carpe ultra

Hey all,

I attended a tournament yesterday. I did fairly well considering I didn't expect to win at all. I actually pulled out two wins. One was against someone who clearly just started playing the game, and the other was against a decent Fei Long. I lost to the guy that ended up placing third (I did manage to steal a round from him) and another guy who placed 'I think' fifth. It was overall a very fun experience even if, once again, I didn't really say that much while I was there. I did have my ears and eyes open and tried to glean what I could from the matches I had. One of the things I took away from the tourney was that I really need to start capitalizing on opportunities I'm creating for myself. I noticed, even against better players, that I would manage to put them in undesirable situations that I just couldn't follow through on. Watching them play casuals, I noticed that they rarely missed a combo or ultra opportunity and watching the weaker players at the tournament I noticed that they usually always did. Doing big damage when I get the chance is important because those chances don't seem to come by very often. So this comes down to execution practice. A lot of it. My friend Doug, who has formidable Fei Long, says that he goes through Fei's hard trials once a day both sides of the screen for execution practice. He says he can get through them in about 10 minutes now. I would love to be able to do that with Ryu, and so I popped into Challenge Mode today with him and finally got through Hard Trial 2, which is actually easy for me now as opposed to when I tried to do it a few months ago. I can see rolling through these challenges in 10 minutes, and I can definitely see how working on them will strengthen my execution once I'm able to do them automatically. That's the kind of grind you have to go through I think if you really want to play at the high level. That kind of execution is one of the pieces of the puzzle that separates the average from the above average. Now once I get to above average it will be about a lot more than just execution, but for now this is certainly a hurdle that I can overcome and will overcome.