ehuangsan

Thanks. I'll make that the next writeup Next up: Ky vs. Sol (requests) FD Shenanigans (Defensive Tactics with Ky) Effective use of the Stun Dipper Optimizing Damage in Endgame Effective use of the Greed Sever Ky vs. May

The Buppa Ball The Buppa Ball is a ghetto trick that only Buppa used to do. Since he stopped playing, nobody else uses it. It's a dubious attempt to maintain an initiative and to mindscrew your opponent. One basic Ky tactic is when you launch a CSE, you FRC and then do jump towards k or p to see if your opponent attempted to punish what was in reality a safe CSE. You can often catch many people with the standard Ky air combo this way. The Buppa Ball is an extension of that and the FRC CSE glitch where the CSE follows Ky. Normally the safe CSE distance is slightly outside airdash range. However, you can actually get away with being a little bit closer by doing a CSE FRC into immediate backdash, so when your opponent tries to do an IAD punish, his attack ends up going through your backdash, and you punish him with counterhit CSE, because the CSE will drag backwards along with Ky's backdash due to the CSE glitch. That is known as the "Buppa Ball", after the Ky player, Buppa. Once you catch your opponent once or twice with that, you can start to get away with unsafe CSEs, such as those without any FRC, as your opponent will not really have a good idea what is safe and what is not. By doing this, you can convince your opponent to stay in perpetual blockstun, until he does something stupid and loses. With the advent of the CSE forcebreak, you can also sometimes substitute the backdash FRC into just the forcebreak, which will catch an airdash. Here's a vid of Buppa at work, launching a myriad of Buppa Balls, and then getting away with not FRCing because he's mindscrewed his opponent. Note that he still loses anyway. It does require a lot of setup, in that you have to portray yourself as a reckless attacking blitz Ky, you have to catch him at least once with the counterhit CSE, and your opponent has to be at a relatively decent level. So all in all, it's not really a good idea, especially if your opponent does catch on. However, if you need to create some chaos and variance and are out of ideas, you can give it a try. I've used it a few times, and by utilizing variations of the Buppa Ball, I managed to lock people into seemingly perpetual blockstun for 30+ game seconds. If you do manage to get it to work, it looks like you've caught your opponent in a Strider-Doom Trap, so it does kinda look cool. Next up: (requests) (Defensive Tactics with Ky) Effective use of the Stun Dipper Optimizing Damage in Endgame Effective use of the Greed Sever Ky vs. May

His spacing is very good, which is why I use him as it fits my playing style....but a lot of times, it doesn't feel like it's enough, especially in matches against Slayer or May. You can only keep the tide away for so long. The magical airthrow trick works in every game that has 1) a <2 frame airthrow, 2) air blocking, and 3) landing recovery. It actually works even better in XX and #R because you have the FD option select to tack on as well. I stopped playing shortly after #R came out, but at that time, I only saw people in the know (e.g. those who played SiN) doing that trick...though it wouldn't surprise me if people caught on around slash or so. But yeah, seeing SiN do magic airthrows in CvS2, MvC2 and GGXX was quite a sight to behold at the time.

In which case, I vote for June 30th weekend, since I'm otherwise not available.

I agree that long sets of casuals would be helpful for newcomers. So, with that cool head to head and stream setup, maybe we should randomly select one person from the 1 Dan league for a kumite, versus everyone else that happens to be at GameCenter at the time (best 2 of 3 matches) with color commentary, perhaps with someone pointing out where each person is going wrong so they can refer to the stream video later. I think that would be cool. We'll call it Nor-Cal Boot Camp.

SiN's magic air throw Those of us who had the unfortunate experience to play against SiN and his "suck the fun out of the game" style of trench warfare play almost certainly know what I am talking about. Unfortunately, that is mostly only a small audience of top players and people who have played in So-Cal. Despite his tendency to commit the most inexplicable execution blunders and his inability to do combos involving more than four consecutive button presses, SiN has placed in top 8 or top 16 at Evo since 2k2 in a huge variety of games, from CvS2 to MvC2 (?!), Tekken (??!) and GGXX (??!?!?!?!?!), even recently placing in top 8 for ST HD Remix at Evo2k9. He was also often regarded as having one of the the best Captain Commandos in the world for MvC2. Even so, from a casual player's perspective, watching his match videos in any game will leave you with nothing except for a "wow...he scrubbed that guy out one hit at a time, what a lucky scrub" impression. You have to play him to really appreciate his level of play. For those of us who have played him, he does one trick that we often called "the magic air throw", or "SiN's magic airthrow", where he air throws people when they're doing crossovers (ambiguous or otherwise) in every game that has an air throw, leaving his opponent with a "WTF" feeling. In reality, he is doing one heck of an option select. As applied to GG, when an opponent is just above you, the "SiN's magic aithrow" is to either a) tiger knee backwards HS if the opponent is just above or just above and behind you, or b) 270 from down to uptowards to upback, HS if the opponent is just above or above and in front of you. This provokes an option select where one of two things can occur: 1) You get a magical looking airthrow (example @ 2:03-2:05), and yes, you can inexplicably airthrow crossovers this way. 2) Your opponent reacts and attacks too early, causing a chicken block which you can land and punish (example @ 3:34-3:36), or if it turned into an IB, you can airthrow them immediately after blocking The only problem with SiN's magic aithrow is that it's so damn cool that you'll be tempted to replace all of your anti-airs with it instead. You should fight the temptation to do that, especially in GG, where you'll have situations where more damaging AAs (e.g. 6P into VT loop) would've served you better. Rather, you should reserve it for situations where you cannot afford to trade hits, if your other AA's won't come fast enough to save you, or if you have no idea what's going on in the screen but you notice that your opponent is in the right distance to attempt the magic airthrow. I consider this to be one of my biggest trade secrets to a point where I was quite reluctant to share it in writing. However, since I'm essentially retired now, I thought I would share it as a gift to future fighting game players. It has served me very well in many different fighting games, and GGXX is not an exception. So give it a try! Next up: (requests) The Buppa Ball Eat and run Effective use of the Stun Dipper Optimizing Damage in Endgame Effective use of the Greed Sever Ky vs. May

Are people going to show up @ NCI for GG? I can run brackets; the question is really if people are going or not.

Wat, there's no GG in this week's NCI? Is is completely outsourced to dogfight now?

I've tried that several times in tourney play (as shown in that video against Honnou), and Ain does it too sometimes. It does work, but sometimes not quite as cleanly as close 5S, 6HS or 2D, as Ain would normally do, since if you do, for example, a j. S, JC into the prison and try to mixup into 2D, sometimes the FB star will be too close to the opponent and both the 2D and FB star will hit simultaneously, which stops you from comboing it into a close 5S. Othertimes, the FB star will be so close that the opponent can do a standing block to get rid of it. The difficulty is more of the spacing in the jump situation than it is in the actual execution. I think that is why Ain prefers doing it off of 6HS or 2D, since it gives him a lot more space to work with.

Hah, I sorta forgot about forward EXE beast. In that case, it may be better than I thought, as it does indeed looks like it's doing more than 1dmg per hit. The current AC combo off lightning strike into FB star is a normal OTG in that terminates immediately into 1-2 dmg per hit (see @ 1:00).

Unless they change the physics or the game mechanics severely from GGAC, the OTG relaunch combos should only be doing 1-2 dmg per hit. Which is fine; it allows you to win in the endgame by taking away the last 10-15 pixels by tacking on 10-15 more hits at the tail end of your combo. Dealing with the last 10-15 pixels of your opponent's life is something that Ky has a lot of trouble with in AC, and this fixes that problem to some extent. From the video, the FB Greed Sever looks like it could lead to pretty buff damage, but whether that would be a better punish than 2D -> HS SE FRC remains to be seen. I'm not terribly impressed with it being used as an overhead into buff damage. If 3HS is like the old 6HS, then it should force crouch on hit, which would make it very useful as a punish.

Ain's Prison If the opponent is in the corner and Ky makes them block a jump cancelable move, Ky can jump cancel into a 270 air D forcebreak ending on uptowards on the stick. That way, Ky will float up and towards the opponent (instead of sinking straight down) after the air FB D comes out and do an assortment of mixups, like feint jump HS into 2D, jump HS proper, etc. If the opponent gets hit by the mixup, then you can bounce them into the FB D for some good damage. If the opponent doesn't get hit by the mixup, the FB D keeps them stuck in the corner anyway, and you can continue your pressure. According to the Japanese videos I've seen, this is called "Ain's Prison" after the Japanese Ky player Ain, who uses this tactic quite a bit. At first, I was very skeptical about this tactic since I thought this is awfully slow and rather easy to defend against, so who the hell gets hit by this? It turns out that apparently LOTS of people suck and get hit by this, including the Japanese. So I've started using it more and more and yes...this is quite effective. Here's a video example (at 0:24-0:27) where I make a half assed attempt at Ain's Prison, because I was still very skeptical about its usefulness at the time. EDIT: Here's a video example of Ain putting someone in the prison and the ensuing mixup (@ 1:53-2:00) Next up: (requests) SiN's magic air throw Effective use of the Stun Dipper The Buppa Ball Optimizing Damage in Endgame Effective use of the Greed Sever Ky vs. May

I dunno, IMO it seems like most of Ky's changes are pretty worthless. The S raging Javelin looks like it also wall sticks, which would severely reduce its usefulness. Hopefully, HS will not wall stick, otherwise Ky is going to suck rather horribly if he can't do a knockdown after VT....unless the wall stick is also relatively untechable, but even then it would strike me as difficult to combo off of it, if not impossible. I do like the command change to 4D after CSE, and the FRC after 222HS has some marginal utility. Because of slashback, I'm not sure that 3HS will really be all that useful to Ky anymore on oki, but I can see it being used as a great punishing tool. Charge drive wall stick would be pretty useless, unless Ky recovers a lot faster off the Charge drive now. Guess that remains to be seen. The FB greed sever is interesting. I'll have to see how that plays out....although it looks like it's about as fast as Ky's 5D with a bigger tell....so perhaps it's not that useful after all.

Ky Vs. Slayer IMO, this matchup is pretty godawful for Ky. I place it as part of the unholy trio of godawful Ky matchups (Slayer, Baiken, Venom). From a practical standpoint, it probably is only 4-6 in favor of Slayer overall, but it tends to feel a hell lot worse than it actually is. The problem with this matchup is that, although Ky will tend to win out in the air to air exchanges and ground to ground exchanges (maybe even something like 60-65% of the time), that's all irrelevant until Slayer dies. Slayer's HP is completely irrelevant unless it's zero or less; the question really boils down to will he counterhit you with BBU, pile bunker, 2HS or super, sending you into a near or instantaneous loss or not. In that other 35%, Slayer will hit you with one of those, and sometimes it will be counterhit. Slayer is one of the few characters (the others being May and Eddie), where until he dies, your life lead is completely irrelevant. So basic strategy is to always watch Slayer's meter bar, and be always mindful that if he has 25% tension, you could end up into a situation where not only do you lose, the burst would not have saved you. So the way I deal with Slayer is to get him to compromise or part with the meter with rope-a-dope or blitz tactics. Neutral In the neutral game, I try to find safe ways to either score a knockdown or take the initiative. You can't really get away with terribly risky things, as the risk reward is not there. For example, although Greed Sever will beat Mappa and 2HS, it will lose to Slayer stupid moving K to 40%+ life loss. Stun Dipper will beat stupid moving K and BBU, but will lose to 2HS for 40%+ life loss. Nowadays, I try to keep it honest most of the time by trying to zone Slayer out while looking for my own way in or a way to knock him down. Air dusts work when properly positioned, Air S SE FRC into air dash is an extremely good way to seize the initiative (sometimes Air HS SE FRC, airdash will work as well), as Slayer cannot really deal with that too well. Jump K will beat or trade with him quite often as air to air, jump backwards HS will also zone him as well. Air S SE FRC is also a good way to bait Slayer into hitting an AA like 5P, 6P or 2S, and a counterhit punish of Slayer's AAs off of that will lead to very good damage. It's also a bad idea to challenge Slayer's jump HS with 6P unless you are perfectly positioned, as you will get counterhit into the air for sadness. However, VT will trade with it in your favor, and if both of you are low on life, counter hit slash VT trade into immediate blue burst will let you recover in time to land and actually go into an air combo. It takes some practice, but it's important to recognize the distances where you should 6P vs. air throw vs. VT versus block. If Slayer has 25%+ meter, I try to bait him into using it, either by weaving in and out of BBU/DOT range, feinting moves to perhaps get a random DOT, or otherwise, getting him to compromise somehow into parting with it. It's important to try to get Slayer to use meter, either for 1F jumps, or anything. It's also important to stop him from just dicking around and building meter from full screen away by rushing in to seize the initiative if he chooses to do that. Also, keep in mind that using typical pokes for abare, like 5HS or 5S, may lead to instant death, so you will have to restrict use of those more than you might be comfortable with. However, if you do find a way to take the initiative away, you should do so regardless of his tension. Defense On defense, you have to keep in mind that every poke of Slayer gives him pretty buff frame advantage. You can't do anything overly risky, so I normally restrict myself to 2p/2K, 1F jumps, FDing to push him out, air S SE FRC and, very occasionally, VT/GS or random stun dipper depending on my read. You will have to part with meter to get him off of you, but that's fine; your tension bar is not nearly as important as his tension bar. 2P is a very good abare on defense, and you should maximize your damage and tension build when you catch him with it with the rather Slayer specific funky combo of 2pxn, 2D, S VT into LJ. In fact, anytime you get 2p or 2k into an abare, this should be your automatic combo, as the godawful proration will typically make the SE FRC or FB Orb combo suck. There are many situations where this could come up, such as if you IB two hit dandy, IB 2D, Slayer screws up a 2D, etc. Of course, if Slayer screws up epically, you should use your best damaging combo instead, but if he does something you can punish only 2p or 2k, you should do the SVT combo. Slayer also has a pretty lame overhead that he can kill you with by comboing into BBU. You just have to practice reacting to it. If you're really baller, you can CH it on reaction with 5P. Offense Once you get a knockdown on Slayer, your mindset is to not give him one moment to even breathe and you should blitz the hell out of him. You want to force him to part with as much meter or HP as you can possibly extract from him for as long as possible. Although Slayer has good pokes, they're kinda slow in comparison to Ky's 2P and 2K, so Slayer will be looking to escape by either 2P, 2HS, BBU, super, or backdash jump up. If he has meter, you should restrict yourself to safe Oki options, such as safe jumps, backwards air dash, etc, to avoid the possibility of eating a random BBU or super. Once you get him to block something, you should just keep the pressure up with an assortment of 2Ps, 2Ks, 5Ks, 5HS, 2Ds and random throws, to get Slayer to part with meter by FDing or dead angling, or to get Slayer to start mashing buttons or BBU. The only button that Slayer has that can kick Ky out at in close range is 2P. However, it's not really that good, especially if Ky is up close with frame advantage. One trick that works very well is to start a tick with 2P, pause ever so slightly as if you're going to tick throw, and then 6P 6HS or 6P 5S instead. This works extremely well if you have thrown Slayer off of tick throws or other tricks before. The 6P will counterhit Slayer if he mashes on 2P, and give you good damage as a result. Slayer can also mash BBU to get out of Ky pressure, which is why you sometimes have to rope him into doing it. One way is to do a block string that sends you a little far, and provides the appearance that you're going to SE. Slayer will sometimes try to BBU in anticipation for the SE, but if you stun dipper (!) instead, you will counter hit him into fairly good damage. If he decided to block instead, then you FRC and continue on pressing. This will even catch a DOT or a jump attempt....sometimes. Some Slayers will try to wakeup dandy, but that's pretty bad, and you can counterhit that on reaction with 5HS. Overall, this match is very bad simply because Slayer can kill you and take the round at any given moment, and you have to hit him a lot, so you essentially have to play a near perfect technical game in response, and forcing him to part with tension to cut off the ways for Slayer to come back by randoming you out. However, because of your advantages in air to air, in ground to ground neutral and on the initiative, it's quite doable. Next up: (Requests) Ain's Prison The Buppa Ball Optimizing damage in endgame

Wouldn't June 2nd collide with NCI?

Those people are lying through their teeth to you with respect to 3S. That game is littered with 8-2 and 7-3 matchups, and it is crystal clear at top level play. That's why you don't see Sean appear in any major tourney. The other low tier characters like 12 and Alex are barely playable. Beating any top player with Sean is considered such an impossible task, that on the REALLY off chance that it happens, everyone loses their shit. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lDHTRmHm-U But given an infinite amount of matches, even Daigo would eventually lose a match to a monkey mashing random buttons while spinning the joystick. In GGXXAC, there is no such matchup. It's not unheard of for top players to lose to any given character at any given time. So the balance is good, even if it's not perfect. I do not think there is any matchup worse than 6-4. OTOH, watching Ohnuki lose a Chun-Li/Alex matchup in a tourney would be a damn sight to behold. I would insta-save that video.

Take away that godforsaken prorate on either 2p or 2k, and Ky would be perfect. I'm even willing to attach that prorate to the 6HS instead. I can live with all of Ky's other problems if I only had that. If that's not allowed, then making 222H do guaranteed 10 dmg would be an okay consolation prize.

I believe that he thought I was going to do something other than block, and mashed out the DOT ahead of time to catch me doing anything. Maybe I'm too stingy with assigning ! to anything, but IMO, ! would be buffering the super motion and then hitting the button on reaction to some move to punish the whiff, since I'm out of range to hit him with anything. !? would be mashing out the super without any confirmation since it's not a bad try and a rather good guess. FWIW, magz is quite reckless on offense, so I think he wouldn't have bothered trying to do this on reaction.

Sure, I'll make Ky vs. Slayer my next writeup. Next up: Ky vs. Slayer Ain's Prison The Buppa Ball Optimizing damage in endgame

Abare 2D > HSE FRC > air combo is the main one for >25% meter. Otherwise, stuff into stun dipper/2D for 0% meter.

Conducting a Post-Mortem I am often astounded that a lot of players don't even bother to conduct a post mortem of their matches afterwards. Back when I was in the fighting game scene, footage was rare and I would have actually paid money to watch my own footage. Since there was no footage, I had to memorize what happened during each match and recall it in my mind later, which is a very inefficient way of doing things. Had I had such footage available in my day, I would have been a much better player as a result. With the advent of sites like Youtube, there really is no excuse now. All of that practice with training mode, all of those matches you play mean absolutely nothing if you are solidifying your flaws by not figuring out what you're doing wrong from your match footage. In fact, since I rarely play now and have hideous execution errors everywhere due to lack of practice time, I think that the only thing that keeps me remotely competitive nowadays is that I peruse and break my tourney footage down before I enter the next tourney, just to see where I currently stand. Even for the people that bother to review their own tourney footage, a lot of them refuse to check their egos and will only look at matches where they won. It is a lot more interesting to review matches where you lost, since you get to see exactly why you got annihilated and what mistakes you made. Also, a lot of people will say things like, "Well, I should've done wake up super here", or "Why didn't that scrub do X", without taking into account the context and the opponent that they were playing. I find it helpful to vet through my own matches by mentally assigning chess notations to specific moves/situations. The notations are as follows: ?? - A horrific blunder, usually leads to an instantaneous loss ? - A mistake ?! - A dubious move, but had some logic to it. !? - An interesting move ! - A good move !! - Something downright amazing I'll give an example for one round of a match that I lost: 0:09 - Ky - Greed Sever opening (?!)/Slayer get hit (?). Actually, I happened to notice that magz wasn't even looking at the screen right when the round was starting, so I figured maybe I could catch him napping. Turns out that he wasn't paying attention at all, and got hit. 0:26 - Slayer IAD (?) - Three IADs in a row, each time getting punished for small damage. You would think that he would stop, but magz likes to be hyper aggressive. 0:36 - Ky Blue burst (?!) - I probably should've held on to this burst, but I wanted to keep the initiative, and I figured he was going to 2D anyway, guaranteeing that the burst would hit. 0:46 - Ky j. d (??)/Slayer DOT (!?). At the time, I didn't know that I could die from DOT instantaneously from this position, but I should've figured that magz would attempt something hyper aggressive like that. Had he done this on reaction, it would be a ! for Slayer, but the super flash came before the J.D, so clearly was going to do this no matter what I did. It gets a !? because it's not a bad try.

Looks like I can't make this after all. Oh well, next time then.

I have just witnessed greatness. We have to include this during poverty time.

Somewhat off topic, but: Fred - looks like hour 1 and hour2 of station 1 are all tourney footage, so you may want to break them up and post HQ for each.

FWIW, I assumed it was going to be the 7th, even though I cannot make that date. If it's the 14th, then I might be able to show.