PAW-SAKURA-DIARY

2020-07-24
After few hours of ranked+casuals i deranked all the way down to silver, around 2300LP. So far i am just getting feeling of what sakura can do and cannot do. Namely she really doesnt get away with doing raw SureYouKens and even her tatsus are more help for opponents than me. I still cannot do jab>jab>DP i still cannot hitconfirm anything but i didnt expect to be able to do anything on 1st day anyway. Still despite all losses online, i confirmed that i still can steal game and rounds with just pure fake pressure and very strong walk>grab tactics online. And i pity all bronze plebs who were forced to face me and lose. They really are as bad as all the rumors about bronzes. Though they can block crossups. But thats message for the one dude on sfv server where i got banned...

On bright side i did ALL sakuras combo trials. Took about 3 hours and now both my hands hurts. Future plans: train doing clean DP motion so much i can use it without thinking in sakura combos. Without reliable DP i wont progress anywhere.

I hate DP. I spend 4 hours in lab today, doing various sakura combos and i can do a few now with almost 100% accuracy until the part where you are supported to do DP. Then i usually do fireball, nothing or late DP which drops the combo. ♥♥♥♥ my life. I cannot comprehend how normal people play characters with DP motions and not jump from bridge. At least my hand doesnt really hurt, just the fingers. I tried so many ways how to do DP motion and they all equally suck ♥♥♥♥.
F D F
hold F, double tap D
hold D, double tap F
hold F, tap D once
The biggest joke is that doing DP alone on its own is piss easy. But doing it inside combo is nightmare. ♥♥♥♥ combos, ♥♥♥♥ nerds who love these controls, ♥♥♥♥ capcom. Please remove DP motion from SF6, thank you. Make it instead reversed fireball aka just F D for sureYouKen. So much time wasted...

Joined sakura discord server today. Was cool to talk with other peeps and knowing they also struggle with ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up b.HP > DP combo. Its ♥♥♥♥. No wonder sakura has lowest winrate online. ♥♥♥♥ DP.

Today i didnt practice much, instead i grinded ranked + casuals a lot. My success rate of doing DP as combo finisher went up to about 70% success ratio. Its not perfect, but its viable. The trick was behind b.HP having way shorter window for cancel that it looked on screen. Turns out you have to cancel it pretty much immediately which is truly issue with buffering DP motion. ♥♥♥♥ DP. I have way easier time doing it from left side facing right than the other way. Anyhow today i landed my first jump in mk > mp > b.hp > dp.hp which marks beggining of me actually knowing what am i doing. Also using cr.mp > cr.mp (hitconfirm) dp.hp as meaty works extremly well on plebs in silver and bronze. I scored two perfects today both against ultra bronze. Made me feel bad for them :cry:

On pic you can see the biggest weakness so far i lived through with sakura: her anti-air tools are very whacky and situational. Dipped two times to ultra bronze, but quickly came back. Still on 2200LP.

I suck ass at street fighter! day 4 and day 5 i was just playing lobbies with peeps here, namely rusty, infighter and bear. So ofc i didnt learn anything then. On this day 6 i spend about 2 hours autistically practicing combos. Results? I still drop DPs randomly, sometimes on wakeup i do on accident ex fireball or just cr.HP instead of EXDP which always ends in great failure.

Today i played many ranked and casuals games. Ofc casuals are full of smurfs who plus minus wipes the floor with me and ranked is people in ultra bronze getting perfected by me, zero silvers and very tight games with super silvers. But i was stubborn to go sleep and kept going, resulting in rather sad lose streak resulting in me going back to the roots: bronze. Kids, if you dont want to derank, dont play ranked past midnight. All actual begginers are asleep at that time and only smurfs remain :joy:

My combos right now are:
mp(hitconfirm)>b.hp>heavy DP
cr.mk(buffer in neutral)>light tatsu
cr.mp(meaty, comboes on counterhit) >cr.mp(hitconfirm) >heavy DP
lk>medium DP (meme combo which makes DP whiff 90% of the time)
My fingers hurt, i hate DP, i hate how little i know matchups and i hate execution barrier in fighting games. And i dislike smurfs but without them i would get almost no matches in silver :joy:

Future plans: spend one whole day doing anti airs and learning some way how to use vtrigger for actual damage and learning 3 frame punish so next time i meet guile i have answer to his knee (-3 on block). But the AAs are way more important. I can already see my bad habits from kolin forming where i cope in very unhealthy ways with jumpins instead of just AAing them :sadkitty:

Used sakura over 500 times according to game announcer. Still in ultra bronze, but getting hang of using sakuras basic combos in fraction of second to land the damn punish to retarded ken's tatsu. I still HATE DP with passion. And i also hate holding back while trying to cancel HP into other moves. Whole day i did like 2 antiairs total so nothing changed on this front.

On other note i made a plan to send email to [email protected] and tell him to make video about himself and other smurfs like pic related. I am interested to hear about the topic from the other side of barricade. Will do it tommorow.

Ps: ♥♥♥♥ DP motion. Also i am scared once i get the DP motion down i wont be able to cancel normals into fireballs anymore because thats how you dish out additional damage with sakura :FrogeSweats:

I am starting to experiment with sakuras vtrigger1 (better firebals) and how to convert them into damage via vskill2 (the roll kick). Its okayish damage which leads into no OKI but who cares right? Aproximately 250 damage per stray fireball hit. Not bad.

I still suck with DPs but i am experimenting with different methods to input them, namely due to the link vskill2(hold)>medium or light DP which you absolutely cannot mash because it will result in CA instead. Holding forward and then tapping down seems like most reliable way (except when trying to do b.HP>DP, ♥♥♥♥ THAT LINK).

Dabbled a bit in ranked, got 7 win streak, these poor bronzes all lack some basic skill and then they stand no chance unless i do something really stupid like dropping all my combos. Also met my first lag switcher after a long time. Glad to see some things never change.

Still no AA game. DAMN YOU GAME! GIVE ME NONSTOP STREAM OF JUMPING KENS so i am forced to learn.

I am getting confident with sakura. After crazy ranked match against silver bison where i was chasing him all across the screen and punishing all his nonsense with lk>dp felt good. Reached another 7 win streak but these dont hold much value because i dont get matched with any silvers or super silvers, its like silver ranks are ghost town and only plebs in bronze exist.

Didnt learn or used any new thing, just getting more consistent. And i still think b.HP>DP is nonsense. In whole session I didnt do a single AA :rofl: but to be fair it seems nobody is jumping in bronze/silver. Wonder why is that.

Also met the ultimate king of retarded ken playstyle who even showed me new tech for retarded ken. He should be the aspiration for all of us.

Nothing really changed except i did my FIRST INTENDED ANTI-AIR with sakura and it won me the game. Spend hour and half AAing ken in training mode. I think all my future combos i will learn while having bot randomly jumping around stage so my head is forced to automatise the AA while i am thinking about complex combos, vtrigger, bar management and punish for whiffed DPs.

And "smurf" with the worst winrate i have ever seen with name ShotoRyuKen is my favorite player to get matched with. I never win a single round against him, but he is very suicidal so once i get all the punishes under control he should go down nicely.

Still stuck in vanilla silver, still dropping combos, still not doing any anti-airs :sadkitty:

That said i managed to break 36 winstreak of smurf using B MINUS TIER character G so that was awesome. I am getting more confident when punishing various moves in the game, though its still misery full of dropped combo and not optimal punishes.

Also i landed my first (almost) optimal combo using vtrigger and vskill in real match:
mp > b.hp XX firebal (in vtrigger) vskill2 > light DP

Slowly but surely i am growing more and more confident in navigating sakura. 700 games with her

I finally touched super silver with sakura! It took only 759 matches with 43% winrate. No bad, not amazing neither. I still drop b.hp>dp motions like soap in prison shower but whatever. I still didnt get any meaningful AA under control because no opponents jump at me at correct time nor correct angle where my only dedicated AA button (cr.hp) works properly. And no sakura shouldnt use her DPs as AA because they are too slow, have wonky reach and no invincibility against jumpins. That said i managed to bait zangief to jump repeatedly over my charged fireball and then i medium / heavy DPed him. Felt like orgasm, but in street fighter.

Future plans: as it was stated in some video some pro made, doing anti airs correctly isnt just reaction check, but proper spacing. If i was B- tier character like G, i could just press vskill and win instantly any jumpin encounter, but sadly i am playing B tier sakura so i dont have a single reliable anti crossup AA. So what i will do instead? I will position myself better on battlefield so i can either use the cr.HP or i can walk under the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and punish them on landing. However there is one big question i need to ask pros: do pros visually confirm their attack will connect mid-air before pressing the button or is that impossible? Because if higher ranks can confirm before landing if they crossup will or wont hit, they can just not press the button and be completely safe on their landing. I need to do more research on the subject. Otherwise the great walking speed is ideal for walking under jumpins and landing BIG PUNISH. Also air to air fight is an option but i hate it because even if you land the air hit, the opponent recovers faster than you on the ground. And air grab works only from point blank distance.

Also i am experimenting with fireballs but i suspect in these low ranks with extremly random opponents they help them get random jumpin way more often then they offer anything of value to me.

I played two sets with selfieSuck (kage player with annoying minor lag which makes his movement not visible): 5-4 (i lost) and 1-5 (i won). Not bad. Either he got worse or i got better. I still cannot AA and i still drop b.HP>DP.

Also i spend an hour trying to learn the difference between medium and heavy version stomp of kage. ♥♥♥♥ this move honestly. Normally if moves becomes plus on block they are EX versions which are easy to tell apart because of color change. Medium stomp is -2 and heavy stomp is +3 and has to be jabbed out. ♥♥♥♥ it.

No real progress on my AA game or on b.HP>DP. Tried to train against kage loop stomps a little and decided i dont care enough about it. I can just vreversal, EXDP it or just take the throw. Tommorow i will spend at least two hours AAing i promise. No ranked or casuals, just me, ken dummy and billion different ways how ken can jump. The goal is to recognize when to AA, which option to use and test if sakuras heavy DP can reach backjumping opponents in time and if it isnt suicide to pursue them. And if the DPs wont be good enough even for this, i will officialy declare sakura's DPs as ♥♥♥♥ tier AA and punish tool.
Was grinding ranked and casuals and today is the first day i "deranked" gold player (lost to them>they ranked up, then defeated them). It was setplay ibuki. At first i wanted to call this ibuki retarded because she is displaying same qualities as retarded ken HOWEVER her setplay is insanely hard to counter if you dont know the matchup. Name of the player is KANSAIKING. He has 15k games, 50% winrate and is really really bad. The moment you block his ibuki nonsense, hes pretty much dead. He solves all pressure via EXDP even when he has no bar left and is heavily relying on ibukis fake teleports and inability of people to punish her b.HK and vskill1 on block. That said his setplay is on top. One mistake and you get looped to death. Who knows maybe he will force me to learn ibuki's matchup, he is playing ONLY ranked games.

Also for the first time ever i used one EX bar combo to kill stunned opponent
j.HK>mp>b.hp>EX tatsu>light DP
i felt like pro sakura player doing that and it secured me a win so a progress i guess?

First minor results of "training" AA finally came in. I landed about 6 real intended anti-airs. Still very pathetic number but hey, most players i meet either dont jump at all or they keep jumping backwards (mostly bronze kens do this, yes i deranked back to vanilla silver) away from me hoping to tilt me and score easy win. Also training AAing in traning mode is completely different from real match. In training mode you know they will jump, in real match they jump once per round while you have to focus elsewhere...

Also i have found out that punishing neutral jumps with sakuras LONG REACHing DPs is only plausible in theory. In reality the damage you get is super low because only few last hits of the heavy / medium DP connects so you risk around 30 extra damage + small corner carry for insane risk of whiffed DP. To put it shortly the heavy DP doesnt have reach long enough to punish fullscreen jumps whatsoever and it can lose horribly to empty jumps. Totally not worth it.

Considering the issue of b.HP > DP motion i decided its not worth my time anymore. Optimal combos either use fireballs or tatsus after the b.HP which is insanely easier to buffer and i dont risk anything even if i whiff it in middle since both are safe on block. So yeah, ♥♥♥♥ that string. Optimal meterless max damage is mp>b.hp>medium tatsu>cr.lp>light dp anyway. Doing b.hp>DP is wasting damage and i drop it all the time anyway.

Oh and i met ragequitter bison in bronze with too high suspicious winstreak. Do you really keep your winstreak even if you ragequit?

Ugh what a day. Lost tons of matches, wondered about meaties, tried out pic related a bit and was generally very dumb and lost everything thanks to it. At the end i got 5 win streak and ranked up back to super silver. I think this is simply because i never warm up. No matter what state my brain is in, i jump into ranked and get bodied. Maybe i want to implement some sort of warm up in the future.
Also made another gold player. I lost to him solely because the bastard knew how to delay tech and to this very day i didnt learn / practiced anti delay tech tech.

And nope, today i did ♥♥♥♥ all total ZERO anti airs.

Actually its day 19, but on sunday i didnt even turn the game on. After a bit of thinking i reached conclusion you can see the date and time of each post so counting days when i dont play is redundant. I will only count the days where i did something.

I have reached 1000 ranked games wins. This only shows how big begginer baby i am. Total ~2000 ranked games only after 560 hours of game according to steam. Unbelievable how much time i wasted in survivals and other single player crap instead of buying the DLC like anybody else. Oh well, the time is only as valuable as we decide it is. Grinding the FM so i dont have to dish out 10 bucks for season pass in hindsight was total waste of time. But maybe its the same principle with maining kolin...

Also i changed my ingame title (from gold to show i am smurf; and its pointless since i am really bad silver atm) to pic related. To forever symbolise all the wasted time in weird way. You should chill out. Right, thats the only way to get gud at this game, otherwise you would go crazy or ragequit like so many others did before me. Also i bought new colors for sakura costume. Even if you get stomped, you gotta keep the style.

In terms of gameplay today i (to my big surprise) discovered i can do
cr.lp > lp > lk > dp.mp
without ever training it. Ofc i am yet to land it in actual live match but i can do it very consistently in lab. Weird. Did my brain learned something i never trained? Or am i going insane and forgot i trained this? Otherwise no more advancements, only me getting depressed seeing all the ♥♥♥♥ i do in match like headless chicken without a plan. Gotta work on so many things before i can escape silver hell... :tired_face:

Today was a day of big win streaks. I felt way more calm and brain oriented with sakura than usual, mostly utilising strategy of letting my opponents to kill themselves. I was one win away from ultra silver on 8 win streak and then i met my biggest enemy: unknown matchups. First chunli which is so weird i have no words for that. And right after i got 90% winrate smurf on vega. Yeah, i should probably learn chunli matchup, she is quite common online. But ♥♥♥♥ vega. In every tierlist (except online winrate) he is trash and nobody plays him. It would most likely be total waste of time.

I tried to AA today, not many result. And even when you land sakura's AA, its so pitifuly weak and i am not even able to take my turn afterwards. So much struggle for basically no reward. Sadness. Also today i experimented with EX bar usage, namely optimal damage per one ex bar and i gotta say in comparsion with kolin sakura does way more damage. Its probably tied to her harder execution. Pretty nice, i win few games thanks to optimised one ex bar combos already. It can make the difference.

Also i have experimented with tall characters having weakness which can be utilised by extra damage even without using exbar. But i have yet to land that in real match.
mp>b.hp XX ex air fireball > heavy DP (anywhere)
mp>b.hp XX ex air fireball > light tatsu > light DP (corner)
mp>b.hp XX air fireball > medium DP (only tall characters or turbo precise timing on b.HP xx fireball)

Today i feel optimistical and i wonder how tough opponents in gold will be once i breach the ultra silver, which is probably close. Too bad i might reach gold without AA game on point...

Today i didnt really train anything new, just grinded online to get more consistent. Not sure about my consistency, but i reached ultra silver on nice 10 win streak. And no, i did about one anti air the whole time. Why is something so basic and super important so hard and impossible to train. Also i have noticed when i need to spend CA in order to kill opponent i usually drop the whole combo right after mp>b.hp. Gotta train this more.
Side note: today is the first day i used my newly discovered shortcut for wakeup EXDP in live match. The shortcut is holding forward, tap down, tap punch. This is revolutionary since normally when i want to do this move, i usually mash like crazy which sometimes fires off CA and sometimes EX fireball instead. I will keep experimenting with it. Also its kinda hard to know the timing: i never really paid attention to MY wakeup animation so i expect to die a way more than usual in the future by eating meaties.

Also i have noticed after about one hour of playing i ran out of brain juice which makes me play even worse than usual. I gotta ask some pro players if they train past their brain fatigue or not. At one hand when you are tired its expected to play like ♥♥♥♥ and probably not learn much from your loses. But on other hand if you are capable of doing combos and basic neutral even while fatigued, you should become absolute killing monster when you are well rested... :thinking:

No progress in anything. Life sucks. My student rustydog said to me ♥♥♥♥ you, i wont play this ♥♥♥♥ game anymore. Life sucks double. I lost lobby matches again another my peep bear. Life sucks many times over. No progress on anti airs. ♥♥♥♥ life.

On positive note today i discovered that not all sakura combos works on crouching opponents. Notably her (ex) air fireball combo extension. Thats very troubling. Kolin had no such issue whatsoever. Last time i met similair mechanic was in Tekken 7 where the scenario was reversed: many moves forced you to crouch on block which in turn disabled your ability to use jabs and instead of jab you did WS(while stanind) moves which were turbo slow and killed you in 99% cases. One of the reasons while i hated tekken. Looks like i will have to learn not just hitconfirm my combos, but also watch if my opponent is crouching or not before i decide to go for any ex fireball extension. Now i can finally see why would you ever use ex tatsu which is otherwise complete waste of resources and damage (but works on crouching opponents).

Its infuriating to see how behind i am with execution, anti airs and more and more like checking dashes or executing shimmies without killing myself. Side note: vega doesnt make sense to me and ibuki's overhead is the best move in the game. Yes i met that only one ibuki player in ranked and lost 2-1 to him. Can't check her teleport dashes, similair to bison dashes. In fact i cannot check a single dash in the game. ♥♥♥♥ everything. Oh and pic related send me invitation after he mopped floor with me in casuals. ♥♥♥♥ this dude as well.

Today i tried new thing: playing the game twice per day: once when i get home and 2nd time after dinner. We will see in long term if this does anything positive but wasting twice as much time by losing matches online. My ingame performance? Horrible. I dont know what exactly happened, but all opponents i got today played solid neutral, didnt do any gimmicks, never jumped and generally beated the ♥♥♥♥ out of me. Did people watch the from rookie to diamond series or something?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juWv7Ye7xm4
I did total ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ 2 anti airs. Jezus.

Still today's day wasnt complete disaster. While i was facing another turbo agressive player who was mashing jab no matter what i realized the piece of gameplay i was missing: I have to pick up opponents patterns and if they dont respect being -2 on block, they have to die to frame trap. And this sounds extremly basic, but its something i never had to even think about with kolin. Kolin just did lp>mp>hp all day everyday. And to apply pressure you just did lp>grab and anybody who didnt respect it would die. With sakura? It feels like i need to get another uni degree. None of her buttons really combo into itself, the pushback is massive, MP button is extremly stubby and window to cancel it into anything dmaging is small and one mistake and i whiff DP and literally die. I will look into it tommorow.

Skipped saturday and almost skipped even today but somehow i managed to make myself play. Nothing new learned from sakura's arsenal except trying to do HK (CC)>vskill2 roll>DP. This is one of many things i never had to learn with kolin: using heavy buttons to open up enemies. With kolin you just spaced her vskill 1 (universal parry) and it was practically safe and it parried any kind of button your opponent would throw out and even if they didnt do anything, it would still hit them and moved me closer. And ice cubes from distance would give me basically free jumpins or forced enemy to move either towards me or towards corner. With sakura i am forced to play honest game and fireballs dont cut it in many matchups like cammy or karin. And one thing which all good players use are heavy buttons in neutral.
In ranked i achieved another nice winstreak and returned back to ultra silver. Which is cool and all but it doesnt serve any purpouse. Also its official now: there are two different vega players, two blanka players and one bison. Matchups i have no idea how to win so despite them being worse than me (they have no idea how to defend for example) i always lose horribly because they practically get free everything and i dont even punish. If this ♥♥♥♥ will continue i will be eventually forced to learn these meme matchups one way or another. Its like all players who hates footsies pick vega or blanka...

And you guessed it, i again did total zero anti airs...

No new sakura tech learned. At the start i felt really good but then my dad started to download and the internet bottlenecked hard as represented in pic related. Middle test is when i unplugged his pc from router. Time to move out from papa-hotel or buy new router with QoS feature (quality of service: prioritize traffic from X pc or X program over other packets).

I landed one whole antiair today, defeated my first gold player in ranked with sakura (95LP and he was so salty he didnt reamtch afterwards) and got a new tip from sakura server which i gotta test myself somehow:

Fun fact, your brain reacts to audio cues slightly faster than visuals, so listen for the CC sound and train yourself to input roll after the kick.

The grind has to continue...

Today i finally labbed and understand how to do
hk(CC)>vskill2>dp.mp
it just has tricky delay into it when you hit the crush counter which stops the time and that was the reason why the roll wasnt working as you would have guess. I still didnt use this new tactic in live match (using heavy buttons in neutral to fish for crush counter) and then actually converting it into okay damage + corner carry. The future is yet to be seen.

Met another smurf ryu in ranked, was pretty intense battle but i ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up by letting my opponent walk for free out of corner and that costed me the game and chance to break their winstreak. Normally i would complain about smurf but honestly, this was the most nerve wrecking closest 2 games i ever played in last few weeks. I even saw new secret ryu tech: after ex donkey kick ryu can do a reset. Total number of anti airs? About three. So hard to even remind myself during batte: hey watch the spacing, you wont be able to cr.hp at this angle!

Played nice set first to 5 against churly. He was using cody and it was nice experience. Sure i still do some stupid ♥♥♥♥, drop some combos and keep doing mistakes, but in the end i won 4-5. Thanks for the game @Churly :dog~1:

the day of big depression. The more i played the worse i got. Truly horrible day. But i cannot just give up at first struggle. Gotta preserve and endure! I think today's mood best description is to simply quote my salt i typed earlier today:

its official
i just ended 4 win streak cammy 2-1
and i almost lost MULTIPLE ROUNDS
because i kept doing walk forward > cr.mk > firNOT_REALLY_ITS_DP
:♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥:
CAN YOU IMAGINE
YOU WANT TO DO SAFE LOW POKE AGAINST
OPPONENT WHO LOVES TO PRESS BUTTONS
WHEN HES MINUS
FOLLOWED BY FIREBALL WHICH CAN LEAD INTO
CASUAL 300 DAMAGE
AND INSTEAD THE GAME SAYS: HEEEEEEY, IS THIS
FORWARD AND FIREABALL? GEEEZ, let me make
DP from it instead
AND THEN YOU WHIFF ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ DP BECAUSE
LIGHT ONE HAS ZERO REACH
AND YOU WATCH AT YOUR OPPONENT WHO IS
EVEN MORE CONFUSED THAN YOU
AND HOPE THEY WONT PUNISH???
See? Three question marks there, that is a sign of maximum TILT. Anything above that and you forget how to type. I still dont know how to feel about this SFV feature. Sure it is trying to help newbies to do DP, but at what cost? And learning doing forward > down+back.kick > down > forward.punch is really really hard on keyboard. Its one of the most complex sequence i ever had to do. I really dont know if i even want to learn this. Maybe i can give up one of the strongest tool sakura has? ♥♥♥♥.

Number of anti airs today: about three. Still abysmal. And todays pic is showing akuma ignoring air fireballs. I wonder why its always akuma players when this happens. Is their jumping hurtbox S tier as well?

Bought championship edition upgrade! One day after the sale ended. Yup. Just like that. Twenty-Five euros (25€). Now i can finally experience full SFV experience of getting bodied on various fun maps and dress sakura into new costume and new color each day!
Didnt learn a thing today, just played lobbies and with horror i realized i am suddenly ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ up mp>b.hp link. This never happened to me before. Its either my keaboard buttons acting up in hot summer weather, my brain developing alzheimer or my hands are getting continuously damaged to the point i am losing sense in them. I dont even know which one of these variants is more scary!

Also i made one of my friend Temote today super sad because i said that certain characters like dhalsim or menat are pure cancer. He took it as a reason why i didnt play him yesterday (when i had depression day) and it was all kind of sad for both me and him because he apparently spend some time learning dhalsim and he wanted to show me the progress in lobby i didnt join. Lots of miscommunication and sadness really.
>why dont you play him other day?
Because he doesnt have access to okay interent connection often and its kind of rare for him to be able to play with any of us. Sorry temote!

the day of weird online. Today majority of online were smurfs wiht 40+ winstreaks, weirdly playing people with less than 400 games and already being in silver and zoning cammy. Yes you have read it right: cammy; a character without fireball or long range pokes was zoning me. I have no idea where average silver players disappeared to, but the rest of bunch who kept playing on friday evening were ragequitters or described as above...

Today i did about 10 anti airs? Pretty small number, but today is the first day i feel like i did some sort of progress in the matter of forcing players to play the ground game. And most IMPORTANTLY one dude at sakura discord server shared a secret tech how to input
walk forward > cr.mk > fireball
without doing accidental DP: Do the fireball as late as possible aka make the delay in the input buffer so it sees forward (nothing) down forward. It feels very wonky to input it with delay, but its million times better than all other trick i have tried so far. Thank you JoelMcD#9866! Hopefully i will be able to implement this in real fights without too much work and my win rates will skyrocket. After all its better to whiff fireball than whiffing DP...

Also lately i met a lot of players who delay tech 100% of the time. I am itching to finally learn and practice anti-delay-tech tech but i know this will catapult me into ranks where nobody jumps anymore. I gotta resist the devil and keep training the basics while i still can.

Today i trained new newbie on our server. Fun but for me it meant less time to get gud. I also tried the
walk forward > cr.mk > (wait) fireball
in order to prevent unwanted DPs. Works quite nicely, didnt even have to grind it out in lab, i just started doing it in matches and instantly having like 80% succes ratio. Still it showed a big gap in my offense sakura game: if i dont have vtrigger on, i only do the super weak unrewarding cr.mk > light tatsu which even ends my turn on the spot against better opponents. I gotta learn to use EX fireball because certain opponents catch the trick and stop the walk back the moment i pop vtrigger. I need to have offense tool even without the vbar.

I am slowly getting used to anti airs, though its still extremly hard to persuade myself to press the damn cr.hp. I even find myself in situations where i space myself correctly so enemy will land right into cr.hp and keep saying jump... JUMP! and then the madmen actually jumps and i still forget to press it. Jezus how i wish the training mode was better (way more slots for recording dummy).

And late in the night i met another ryu legend: pic related. He plays so weird, he isnt exactly good but ♥♥♥♥ i barely managed to steal one round of him. He has 33k games and still stuck in silver playing like ♥♥♥♥. And no he didnt swap characters or played casuals. He only plays ryu... I gotta watch his replays sometime and analyze what exactly is he doing wrong and how come i cannot breach it (i already suspect its the combination of my inability to AA 100% and check dashes, he does both of these quite often). Also i tried to lab optimal maximum efficient DP punish for sakura and i reached conclusion that i have no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ idea. But using df.hk (counter) > BnB does exactly 300 damage without a single bar which is A LOT OF DAMAGE. My typical one ex bar BnB does 280 something...

Whoa, a whole one month of playing sakura. Today i tried to traing cancelling light DP > CA but no real results, it really feels like my ring finger is too weak or not dexterous enough to pull it off. I have way harder time doing this at P1 side than P2 side. I wonder if i didnt ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up myself by playing on keyboard because from the little i have seen it looks like pro players play on hitbox / stick like on a piano: nonstop moving and adjusting their hand position so they always end up using the 2 or three real fingers which are never the pinky and ring finger. While i am using the technique of unmoving hand where one finger = one key no matter which position on screen i am or which combo i am trying to do. Heck, i should try out swapping the position of hand myself, at least when i am going for complex combo which this one definitely is
mp > b.hp xx vtrigger > hp xx fireball > vskill2 roll > light DP XX CA

Today i did a few anti airs, but the desired results i would like to see are still too far away. Also today i won my first 2-0 set against golden cody which i even blocked from ranking up. But who knows how real this victory was, it was late at night he was probably tired or how else should i comprehend him REFUSING to block on his wakeup and eating three meaties in a row?

Also the more i play the more i realize how ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ complex it is to play shoto. Trying to read opponent and deciding when its safe to throw out fireball in offense and when you have to sit tight and expect jump in is no joke. Then there is million buffered buttons, looking for dashes and looking for ideal spacing for crush counter HK. I never had to do any of this with kolin and still get very decent results with her. Who knows, maybe at the end of next month i will pity all Ryus because i will finally understand their struggle to do anything. After all i have at least cr.mk which converts into million damage and corner carry, ryu doesnt have even that.

i can almost taste the gold. I am slowly growing confident in my sakura abilities. I still drop many combos, choke and do many mistakes, but i now can call my basic sakura's gameplan refined enough to reach gold rank. At this point its just question of patience and maybe a little luck. Won my first few games against golden players as well. Even got one perfect. I dont do many stupid things anymore, punish more than zero of my opponents mistaktes and sometimes even play footsies and fish for lk > dp.

Today number of anti airs? Eh, like 2. But who cares, the higher i climb the less my opponents jump. Its truly weird how some people NEVER jump. Like wow i throw fireball and you just take the chip damage? Weird ass gold players...

I tried to train today cancelling the light dp > CA but alas its super frustrating and it makes my hand hurts :frowning: And yup you guessed it, in my first match against NOT RETARDED GOLD KEN PLAYER i dropped this cancel TWO ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ times which cost me 2-0 games. ♥♥♥♥.

Reached 5 win streak in ultra silver. First day where i managed to not derank back to super silver. Its getting close. The only thing i keep training is the ability to cancel various DPs (mostly light or medium) into critical art, because lately this has been the most critical combo failures in my matches and it ALWAYS costed me the round.
I am slowly getting used to playing "footsies" with actual gold players. They play entirely different league of SFV. This feel exactly the same as facing silvers when i was trying to get out of ultra bronze. Except this time i am not so scared anymore because i know (in theory) what should i be doing. Sakura footsies are mostly three things
lk > dp.mp (buffered far enough so LK never gets blocked)
hk (CC) > vs2 roll > dp.mp (here you never want your HK to whiff)
fireball (or air fireball if you feel they will jump)

I am pretty sure i am missing something but this basic "shoto" trio covers basically everything your opponents can do in neutral: walking and pressing buttons gets clipped by LK, pressing buttons at wrong time can get crush countered by HK and generally any long or slow button gets clipped by fireball. So far i am generally using only the LK buffer, i am never confident enough for HK or fireball, both these tools lose horribly to jumpins my opponents never do :joy:

All of this lowkey falls apart when you cannot do anti airs 10 out of 10 times, but ♥♥♥♥ that, these golds just dont jump at me. And when they do, it almost never leads into anything.

This pic was made by my friend bear who mains juri and up until ultra silver his gameplan was keep-away and timing opponents out while abusing his juri vs1 teleport which was truly cancer to face. Sadly hes banned now because he was too edgy for temote (and other people). RIP bear, i wont forget you.

GOLD! I am back where i was year ago with kolin: touched gold!!
Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Some boring data: 33 days, 1660 games (768 ranked), 49.46% win rate. Final match was 5 winstreak game. Today i played 2 different ibukis, ken and abigail. All other games were in lobbies against various peeps from our server. Who knows maybe using lobbies as a warmup improves your win ratio in ranked (or your confidence when you win 3-0 lol) or maybe it was just result of my unending resolution and grinding ranked and casuals for a month straight.

Now the real work will begin: staying in gold and start reaching platinum. I dont doubt there are many ways how to reach plat, namely i suspect you can do any of these to get to platinum comfortably:
learning matchups so you actually punish -3 and -4 moves
learning meaties after every single knockdown
getting consistent anti airs because any jumpin is deadly
getting consistent anti ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ like DPing G's wheelkick
learning some basic footsies
optimising damage because closing rounds + denying comeback is crucial
learning how to actually read your opponents habits
set play, set play, set play, flowchart, set play, mix ups
getting guts to lame out your opponents with keep out style
learning how to defeat delay tech and force opponent fear to block

From all of these, i will focus on simple honest things first so meaties, shimmies, light DP xx CA cancel (lol 3rd day and i still cant do it) and then we will see how it goes. Obviously i never done most of this nor really faced many gold+ opponents so all these plans of mine can be fruitless endevaur. Only time will tell how wrong i was :CatBlush:

I got fans. I am quite not sure what happened, but apparently somebody reposted my previous diary post elsewhere and suddenly we have like 4 new people, all of them saying everything i say / do / play is wrong and that they can do better :joy: Quite amusing i have to admit. And they want to play sets with me and persuade me into playing boring footsies and that training combos for hours in lab isnt autistic :joy: Who knows, maybe they will speed up my progress if i can stomach their nonstop sneaky insults.

Today ranked and casuals were extremly slow, i wonder why was that. Are gold ranks ghost town? Does nobody play games on friday night? And the most important question: why almost every single G player i know have insufferable personality? Played only ibuki, urien, ryu and turbo laggy ken. And yes, my first ranked match was pic related: 10 win streak ultra urien. I would win if i was mentally prepared for his kick overhead and didnt do stupid ♥♥♥♥. Oh well. I hope this lack of games was just rare occurence otherwise i will have to change the way i train a lot.

Did only train the cancel light DP > CA today and managed to land it once in live match. Still nowhere near as consistent as i need it to be. Tekken 7 has dedicated button for supers, wish SFV had that as well. Would make life way easier.

Day of lobby fighting. Fought few people, win all matches in lobbies. Not really impressive considering selection of my opponents and unussual characters they picked (not their mains). Still trying to figure out DP > CA cancel. Holy ♥♥♥♥ how many more days do i have to waste on such "easy" cancel?

And news from ranked: link related https://youtu.be/8tGMNgEmdtM
In this fatal match you can see me (pleb with 5k games, 1.6k games with sakura) vs experienced player (8k games, 0.8k games with zeku) suffering the whole time. Me from being unable to open my opponent because i dont have anti delay tech tech and him from having to suffer for so long because despite my best efforts, he isnt able to kill me fast and move to more competent players in super gold and above. Sure you could say my AA game there sucks balls or that i did very questionable things like jumping, doing raw CA or always went for jab>grab but none of this lost me the game; i lost because no shimmies. Shimmies are now top two priority on my TO-DO list.

Tldr today way kinda waste of a day.

What a waste o time: didnt play a single match in lobby or online. Just wasting time in lab trying to do DP > CA. Yeah. The sooner game developers abandon motion inputs the better. This ♥♥♥♥ ain't fun or needed or impressive. Its just tedious waste of time, barrier 99% of players choose not to pass and instead play monster hunter or whatever and the worst part is that it wont even make me that much better player.

3 and half hours and almost no results. And people wonder why nobody wants to touch the fighting games. But now i kinda understand how people develop carpal tunnel syndrome. I can already feel it a little. Practicing this ♥♥♥♥ hurts. And why do i struggle so much while others dont? Its in my DP shortcut. Apparently normal people input DP in a way there is fireball motion in it so all they have to do is to input fireball after DP and it will cancel into CA (if they did it fast enough). To learn new way how to input DP or keep suffering DP > CA. Or maybe i could uninstall this game and do something more productive with my life and join the 99% group.

At least i minimised the pain and boredom by playing windowed and with muted game so i dont hear sureyouken 10 times per minute over and over mixed with ryu's grunts while i watch a movie. You know even grinding MMORPGs back in 2000ties was more fun than this: at least it didnt damage your hands.

Nothing works. My hand hurts 5 minutes into training. If yesterday bruteforce approach didnt bring a single result but damage to my hand, today i am trying the "brain" approach. And no results. Canceling firebal into CA is piss easy. Cancelling normal into CA is tedious but still very possible. Cancelling DP into CA is nigh impossible. I am the only player of SFV who cannot do this. Oh the irony. Even the king of salt rusty on this place said its easy.

Sadness, depression, dehumanization, hopelessness, broken ego and physical pain in right hand. I am seriously considering using scripting macros to solve this "trivial" problem. Can somebody patch out the execution barrier away from SFV so i can resume playing the real game involving baiting, punishing, footsies and other things?

A lot of things happend. First of all i got so demoralised by failure of mastering DP>CA (and my hand hurted for a two days) that instead of training or playing i just torrented season 1+2 of one punch man and after like 5 years i watched anime. So skipped about 3 days this way. Pretty funny anime, i give it that. The conclusion? Never ever stop the casual + ranked queue just to bruteforce a combo. Not only it sucks away any fun, but mashing one same combo for few hours in a row seriously strains your hand. Lesson learned the hard way. Wasted a lot of time on this.

Another big thing happened. My friend temote suddenly decided he will kill our small discord server called FGriends :cry:. Many people tried to ask why or if we cant do some compromise, but alas it isnt possible. I dont understand this decision but i respect it. Looked into many other existing servers and honestly they were all either dead or i was already banned from them. After some trial and error, i decided i will give New Challenger a try. Mods seems unbiased against me there and chill enough.

In terms of actual progress i can now finally execute DP>CA with somewhat consistency (about 80%?) so from tommorow i can focus on more usable and way more fun tech called anti-delay-tech which is either done by walking out of grab range (shimmi) or by intentionally delaying an attack (or using slower button) mostly in meaty situations like knockdowns or air resets.

Extremly lazy day. Only played lobbies against opponents weaker than me and give them some tips. Sure it was fun and relaxing but i didnt learn a single thing, only confirmed my execution is mostly okay, even with the newly acquired skill DP>CA. Still its not 100% but thats a long term thing to grind out and not important atm. Didn't lose a single game. Also i kinda forgot what combo to use midscreen when i have ex bar and opponent is crouching while landing MP>B.HP... Have i ever known a combo for such situation?

Tomorrow will be the day: the day of shimmies. I am remaining hopeful.

SHIMMIES! I have set up the dummy bison to do block everything and as post block action to do grab with 7 frames delay. It feels awkard, but its incredibly easy to do with sakura because she is super fast both in walking forward and backwards. Still havent decided which is the optimal button to go with as counter to the whiffed grab. Wise people in sakura discord told me its either HP or cr.MK. To me it seems like a waste since i can walk back to range and go for MP which leads into anything i want and is very plus on block so i dont lose pressure. That said it can get blown up by opponets who pay attention. More research and training needed.

The real matches results? Didnt managed even once to blow up oppoent by proper shimmy > button > combo, instead i just shimmy > grab which was surprisingly good enough. Against ultra silvers it works because they are ultra scared in corner, letting me dance in front of their face for like 30 frames and then STILL taking the throw while the golds actually go for delay tech, whiff and then they eat the real grab attempt. Considering this is my first day where i am intentionally trying this new tech the results are spectacular: 8 win streak in gold, thats my first. Before i never was in golden league longer than 1 or 2 matches, now i sit there consistently. As expected, learning shimmies was one of the crucial pieces missing in my pressure puzzle. It works extremly well and i am not even utilizing its full strength yet (just 130 damage grab, not 200+ damage combo + oki).

Also this is like 4th saturday i skipped playing SFV. Wonder why its always saturday. Also not everything is rosy today, i played one dude from this server: i was expecting chill silver game but he brought dhalsim upon my ass. Managed to clutch 3-2 but then i got salty and quit the FT5. Sorry man, but you need to be mentally prepared to face certain matchups and i wasnt.

I didnt derank back to silver. Thats the only positive i can say about todays grind. You know how everybody calls casuals as smurf zone? Well i never imagined it would be that worse in comparsion with bronze and silver. There are hidden some extremly skilled people in gold casual with very VERY high count of games. Like using vtrigger activation freeze time to whiff punish medium button with CA. Wew. Ryus parrying literally everything you do and when you switch to empty jumps and delayed meaties they blow you up and people who outfootsies you despite you never wanted to play footsies in the first place.

I am trying to incorporate my half asses shimmies into my gameplan. Kinda hard to do, but doable. It also made me notice there are 3 types of golden players:

1. Never delay tech, never push buttons, just block in corner.
2. Delay tech 90% of the time in corner, walk back midscreen.
3. Delay button every single time, be brave and just jab.
   I have a BIG problem against the 3rd type. They arent completely brainless, they dont mash into obvious frame traps and i have only obvious frame traps. I need to come up with not obvious frame traps or grow new habbit of walking back and buffering some counter poke. Or completely changing my patterns. And thats hard as ♥♥♥♥. Also using cr.mk against walking back opponents is my weakness: the range is poor, i need to be extremly close for it to connect and these gold players dont allow you to get so close for free.

Also the execution: i need to work on "exotic" sakura's combos like mp>cr.mk, cr.mk>dp.hp and incorporating hp and lk>dp.mp in situations i land stray hit but i am too far for conventional strings to connect. The higher i climb the better the opponents are in spacing so less and less combos work without careful thinking. I am not used to think during hitconfirms...

Oh and ♥♥♥♥ blankas and dhalsims. Joke characters playing some minigame, definitely not street fighter.

Weak anti airs, totally not good enough frame traps, shimmies only learned half assed way (but holycrap they are still VERY effective), not optimising my combos well enough and holy crap cr.mk > fireball. I know i already "learned" this on like day 30 but ♥♥♥♥ me. The original idea was to simply delay few frames so walking forward > fireball doesnt result in DP but the better opponents i face the harder it is to calm myself during the battles to wait long enough. THIS NEEDS TO STOP. Tommorow i am learning either doing down+back crouching kick > fireball or as one peep suggested: doing full half circle forward instead of just quarter circle to prevent accidental DPs. I hate execution barrier of fighting games. So ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ lame and frustrating. You dont fight opponent, you fight your own hands. Not fun.

Speaking of frustrating, there is exactly one dhalsim player in gold. After a short thinking i put the dude into blacklist. Sure its lame and bla bla bla bla but not even the vegas and blankas i face are this annoying. I dont want to learn nor play this matchup. If you want to blame somebody, blame capcom they put blacklist feature into the game. Unless something changes and i will face only dhalsims in ranked i will just skip these players. Sure you can play whoever you want but you arent entitled for playing me with that character.

On bright side today is the first day i have ever defeated vega in ranked match. I used the anti barcelona tech i have seen in one video: jump forward + punch the joker high in the air. Still lost the set 2-1 but even then i consider it as moral victory.

I MANAGED TO DEFEAT GOLDEN BLANKA PLAYER 2-1. I feel like the best street fighter player on the internet. I forced the lightining furry ball to play "footsies" with me and then beat him at that game. Also HUGE ladder points gains: there are practically no gold players, so i am nonstop matched with super gold players where if i win i gain 100+ points and with losing i lose only 50 points. Balanced matchmaking LOL.

Speaking of gold players, today i felt really good facing them. Sure there are few odd balls like pic related ryu player with name oldFashioned1912 who starts each game with taunt "show me your move" and refuses to ever engage in offensive style. He literally just stands there and wait for you to dash into his face so he can whiff punish you. Still I clutched win. But for the most part gold players are super defensive, they almost never go for the kill and rarely ever surprise me. And yes, you guessed, they all die horribly to shimmies. Even my half assed shimmies. I guess they took the meta **just take the throw** too seriously. As long as i refrain myself from doing ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ i usually get the upepr hand in these matches.

Today i didnt learn anything new except that i need to invest even more time into learning PERFECT half circle motion if i ever want to walk forward and do fireballs at the same time. Seriously capcom, why can you do back in between forward and fireball motion and its still dragon punch? Fix your game, give me option to disable it, make sakura motionless like ED REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! I hate wasting time in lab breaking my fingers to break execution barriers. ♥♥♥♥.

wasted day. Dabbled little in ranked and casual, tried to do whack things and lost most of my games. Unfocused, not serious at all, undisciplined...

Slowly rising up in the gold. Its quite simple when i get 100 points per victory and lose 50 on loss. I have even noticed some people from super gold win quits me after 1 game if it was too close for this reason. Still I havent got used to how golds operate. The differences are huge between player to player. Some do delay tech, some never block low, some always mash jab, some play footsies, some do braindead flowchart (YES i am looking at you lauras and ibukis) and some do wild ♥♥♥♥ like wakeup raging demon or light dp after i block their vreversal. But almost all gold players have one thing in common: they can do anti airs most of the time and you almost certainly die if you get stuck in the corner.

And i got RAGEQUIT! Golden kage player RQed me after i perfected him in 2nd game with sakura's nonsense (jumping into air fireball, jumping over fireball + DP). Shame. This was so funny match i would put it on youtube otherwise. Moments like these reminds me that there still is fun to be found in this miserable game full of tryhards who find labbing for hundreds of hours "fun".

The only minor progress is that i reached definitive answer to walking forward > cr.mk > fireball problem: ♥♥♥♥ **PERFECT** halfcircle. You dont even need perfect one to do kage's stomps. I would waste like a week just on this silly thing. No ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ way. Instead i will just have to practice the delay in the combo cr.mk > (hold down for 0.5 second) > fireball every single day before ranked in lab.

Also i played lobbies against ultra gold (real rank probably higher, he is just another smurf) blanka and there i realized i need to upgrade my shimmies into a real ones with 200+ damage and oki instead of lame throw. So either shimmy > HP > roll > dp.mp or shimmy > cr.mk > something. Optionaly try out if its indeed possible in real match to do shimmy > mp > bla bla bla. Apparently nobody does it, gotta find out why the hard way since its 300 damage instead of 200.

This is the first saturday in ages where i actually got to play the game instead of sleeping. I call that success. Did some casuals, did some ranked, didnt lose much. Met ultra silver bison who didnt know what is anti-air, how to block on your wakeup and my suspicion is he only knew that one combo he was trying to do whole game. Seriously, if somebody is stuck in bronze, just pick bison and mash. Apparetnly there arent players bellow ultra silver who can stop that. But i will give him the credit: once he gave up he didnt ragequit, he just went AFK. So thanks for that 50lp.

I am now trying to practice and use advanced sakura setplay: cr.mk > exfireball > vtrigger activation > go for shimmy / throw (i am like +18 on block) or vskill > dp if it connects. Its not as effective as it sounds, but its lowkey guaranteed two forced openings per rounds (provided i am willing to spend two ex bars). Shimmies are still on the TODO list. Also i have been thinking about using air grab when i am stuck in corner and opponent jumps. But yeah, still yet to pull that in real match: side switch, very nice damage, whats not to like.

And now the real SALT: i have been blocked from coaching channel. I mean i am nowhere near evo champion but even then the evidence they cherrypicked as me saying nonsense is... not wrong. It happened right as when i was coaching pretty new bronze player how to make basic offense in this game. Like i get it, somebody with connections got mad that they spend X hours getting to high rank and now some random nobody gold is getting praised for actually bothering to talk, play and teach newbies how to play instead of linking them gief gym? BAN THEM :joy: Well i am surprised i didnt outright get ban, but i didnt break any rule and didnt even get a single warning (like others did). I am just little sad whoever i made angry didnt talk with me first and just waited for admin to come online to kick me like that. No dialog whatsoever.

Breached 5000lp milestone on nice 9 win streak. Am i getting better or are opponents in ranked easier on mondays? Still i have a lot of things to work on. Most notably half my matches wouldnt be so damn close if i properly optimised damage. I find myself in many situations where i have bars but i dont use them and leave opponent with pixel health remaining. Same with throws. Back throw for sakura does 20 more dmg and 50 more stun. These super gold opponents have the skills for comeback and ultra silvers are extremly random and upredictable. I cannot afford to let them live. Also by accident i discovered this corner combo and it hits like a truck.
mp>b.hp>VT1 air fb>heavy tatsu>EXDP

Today i met a high number of oddities as my opponents: **retarded akuma** was one of them. His strats? Raw tatsu usage, he baits you by excessive backdashing > tatsu. Also he conditions you to meaty him by disrespecting your oki and that one time he has bars he does billion damage by wakeup raging demon or EXDP>VTA>akuma things. Oh and doing raw extatsu which has so great pushback i didnt even know if its punishable. Speaking of akumas i noticed a big flaw in their gameplan: if you pressure them a lot, they tend to brain fart and whiff air fireballs. This is how you can blow them up.

**godlike reactions** cammy player. Well he isnt really cammy player(1k games), he tried whole game to do instant dive kicks and kept whiffing them. But he has 10k matches and ability to check dashes. I have never seen this before. Every other opponent i have faced so far simply predicts dashes by pressing buttons / fireballs in neutral. This dude? He only presses the button after you dash and it takes him about 10 frames. Unreal. I hope this was just exception, not a rule. My gameplan isnt ready for opponents with this ability.

And i am mad at myself for not converting jabs into damage. It costed me one game today. I have to force myself to start using (cr.lp>)lp>lk>dp.mp

the day of the monkey. And who was mashing like an ape? Me. Today really wasnt my day. Brain refusing to concentrate, my hands deciding its EXDP time all the time and many many missed damage conversions. Bleh. The only positive i can find from todays games is that apparently even on my lowest i am not losing badly enough to lose ladder points. Still sitting on 5000lp.
In terms of tech i am still working on the the exfireball>vtrigger pop>vskill / grab / shimmi. And i have finally landed HP after shimmi for the first time in real match. Sure i was too confused to properly follow it up with rest of the combo, but its a start. Almost every single opponent i meet in gold does delayed tech, delayed jab or walking backwards as their main method of defence. And interestingly enough, some of them are so good they adapt even in 1st round and when they see i try to shimmy they just block or even try to blow me up with low attacks. This almost feels like a street fighter game with thinking!

And while i was badly losing today i met some cody who was utilising almost exact copy of my pressure style. This is the first time i was experiencing my own medicine (maybe i faced players like this in the past, but i never realized they are trying to do same thing as me). And it was quite a learning experience for me! Not only i saw firsthanded how deadly it is to just button > walk > button but i also realized how extremly weak it is against better opponents who are mentally ready with good execution of their combos! I wonder if i was just blind or if this strategy is so strong i first saw it in super gold league. This realization opened my mind. If i can come up with counter strategy to it, i can predict how my opponents will try to stop me and counter their counter and become even more deadly with my pressure.

Finally the results of ape were delivered. I have lost 500lp. I play horrible. No way around it. I need to learn meaties.

The ape has been subdued. A little. Today i did a total zero wakeup CAs. A GREAT SUCCESS! Otherway nothing special really happened. No super powered golds nor exceptional ultra silvers. Even got a small 5 win streak but nothing special. I am suspecting i will have to study the bison matchup more. Met three different bisons and lets be honest: bison matchup is nightmare of nonstop blocking and guessing. And i really dont know when its my turn. Bison players love to do infinite loops and its not fun to block 24/7. If this will continue, i will be forced to do the unthinkable. Lab and watching replays. ♥♥♥♥.

Today i really tried to focus on anti airing. I still use walk under + jab against crossups but otherwise i try my best to AA with recommended tools. Also today is the first day where i managed to land air grab in corner which is awesome because it switches sides and does massive (in terms of ♥♥♥♥♥♥ AA game of sakura, not like urien or gill) damage. Still long way to go. I still struggle with walk>cr.mk>fireball, i dont convert damage off jabs and my shimmies now in 10% of cases use button instead of grab. Damn.

Also i met gill in tournament banned costume. And after two games against that monstrosity i fully understand and acknowledge why its banned. You cant even see his legs or arms and even when hes standing still the nonstop motions around him create fake illusion of movement which really messes up your senses.

SUPER gold! Now i am officially better than many people who called me names both on sakura discord and on the new challenger. Yay. The final boss was super gold ryu player from turkey with 14k matches who played very poorly (too many raw sureYouKens). Unbelievable. I am only on 2390 matches on my sakura (6k games total). So what did i have to learn to reach this rank? Nothing extra ordinary. The biggest hurdle was probably working on frame traps and pressure inclusing jab>microwalk. Its really tough to get the timing down and i dont believe you can learn this in lab. You gotta feel it when its "safe" to move few pixel forward without getting blown up. And ofc consistency. Missing even single punish in this gold league can easily cost you the round.

I played one set with my friend Afraz (from pakistan with bleh internet connection). The game was laggy but i still managed to destroy him without dropping a single combo. I guess with enough practice you dont drop combos even in lag. I wish more people were as friendly as him.

Today i also met (different) ryu player with freaking 22k games and he played like a madman. Notably he didnt respect a single situation where he was minus (both when he got hit or when he blocked obvious frame trap) and he always woke up with a jab. And the worst part is i lost to him 2-0. I am slowly getting used to a certain mindset and gameplan of my opponents. If that ryu had bronze or silver label, i would expect it. I am very mad at myself i didnt recognize his deathwish plan sooner. I had like 5 rounds to figure it out. And i didnt. Shame on me.

And today is the first day ever where i **INTENTIONALLY WHIFF PUNISHED** an opponent in neutral. It was against silver alex who was pressing buttons in very obvious pattern and hoping i will dash/walk into them. So i just walked back to correct range and buffered lk>dp.mp. And it ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ worked. Still the damage vs effort of this technique isnt worth the trouble.

The day of trying to make my friend rusty actually play the game and improve. And holy moly, he gets salty so easily and then the salt spreads to me because he is so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ stubborn and keeps saying he can't / wont and other things like he's bad at the game. I am getting triggered when i see him on stream playing casuals and he keeps doing the thing i say to not do. REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE And then he asks me **when does the fun begins?** and i am the facepalm meme but in real life. Also turns out falke has a really hard time dealing with crossups. And the training session ended with the twitch stream getting visit from random nobody who said in chat rusty sucks which was followed by ragequit. We gotta iron these shortcomings out.

But it had two positives! First of all i somehow made him to play at least 20 games today (a big progress after like 2 months!) and i didnt get to play ranked at all myself so i didnt derank. Wohooo. If we keep this up, i believe i will force him into gold in next week or so.

Lethargy. Today i probably overdid it with the sport (swimming). No energy left. Still i managed to turn the game on, practice new "combo" cr.mp>lk>dp.mp which is the easier version of meaty for almost all sakura okis. Also tried to practice anti airs. Bleh. And tried out how hard it is to react to ken's dash when there is 50% chance he will dash or just do micro walk forward. Conclusion? I started playing this game 20 years too late to react to dashes. And doing it online is very likely even harder.

Played only casuals and lost all of them. Its to be expected when you dont even care if you win. And i have noticed how rare "normal" players are in casuals. Its always some dude with 10k or 20k games or new account / smurf under 1k games. Something I have to get used to. Everybody else already gave up and left or is in higher ranks...

Zangiefs... zangiefs everywhere. I have no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ clue what happened, but today i faced total 1 ryu player (multiple times), 1 seth, 1 guile, 1 fang and then infinite amount of zangiefs. Unbelievable. Luckily i managed to mop floor with all of them but one. That one was too crazy for me: he used SPD in places where i never seen before SPD being used. Basically he played as if SPD is exdp. Ken in a zangief body. But what is really interesting is that this is the first time ever i **didnt instantly derank** right after hitting ranked post rankup scenario. Typically the difference in skill levels between ranks is so huge i on average spend at least one week stuck ranking up/down while trying to figure out the strategy the stronger opponents do. Not this time. Weird. Is ultra gold a ghost town in europe?

Also today i finally plunged into meaties and oki for sakura. Yeah, you would imagine i would have learned it by now, but turns out i didnt. To this day i believed all i have to do after heavy DP as sakura was dash>mp. Nope. This also explains the insane number of meaties i missed in my previous games :joy: And ofc on the sakura discord server few people had mental breakdown over this with me. When will people learn to chill. I have to MICRO WALK there for 6 frames. Its very tricky to do microwalking right and consistent. For all veterans from sf4 and third strike they laught at this, but for us normal people this isnt easy.

Also today i managed to land few real chimmies utilising (not optimal) shimmy>hp>fireball and cr.mk>fireball/tatsu. What is interesting is i didnt train this. I simply just did that. Wew. And i am growing more and more angry at myself with my super predictable patterns. Every now and then i meet really patient opponent who just spam block and i typically realize AFTER i end my blockstring i just did the same thing 5 times in a row. Being random is hard.

Breached 6000lp. Honestly super gold rank has been a big dissapointment for me. I expected monster players who are the next daigo and instead i get players who play ultra safe and dont jump or dash and instantly die to barrage of grabs and shimmies or turbo brave shotos who solve everything with EXDP. Reached nice 8 winstreak and even managed to steal one win against 75% winrate honda smurf. So as far as i manage to not lose to vanilla golds (where i lose 100lp per game), i should rank up easily. Games are now less about my opponent is doing but about me not doing mistakes.

Lazy day. I didnt believe i will even play today but ended up doing lobbies with god like "super platinum" dude who "doesn't have a main". And i got crushed 40-3. It was so bad i cant really tell the main reason why i lost. Sure you can easily pinpoint stuff like ♥♥♥♥ AA, no meaties, lack of frame traps and me eating meaty after meaty, mashing EXDP... but that wasnt the main issue. The main issue was he read me like a book. And he kept jumping at that distance (too close) where sakura's air fireballs miss the opponent mid air. I wonder if this is the real average platinum player or if he is one of the "oh i dont play ranked" case. And i lose so easily to delayed jab defence its crazy.

Didn't practice or learned anything except the fact there is a big skill power gap to be climbed. Jezus!

Reached **ultra gold** on nice 9 win streak! Today i won every single ranked game and lost every single casual game. I cant really tell if the opponents in casuals are actually better or if i simply dont give a ♥♥♥♥ in casuals. Maybe its a little of both. And as i mentioned earlier the whole gold rank was a big letdown for me. Its a ghost town. Majority of my opponents were people with barely 4000lp meaning they all were fresh golds who i most of the time deranked back to where they belong. Practically no super or ultra golds in sight. I wonder if ultra gold will be the same or if i will face actual platinum players there who play differently.

Today i learned sakura setplay for chip kill. Medium DP > CA. Yup, its that easy. Basically touching opponent with ANY button (most easily with cr.mk) gives sakura option to cancel into DP into chip kill her opponent on the spot. Simple and scary. And right today i managed to close one round against ultra diamond player in lobby by this. Its very handy tool. Otherwise i still train meaty after heavy DP. Timing the 6 frames walk is irritating.

the day of frustration. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ i lost so many games for so many different reasons. For example sagats j.hk has INSANE reach. Or trying to backdash guile's sonic booms is suicide. Or trying to jump over the slow moving ones. Or trying to do heavy tatsu (sakuras only anti fireball tool) on reaction to sonic booms. DAMN YOU SONIC BOOMS. I keep being too predictable. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ its so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hard to not be predictable. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA And then i throw ONE FIREBALL AND THE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ WHO DIDNT JUMP WHOLE MATCH JUMPS. REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Todays my ranked opponents: 14k ryu, 11k sagat, 2k sagat, 8k vega, 7k bison, 19k ryu, 6k ryu. Its so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hard to gain momentum against these players who have twice or thrice as many games than me (2k sakura). Especially the ryus. They ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ double parry my double hitting fireball and then use light DP when i try to throw and next time they grab me out of the shimmy. Unreal. Its like they can read the future or something. It feels like i will now have to spend year in gold by this rate. ♥♥♥♥.

They all use delayed buttons. Every single one of them. Unreal. I HAVE TO START USING UNCONVENTIONAL "block" STRINGS to catch these fools. ♥♥♥♥ STREET FIGHTER. WHY DO THEY ALL PRESS BUTTONS WHEN MINUS TWO. WHY. HOW CAN YOU KNOW I WONT USE CC BUTTON. HOW. BECAUSE YOU NEVER SAW ME USE HEAVY KICK? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

I have to build new habits. I have to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ lab how to properly meaty after grab so it kills delayed button wakeup. I have to upgrade my shimmy into the real thing. ♥♥♥♥. And i have to stop trying to jump on opponents wakeup. They all exdp that ♥♥♥♥ on reaction. ♥♥♥♥. I have to change my gameplan depending on the matchup. ♥♥♥♥. ♥♥♥♥. Tommorow before i ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ turn street fighter on i will write down new strings and i will try my hardest to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ use them. You will all die ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. All of you who press buttons while being minus two.

I played ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of games today. Probably too much. I started to use HK. No real results. I regret the day i got into this game. List of things here
> expect armored move from sagat in VT2
> practice recognizing overhead from boxer balrog
> do something about cammy floating nonsense above my head
> HK > (pushback) buffered LK > DP.mp (whiff punish)
> cr.MK > fireball > (pushback) > HK (possible CC)
> ban chunli wedding costume from the game
> use HP > vskill2 roll > DP.mp for shimmy when no VT1
> stop being so predictable, it kills you
> punish parries with better combo than empty jump > grab
> when you land LP go for LK > DP.mp and not a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ grab they can tech
> stop trying to shimmy point blank after air reset
> START ANTI AIRING YOUR OPPONENTS INSTEAD OF WALKING BACKWARDS
> learn cr.MK > DP.hp for moments where you know you just blocked -6 but they are too far
> stop doing CA when it doesnt kill, rather use two ex bars which keeps corner and oki
> watch that replay you saved with brave ken who abused the fact i cannot react to his vskill1 run and figure out how does that ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ work any why is my brain so slow

And i still keep practicing oki after heavy DP. I have tested out that certain characters wakeup animation confuses my head. Like ibuki for example. Looks like in order to learn meaty timings you have to learn each meaty with 40 different characters. What a load of crap.

the day of wonders. So turns out higher gold ranks arent ghost town at Sunday night. Finally met worthy opponents in both super gold and ultra gold (read failed platinums). Even lost my first ranked game against platinum zangief 2-1. He combined both excellent anti airs skills and armored moves which in the past i always solved by crossjumps. Oh well. Reached 7k games (3200 kolin, 2800 sakura). Lets hope i hit the goal soon, i am growing disgusted by all the keep away playstyle of my opponents.

And i have met many many players not playing the typical meta to the point i had to save and the rewatch many replays just to figure out what have i done wrong. Most of it can be summarised as *dont panic when you see non standard behavior, dont chase opponent as headless chicken and walk them into corner*. What a sad state of me: having to watch replays. I have sunken really low. If this will continue, i will soon become one of them who use lab for more than just a combos. I hate this game. More ♥♥♥♥ to learn:
> stop backdashing when there is fireball on the screen
> learn to recognize and punish both kens overheads
> find out why ibukis overhead is safe on block and how to punish properly
> stop treating ken's HP as if it was plus on block
> try to recognize and react to ken's run
> eating sonic boom is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ PLUS 9 (for reference landing sakura fb is -2)

And as cherry on top, the weirdest game from today: zoning ibuki utilising backdash spam, jab spam and occasional cr.mk. If you wonder whats up with the sweeps, thats my responce for the backdashing. And it didnt work. Heavy tatsu is just a bait, against weaker opponents it works most of the time because they try to press buttons or jump into it. But when i use them as much as this, its just desperation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Blwm7ETEnc

Another ban. But this one was funny. In the past i have been banned for many valid reasons like being rude, racist, sexist, porn, politics but this time it was because i broke unwritten rules :joy: Oh well. I will continue the journal in the sakura server, channel called wholesome salt. Cheers Vinager and please take your time and write ALL the rules so people know. Ban for talking to people? Thats new.

Yesterday i skipped the game and today i got direct results: i played like ♥♥♥♥. Who could have predicted that you dont get better by not playing the game. Still stuck around 6000lp. Its really bad.

Today i tried something different: i played the game during the day (15:00) and to my surprise there were different players both in ranked and casuals. And either my brain was still fresh or they were kinda crap opponents because i reached nice 10 win streak which was ended by sweep. I also managed to make that cammy player who always bodied me in the past ragequit. That made my day. Still in terms of points i am still where i started. I now feel pain when i do mistake in matches and oh boy, i do too many of them. But thats good. If i feel anger while playing, its because i realize what went wrong. Way better than being confused why i died like in the past few days.

After several hurtful thinking sessions i finally realized what i have been missing all this time: variety of strings in my pressure. On average i was just doing stagger pressure including mix of jab, microwalking and grabs. Now i am including frame trap mp>cr.mk, raw light tatsu and occasionally i try to do lp>lk>DP. It works way better this way and makes me less predictable. Still its ♥♥♥♥♥ to cycle between all these options "at random". And as far as shimmies go, i started to (again) experiment with neutral jump. Looks like tall characters have a really tough time whiffing grab and then blocking / AAing in time if they do late delay tech. The reason why i stopped using this tactic long time ago was because i met too many players who were able to whiff tech>AA but back then i never did anything else so they could predict it. Its another tool to consider (just not against characters with premium AA like guile's flashkick).

And i have FINALLY realized that mp>b.hp doesnt work if the mp hits from a certain distance. I mean i already knew this before but today is kinda the first day i realized its the distance (not lack of execution skills) which makes me sometimes whiff b.hp>dp.hp (and then die). I need to master cr.mk>heavy dp. It is also good punish tool (donkey kick).

Kinda wasted day. In an hour and half i got only 3 ranked matches: deranked two people into ultra silver and vanilla gold and then i lost to platinum gill player 2-0. First game i was just trying to figure out what the hell is going on (gill is kinda unknown matchup for me) and second game i died to the classic: wakeup CA. And this fight painfully reminded me how much i need cr.mk > heavy DP to punish the 9999 moves in this game which are -6 or -8 but too far to be punished by your stubby normals. Other than that the ranked was ghost town. ♥♥♥♥. Now not only i am hindered by my own inability, but also by lack of opponents?

And I didnt train much, still trying to figure out how to do cr.mk>DP consistently. Oh the cruel fate: when i wanted to walk forward > cr.mk > fireball the game kept doing DPs which killed me more times than my opponent. Then i had to spend few days just learning how to stop doing accidental DPs. Now i want to do the DP (but without the movement before hand) and i cant. ♥♥♥♥ YOU STREET FIGHTER BUFFER SYSTEM. ♥♥♥♥ YOU!

And i wasted some time playing with old friend bear and by setting up new discord server (you cant get banned if you are the owner **five-head-moment**). Rusty socially pressured me to do it. So if anybody feels like they want in, DM me for invite i guess.

I want this to end already. Grinding ranked feels so draining and mentally exhausting. Every single opponent plays so differently from the last one. Mashing jab, delay jab, delay jump, wakeup CA, 5 neutral jumps in a row, raw specials, blanka, bison, seth, a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ FANG, brainless flowchart you still die to because you never seen it before, win quitters who know you would win the next two games, people from middle east with questionable internet making their dashes and jumps even more deadly than normal. Eugh.

Today is the first day i didnt derank from ultra gold. The platinum is getting closer. Slowly but surely i am getting hang of all the nonsense my opponents are using for defence. Its still very hard for me to adjust on the go. Like when i try to shimmy and they dont even try to tech and i start to cry. Or when they nonstop try to stuff you with lows or delayed jabs. I managed to beat few platinum players. The worst part is that they try to play footsies with me, lose few rounds because i **ALWAYS jump** and then they unleash the big UNGA BUNGA on my ass. Its so hard to keep up the pace with them. They never hesitate and always go for the kill. I am slowly learning when to do wakeup jab. Every single platinum player goes for oki even when they have none. If i dont jab i die. If i jab too often they CC me. Eugh. Every opponent i face either has less than 1k games or at least 15k games. Insanity.

Today i finally learned (optional mp>)cr.mk>heavy DP. Its infinitely better punish than lk>medium DP. Still yet to land it in real match. The OKI is getting extremly important at these ranks. You never want to give certain characters chance to pop vtrigger into death blender. There were times i was afraid of ken or akuma in vtrigger. I was naive. Go look at what insanities G, balrog or urien can do. More and more people use vreversals now, even as offensive tool to keep you in corner. Some rounds i lose because of one mistake. Eugh.

Back to super gold. Today i played a lot and instead of focusing on my flowchart (as others call it), i was focusing on many other things so i played like ass. Turns out if you are thinking about doing tatsu > dp instead of just dp after you land air fireball makes you lose focus. I am really trying to focus on my opponents patterns. There are so many types of behaviors i see from my opponents, but its finite so in theory i could start categorising them and have easier time making up counter to their defense.

I have started experimenting with HK. Some people really really dont respect oki so today i landed a lot of crush counters. Shame i never followed it up with proper damage conversion. In training mode i still practice mainly meaties which i keep screwing up and two new strings cr.mp>light tatsu and mp>cr.mk>heavy dp.

Sometimes i am almost proud of my games where i notice the habit of opponent walking themselves into corner so i play very passive, walk them to the final destination and then i just wait for jump. Too bad sometimes they just dash and i am never ever ready for dash. Also one my friend told me that i dont mixup back/quick rise and thats why my opponents never miss their meaties. I gotta focus more on this and see whats up with it. And today three different people told me to give up with the game. Nice moral support.

Reached 8 win streak ended by cody of all things. That game made me realize that i need to lab punish for cody's qcf+kick. Its very minus and even if spaced its still -8 and most likely in range of my cr.mk (thats why i spend few days training the cr.mk>heavy DP). But for some reason i wasn't able to figure out the timing during the match and died like a ♥♥♥♥♥. Why is punishing certain moves so hard and unintuitive in this game? What is the difference between punishing ryus medium tatsu and cody's ruffian kick? They are both very minus and typically point blank yet i never start walking backwards by accident after blocking ryus tatsu beause i hold back for too long. Is it just deceptive animation? So weird...

Also pic related is now becoming my usual opponent in ranked. I dont know what to think about this. Are there really so many people who are tired of getting their ass whooped on their main account so they go and smurf? And whats worse when i manage to beat them they dont even run the whole set. And they really make my life extra hard. None of the things i trained so far works against them. ♥♥♥♥ these people.

Todays day was a little special day: i havent met a single player with less than 4k games (aka no smurfs). Thats a very good thing. I have lost only three ranked games: one game against extremly laggy akuma player from israel who was very likely a wifi warrior. And his whole gameplan revolved around him relying on the lag and mashing buttons on his wakeup. After first game i adapted to the very funny lag full of rollbacks and destroyed him 2-1 simply with meaties. And then i reached nice 10 win streak and breached 7k LP. Then my winstreak ended with mika player. I dont really know the matchup but the main reason why i lost is because i tried too many times to do delay backdash to avoid grabs and i have no idea how to defuse mika's charged kick. Oh well. Another thing to lab. Eugh.

I have landed quite a few HK crush counters and this time i managed to do optimal damage conversion. Feels good. Still labbing punish for cody's qcf+kick. The animation on that one is so confusing and it can be spaced very safely so you need to change punish combo on the fly. And its heavy version doesnt even hit crouching opponents. And i really REALLY need to drop my habit of doing raw heavy tatsu in neutral against non fireball users. Its extremly silly putting yourself into -2 situation with almost no chance of landing it.

With a bit of luck tommorow i will hit platinum. I simply shred all super and ultra golds with shimmies and no platinum players in sight. Maybe smurfs and plats dont play on work days as much?

Crap day. Finally got matched with some platinum players and got demolished. And holy crap the amount of exotic matchups: rashid, poison, nash, menat, vega, bison, gill uuuuuuuuuuh. Where are the shotos? Am i not playing shoto fighter 5? I am so not looking forwarding learning these matchups.

I need to watch some replays tommorow. Honestly i lost few games without even knowing what went wrong. It was that bad. Also i have discovered why i have been struggling so much with punishing codys qcf+kick specials: its the very unusual amount of blockstun after you block the hit. Many moves in this game you block and typicaly few frames afterwards you buffer the punish. Not against cody. And there is a cool feature in lab: when you enable the frames advantage, they show you not just -8, but also display how many frames the current animation lasts. So if you time the punish to the end of the said animation, it will work. Another feature which wouldnt be needed if animations were consistent across all characters.

Also labbed gill's ex tackle. -12 on block but for some reason SOMETIMES the pushback on block + pushblock of sakura's MP (on hit) pushes the gill to that magical distance where b.hp doesnt connect on 1st active frame and gets blocked. This ♥♥♥♥ is making me whiff heavy DP in middle of games. I am tired of this sakura exclusive ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ where the BnB fails me. Might as well give up on mp>b.hp completely and go mp>cr.mk from now on when MP isnt point blank. Feels more like a bug than intended feature.

I need to do something about opponents dashing at me while in corner. It feel so silly, i should have advantage but nope. One dash and they are in my face throwing me into that corner. Why are dashes so freaking strong? And i will experiment with letting my opponents from the corner for free if they have vtrigger ready. The pressure isnt worth the risk of random button or sweep > VTA > UNGA BUNGA.

Have you ever been to zoo? Watching some animal doing some predictable, low effort activity like staring at the sky? Thats how i felt today. It was like out of the body experience typically done via abuse of various drug substances. I was watching myself doing my predictable patterns, doing the same errors i do every single time and either overextending or being too passive letting my opponent do whatever the ♥♥♥♥ they want. I need to change this. I need to develop "conscience" during the games. Just noticing my opponents patterns isnt enough. They switch them up even during 1st round. Once they eat EXDP or CC on my meaty they change their behavior. I might get lucky and get 20 clueless super gold opponents in a row but hoping for that miracle to happen isnt winning strategy to reaching platinum in any near future. I need to do something. Something different unless i want to become one of the losers on ranked with 30k+ games ethernally stuck at their ranks.

Today was the first day where i stopped the mp>b.hp>heavy DP combo in middle because i ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ knew the distance was off. Not whiffing DP is big improvement but there is still space for more: doing cr.mk instead. Gotta work on that in lab more. I need to be more confident in my fireball game while in VT1. I miss a lot of damage when i dont look for hitconfirm on the fireball or just do single cr.mk and not cancel it into something. And my anti airs need more work. When i finally press the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cr.hp i dont check the angle and die to crossup. And in corner jumping opponents need exactly one answer: forward air grab. Even if i eat hit mid air its air reset and if i miss i switch sides and get free escape. Its so hard to keep all the options in mind at once. In lab i am practicing AAing urien dropknee and punishing his headbut.

And i tuned my keyboard. Now i will never again press numlock by accident during matches. Cant believe i havent done this sooner. Lost many rounds to this.

Today i felt good. Really good. And i have shifted my focus on myself (instead of my opponent). Dont make mistake: i still kept watching my opponent and the spacing, but i tried to employ a different philosophy: i didnt try to rush my opponents down at any cost. Instead i just took my time, tried to dash as little as possible and kept my eyes up, trying to land as many anti airs as possible. I still suck ass at AAing, but even then this approach worked very well. As one dude once told me: try to do more with less. And i scored even few perfect rounds. I believe this is part of the puzzle i have been missing so far. I was always very focused on how to kill my opponents and wasnt afraid to roll the dice to get the damage in. I need to experiment way more with this "passive" style where main goal is to walk opponent into corner. And no, this isnt the lame ♥♥♥♥ i nonstop see vanilla gold dudes doing: never going for the kill. I still went for offense when it felt right. The biggest difference is that i wasn't trying to force the opening at any cost. Be shapeless like water? :-)

Played very few ranked games cause it was ghost town, still made it back to ultra gold. Though casuals were plenty. Shame you dont get win streaks in that mode. Met one wifi akuma player who was lagging a lot yet he never missed as single meaty. Still beated him 2-1 because his idea of defense was mashing jabs. How do these people time their meaties with such connections?

Also played lobby against my friend bear. Lost 2-5 but thats irrelevant. What is intersting is that i managed for one whole round react to his dashes while he was stuck in corner with jabs. I am not 100% sure how i did it or why my focus lasted only for like 20 seconds, but it wasnt read nor prediction. It was reaction to juri dash (16 frames). No idea how i did it, but it happened. I believe today's advancements are the path to platinum. Now i just have to not lose the path and walk it.

♥♥♥♥ this game. Lose to every single opponent because i am moron, derank, then gain all points back on 9 win streak and then start losing again. its hopeless. I will become one of the losers with 30k games stuck in gold at this rate. Absolutely hopeless. Had situation where i knew b.hp wouldnt work due to spacing, used mp>cr.mk and the cr.mk whiffed as well. ♥♥♥♥ everything.

Hopeless situations require extreme actions. From tommorow i wont jump. No jumping allowed.

I got back up to 7000lp. I wish there was something positive to tell about this day, but there isnt. About pretty much all my lost games can be atribbuted for ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up anti airs where i outright lose 300HP and get put into corner or where i fail to react, block the jump-in and then eat grab which puts me into losing position just because how ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ close to the corner i am.

And the feeling of landing cr.hp is very hopeless. They can freely backdash out of the situation, tech the follow up throw, neutral jump and punish your meaty or outright jump again, this time its crossup and you cannot use cr.hp again. Something so vital to do and with so little reward. Maining shoto without good DP is suffering. Now i know what others told me about sakura and how they dont see a single reason to main her.

I keep facing zangiefs which now can do PPP (lariat, spin to win move) on reaction to my fireballs. Its extremly hopeless to face this matchup. Any other shoto has faster fireballs so gief cannot really react in time at the spacing his lariat is in range of your face. Not sakura apparently. And if you fire fireball from greater distance they just jump over and sakura's AA tools arent in effetive range while giefs j.hk potentionally is. Facing competent giefs is suffering. And when you put gief into corner, even when you have oki its 50/50 in giefs favor. They can (and often do) exspd on wakeup which is immune to your meaty throw and if you try to jump they can easily lariat you. And then there is VT1 which ♥♥♥♥♥ on anything sakura wants to do in midscreen.

Yes i tried to limit my jumps. It didnt help anything, except there were cases i hopelessly watched my opponents whiffing heavy buttons in neutral and throwing fireballs without a single care in the world. Not sure i want to keep this experiment up.

Meh day. Still doing same mistakes, still losing to same situations over and over and over. Bleh. I kinda feel like making smurf account so i can go train anti airs to bronze where people jump more than once per round. I have noticed how my opponents behavior changes when i have VT1 ready. Its another thing to consider. Maybe i just want to pop vtrigger, then never use it and go for 5 grabs in a row.

Met interesting laura player. Apart from standard laura set play you die pretty much instantly to if you dont vreversal it asap was his way of baiting for crush counters: he kept walking backwards for a very long time (usually people just walk back for split second, mixed up with buttons and so on). Not this player though. He literally walked backwards for like 2 seconds at a time and then he just fearlessly used raw CC button as if jumps and fireballs dont exist. Stole one game like this off me. This is one of my bad habits: when i see opponents walking so much away from me, i tend to double down on dashing and chasing them. I need to stop this habit. Its too predictable. I need to embrace the lame. The more i play sakura the more i see her optimal gameplan is to bore my opponent (and me) to tears. Who would have thought one of the fastest walking characters in the game is great at punishing opponents instead of opening them?

Practicing new tech: forward grab > micro walk > lp > lk (hitconfirm) > medium dp. Normal meaty after fgrab for sakura is simply HK. But you cant move an inch if you go for HK so practically nobody falls for this meaty. I need to fake some sort of forward movement to bait out opponent's wake up jab. This will take a long time to train. Its so easy to not walk forward enough or be late with the jab.

PLATINUM! It was about the time. To be completely honest, the last 500lp i wasnt rematching losses or very close games. But still i reached platinum on nice 5 win streak and last 3 opponents were platinum so whatever. So what was the last missing piece to go over that skill gap? Accepting that sakura CANNOT force openings. You have to be VERY patient with her and wait for opening. The last week or so it was never about my opponents behavior, but about mix of my bad habits and impatience. Why did i pick sakura? I though she is basically ken with tits. I was VERY mistaken about that. Sure she can move fast but thats about it. Her DPs are horrible, her fireball is more a liability than advantage and she excells at punishing which requires a pretty wast knowledge of frame data and good reactions which i never had and was never interested in the first place. Oh well, there is still two years + one new season and one more rank to conquer with different main.

My gameplan with sakura was extremly simple (and effective): walk forward and spam grabs. In lower ranks you melt your opponents extremly fast once you persuade them blocking isnt valid option anymore. Around super silver they start to tech throws. Then you learn how to shimmy and get to super gold. Here i had to learn how to recognize my opponents defensive habits (walking back, delay tech, delay jab, delay jump, EXDP) and start mixing up my basic offense. Only in ultra gold i was forced to focus on myself instead of opponent and improve my defence by being VERY patient and "laming" out my opponents. Thats it. And ALWAYS buffer cr.MK and LK into DPs and spend your VT1 asap.

In terms of raw data, it took me 3700 (1770 ranked) games with sakura, 9k total. If i make average out of steam data i spend 3 and half hour per day grinding this game or 50 games per day. Was it worth in the end? :3