through every match between Evo2k9 SF4 finalists Daigo Umehara and Justin Wong, since Daigo stuck with Ryu the entire time. Here’s what i found:
Daigo (Ryu) vs Justin (Abel/Balrog) (source)
total number of rounds: 29
rounds Ryu won: 16
rounds Ryu lost: 13
total number of times Ryu lands ultra: 7
number of times Ryu lands ultra and wins round: 5
number of rounds Ryu wins without landing ultra: 11
number of times Ryu lands ultra and still loses round: 2
number of times Ryu lands ultra more than once in a round: 0
Ryu ultra setups:
antiair LP DP: 0
antiair DP FADC: 2
ground DP FADC: 3
EX fireball FADC: 1
air to air j.MP: 0
ground combo into ultra: 1
Keep in mind that Justin used Abel against Daigo when they first met in Winner’s Bracket. After losing both matches and the first match of Grand Finals, he switched to Balrog. Below are the stats for each character matchup.
Ryu vs Abel
total number rounds: 8
rounds Ryu won: 6
rounds Ryu lost: 2
total number of times Ryu lands ultra: 1
number of times Ryu lands ultra and wins round: 1
number of rounds Ryu wins without landing ultra: 5
number of times Ryu lands ultra and still loses round: 0
Ryu vs Balrog
total number rounds: 21
rounds Ryu won: 10
rounds Ryu lost: 11
total number of times Ryu lands ultra: 6
number of times Ryu lands ultra and wins round: 4
number of rounds Ryu wins without landing ultra: 6
number of times Ryu lands ultra and still loses round: 2
Discuss? I don’t know, i was expecting to see Ryu landing an ultra in almost every round but that clearly wasn’t the case. Maybe someone can do the same thing from Balrog’s perspective because he seemed to win via ultra finish a lot more frequently.
stating the obvious here, but i think the reason you see balrog land his more is because he can do it without FADC. how do i word this… ryu has more options than balrog. balrog always wants to go for the headbutt as a combo ender, right? if balrog is poking and lands c.lp, he’s going to combo to a headbutt. if ryu is poking and lands c.mk, he CAN do a SRK FADC combo but is that going to be his first reaction? maybe he will think to tatsu or hadouken instead. i think meter and options are why balrog landed more ultras than ryu. i would have to watch them again but i’m sure theres some stray poke daigo landed but did another move or didnt hit confirm properly when it would have lead to ultra.
anyway, its interesting to look at this kind of stuff. i remember watching the EVO stream and honestly it seemed like daigo landed the ultra a lot more than that.
something I’ve always wondered is what’s the risk vs reward for a jump in
For this I am only counting it when you jump twords the opponent and not jumping up or away
Also not counting what happens after the initial jump in, so if the opponent blocks it but is then hit with a low jab I’m not recording it.
Daigo vs Justin
Daigo jumps in 117 times
ties 80
win 11
looses 26
Justin jumps in 91 times
ties 59
win 9
looses 24
looking at this it’s clear how few times jumpins work to your favor. But if people could figure out how not to get hit by Daigo or Justin then they would be pro. I was most suprised by how often the jump ins are blocked rather then trying a anti air. Keep in mind that most of justin’s ties are just him jumping over hadokens at long range.
Here is the break down.
Daigo (Ryu) vs Justin (Abel)
Daigo jump in
ties 28
win 3
looses 6
blocked 13
empty or whiff 12
early Hk corner escape 2
trades with air move 1
hit by Abel D+hp 2
hit out of air by air move 2
thrown 1
command thrown 1
hits with cross-up hk 2
beats air move 1
Justin jumps in
ties 6
win 1
looses 4
blocked 5
empty 1
hits but dped 1
looses to air move 1
Dragon punched 3
Daigo (Ryu) vs Justin (Balrog)
Daigo jump in
ties 52
win 8
looses 20
blocked 34
empty or whiff 12
trades 5
early Hk corner escape 2
beats air move 3
Hits to combo 3
hits with cross-up hk 1
Hits to ultra 1
hit by Balrog D+hp 13
hit out of air by air move 4
hit by jabs 3
Justin jumps in
ties 43
win 10
looses 18
empty or whiff 37
blocked 6
hits to combo 5
hits with sweep followup 3
hits to combo to ultra 2
Dragon punched 10
thrown 3
Dped to ultra 2
hit out of air by air move 1
jabed to dp 1
hit by to d+mk 1
Dude. Thank you.
I think anti-air percentage would be a really cool stat to track for everyone. Most stats are way too circumstantial so you can’t really compare them between different players, but counting the number of times someone blocks an air attack versus successfully anti-airing it would be really solid info.
Only problem is you’d have to find a way to count the number of times they attempted an anti-air and screwed up. Because if someone jumps over your fireball and hits you while you’re in recovery, that’s not an anti-air opportunity. But if that jump is timed too late, you get a chance to do an uppercut, which a lot of people mess up. That should count against them, or maybe the anti-air stat should be broken down into three categories to include getting hit while trying to anti-air in addition to blocking and succeeding. But yeah, getting hit is a grey area.
I was focused more on how big a risk is it to try and jump-in at Daigo rather then to see how well he can antiair you.
Justin won’t generally just jump randomly so nearly all of these he is doing a crossup at wake up or he is jumping over a fireball.
from professional sports to golf?
what are you getting at?
ohh cool, good job maj.
i’ve been wanting to do some more insightful commentary, and statistics are definitely a necessity to have a meaningful conversation on air.
i have been gathering some stats on daigo (cause i play ryu as well) and things like this is exactly what i was keeping track.
what i was going to track next was how important it was to win the first round in a 2/3 or a 3/5 round matches. even though winning one round makes you so much closer to winning, it doesn’t translate as much to wins as it technically should..
so things like that is what i’m working on now and etc.
it’s so hard keeping track of all the statistics because there’s no incentive to do so and there’s no one with enough time to actually assemble the data. :(
Haiko: Can’t take golf seriously man. Where’s the defense?
LB: Dude that sounds really interesting. I’d love to see that data when you have it compiled. For Daigo i bet it’s not that important since he doesn’t switch characters, but for American ST players it’s gotta make a world of difference. For someone like Sirlin who needs to pick counter-characters to win, i bet that first round is everything.
Picking counter-characters represents a strong tactical adjustment which should make the first round less, rather than more, significant.
No way dude. The first match is the only one played with double-blind character selection. In a three-game set, whoever wins that first match gets to choose the final counter-character. That’s a huge tactical advantage.
In fact, now that you mentioned it, i think getting a Double KO during that last match should force both players to rechoose characters for the tiebreaker, with double-blind selection again. Otherwise the player who lost the very first match will have to defend against counter-character picks not once, but twice. I mean there should be some reward for achieving a draw game against a counter-character.
@Maj
I suppose what I mean is that, as long as Sirlin is the only one who does a lot of counterpicking, then he’s likely to be less, rather than more, affected by the first round result. (N.B. I’m not sure that he is the only one who counterpicks signficiantly.)
Either way, the bottom line is that the winner of the first match gets to decide the last match. That’s a huge deal for a counter-picker.
I mean, it’s more than a matter of character matchups. There’s also an issue of having time to figure out your opponent. If you’re facing someone who anti-airs every single jump attempt no matter how well you disguise it, then you probably don’t want to pick a character who depends on jumping in.
On the other hand, someone who doesn’t counter-pick won’t gain as much of an advantage from deciding that last match. At best, they can intimidate their opponent into choosing a balanced character instead of a direct counter. But that’s only a bluff tactic.