Rough Night

It's friday night. I work the night shift as a government contractor and my family is usually asleep when I get home. The nightly ritual is to sit down for a few matches which here for the past couple of days have been turning into frustration for me. I feel like I spend all of my time at work, I don't get to see the family much, and the one hobby that I enjoy for the time being, Street Fighter, I'm terrible at. Tonight, for instance, I couldn't even ultra... instead of ultra, ex shoryuken was coming out endlessly... nothing was going right. I would go for shoryuken and get super instead. I just couldn't execute! The controls felt horribly awkward. I thought things were going a little better for me execution-wise, but tonight it feels like I'm starting from scratch. I'm sure I can probably chalk this up to not getting to play as much as I would like. Lets face it, I'm 30 years old, with a family, and a job, and obligations and Street Fighter is a difficult game that requires a lot of time. Time isn't something I have much of. It's very hard for me to be satisfied with being mediocre due to time constraints. One cliche phrase that I have been trying to keep in mind for the past couple of days "slow and steady wins the race". If I keep playing, eventually my execution will improve even if I don't have 3-4 hours to work on it every night, my match-up knowledge will most likely improve too. If I continue to play over the course of the coming years, I should be better than I am now. How much better? A lot better I hope. If I'm not practicing the right way, or with the right mindset of "slow and steady wins the race" and with some sort of reluctant acceptance of where I am now as a player I don't think I will ever improve regardless of time. Why? Because my frustration at not improving quickly enough will most likely lead me to quit playing all together. I have to turn some of my desire to be good at SF4 into patience.

On a positive note, I watched a video of myself playing a fairly decent Guile and I noticed that I wasn't giving up ground nearly as much as I used to in older videos. This made me happy because it's a habit I've been forcing myself to get into and its starting to become a little more automatic. In older videos of myself (a few weeks ago) I would do a lot of needless distancing i.e. jumping back for no reason other than fear of having to react to a poke or react to a jump-in attack. In street fighter, I feel comfortable with space in between me and the opponent. If that space isn't there it forces me to make quick decisions and often times due to lack of experience those decisions might be the wrong ones. I have less time in those instances to think about what I am doing and so it feels unsafe to me. Well, lately, I've been trying to put myself in the opponents shoes and force them into that same unsafe feeling. I'm trying to give them that feeling as often as possible by simply not backing down from them. I'm not necessarily attacking, I might just be blocking a fireball and walking a half step forward back to where I was when I blocked it. This seems to create the illusion that I'm 'pushing' them into the corner. Basically what I'm getting at with this is that if there isn't a reason to give up space that I have earned, then I shouldn't be. The less space the opponent controls the fewer options they have and the less time they have to react to what is happening. I am trying to use that knowledge to my advantage by speeding up my decision making process in those instances while their's might be slowing down as they run out of options.

Back on a subject I've been hitting on in nearly every blog, the c.mk xxx hado while moving forward... the secret? Hold down back instead of down for the fireball and do basically a half circle motion on the stick. Simple. Now incorporating that into my pressure game is another matter, but the technique works.

Slow and steady wins the race.