A lot of people make the mistake of assuming that footsies is something you whip up on the fly. While you certainly can do it that way, and while freestyling footsies is certainly a valuable skill, the fact of the matter is that Alex Valle knows more about footsies than you’ll ever know. The real problem is you don’t even know that you’re supposed to know these things.

Footsies as a whole is such a dynamic, complex subject that it’s impossible to convey or grasp at once. So we’re going to try something different. Let’s approach footsies like a collection of situations and try to come up with elemental solutions to each scenario. Practice these one by one until you’re comfortable enough with them to incorporate them fluidly into your gameplan.

Element 01: Momentarily step into your opponent’s poke range and quickly back out instead of attacking. This is Footsies 101. To see it in action, check out Mike Watson’s HF Guile demolishing some poor bastard – two consecutive full rounds of toying with his opponent’s natural reactions. This bait works well in tense matches, after extended periods of cautious zoning, or with charge characters who rarely walk forward.

Element 02: Determine which of your combos and attack strings position your opponents barely outside their effective reversal range, especially when facing characters with greater mobility. One of the best ways to trick someone into wasting meter and handing you the match is by making yourself appear falsely vulnerable. There’s no better example of this concept than the famous final exchange of the B3 SFA2 tournament.

Element 03: Once you’ve established a pattern of poking consistently at a certain range, use your opponent’s hesitation to walk up and throw them. It’s always dangerous to wander into enemy attack space, so wait until you’re certain you’ve trained them to think twice about pushing buttons. John Choi’s CvS2 Sakura does an excellent job of demonstrating this principle for the entire first round of that Evo2k7 match. There’s no way he would’ve gotten away with such gutsy throw attempts at the beginning of the round.

All of these plays are universally applicable to any fighting game. That’s why footsies and zoning are considered fundamentals. If you run into any questions, bring them here anytime.

Element 99: And every once in a while, try hiding behind a table.

Let’s start with a brief history lesson. Back in the day, uninformed players would call certain tactics cheap and this would lead to unsavory behavior which got in everyone’s way. People would literally get beaten up outside of arcades for using throws in Street Fighter II. To deal with this ridiculous problem, the players who ran SRK developed and publicized a philosophy of “playing to win.” This was an important step for everyone to take in order to get past their self-imposed stumbling blocks.

Fast forward to today, and the fighting game tournament scene is the strongest it’s ever been. There’s no longer a stigma associated with infamously dominant tactics and “cheap” is no longer a dirty word. All of this is great but we might have gone a little bit too far.

We’re beginning to see a subtle misconception developing – that playing to win is the best way to become a better player. On the contrary, the original argument only held that playing to win is the best way to determine who’s the better player. Sometimes playing to win can lead to bad habits, lazy shortcuts, and poor fundamentals.

See, back in the day, we had people praising themselves for combo skill or mastery of a bottom tier character; finding subjective rationalizations to consider themselves “the better player” while losing to someone “abusing cheap tricks” or whatever. Of course this is foolish because how can you consider yourself successful for achieving a subjective goal when your opponent doesn’t even know what it is? The only definitive way to determine the winner is by playing a match and seeing who ends up with the victory symbol. That’s the only clear goal which both players unquestionably share, so it’s the only properly defended prize.

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As a special feature between SF4 TACV episodes, i thought i’d re-encode my old Capcom vs SNK 2 Guile strategy guide in high quality. Since this video was recorded well over five years ago, a few of these tactics are somewhat dated. That means they’ll still work against 95% of the fighting game players out there, except the few who’ve been keeping the CvS2 dream alive by playing against likeminded competition every week.

More importantly, some of these tactics are risky or outright dangerous, but what can i say? I was trying to RTSD like my hero Alex Valle. It’s hard to describe the feeling but sometimes you just know exactly what your opponent is going to do. Plus generally i don’t like playing Guile on autopilot so my version doesn’t look robotic as usual.

If any of these clips are unclear, check out the notes in my original writeup or ask about them here. My initial intention was to keep recording matches on a regular basis to use for updating this video, but i got too tangled up in other projects. Happens.

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

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