Binx
Smash Master
How I Can Beat My Brother
By Binx
I see a hundred posts a week asking the same questions. In this guide you will learn the following
Why is “so and so” better than I am. The simple answer is that they play more and practice better. To become good fast you have to play a lot with a focus, you need to fine tune each individual tactic that you can employ.
Firstly there is a counter tactic to any tactic in the game, if you know what to expect and how to properly time and execute and space your response then you have successfully thwarted your opponent and are now ahead by percentage, positioning or perhaps a stock.
Example: Your rival plays Marth, he likes to spam forward smashes and you always seem to run into them, or you block and it hits your shield but he just keeps doing it until you are forced to run away. Fortunately there is hope – if you expect that forward smash you can wait a moment and when he misses you will have plenty of time to rush in and get a free grab or perhaps a free aerial. If Marth forward smashs your shield then you quickly wavedash out of your shield and enjoy a free grab with most characters.
This brings me to my first point why you should learn to short hop, fast fall, and lag cancel your attacks.
All you need to know about Shffl-ing
Lets start with the simplest of these Lag Canceling, here by referred to as L-cancel. The reasoning to incorporate this one should be apparent it means you are HELPLESS and VULNERABLE for half the time when you do miss with an aerial and it allows you to string together longer more effective combos when you do land a hit.
Short hopping is a little more convoluted in it’s uses but the general idea is that when you jump you have committed yourself to a set of actions, from a jump you can do an aerial, a double jump, a waveland, a “b” move, or air dodge. Also certain characters like Luigi, and Ice Climbers move slower in the air and spend more time in the air so you want to be on the ground where you are faster and have more options. Short hopping also allows another degree of control to where your aerial attacks are going to be place, if you can’t short hop consistently your combos will suffer for it.
Fast falling allows you to spend less time in the air, continue combos that would otherwise be impossible and help you reach the ground quickly where you have more available options.
A good way to practice shuffling is to do my 40 minute training session with or without a friend. Basically spend 10 minutes practicing in vs mode (works best if done all at once so I would just have it set to a 10 minute time limit, what you do here is practice short hopping, wavedashing, fast falling, L canceling, after every action act as fast as your character is capable of acting, so basically you want to shffl all 4 aerials as fast as you can, mix them up too, don’t get in the habit of doing one attack pattern, you are just showing off your technical skill. Maybe create a mock battle in your head where you are tech chasing or something. This will make you faster and more fluid. The next 10 minutes are roughly the same however it will be in lightning melee, this will help you get used to different timings for l canceling, it will get you in the habit of realizing that every hit in smash is a new hit and you can’t rely of muscle memory alone (although it is important). Then spend 10 minutes on slow melee, this will get you to feel out how laggy your attacks really are, against a person this will help a lot with both of your mindgames as well as revealing open spots more often and allowing you to increase your level of awareness of what is and is not punishable, and what moves of yours are and are not punishable creating more solid play in all involved. Then wait about and hour and play normal mode for another 10 minutes and you should notice an improvement in the consistency in which you perform advanced techniques.
Another effective technique for you to learn is jump canceling, you can jump cancel up smashes and grabs. Lets start with grabs, to jump cancel a grab you jump (I use the control stick for jump canceling grabs but thats only because my timing with the jump botton is off, I suggest learning to use X or Y) wait a split second and grab if you did it right you should do a standing grab, a good character to see the difference is is Pikachu, if you miss the jump cancel grab with Chu while running he will do a laggy roll.
Jump canceling up smashes is sometimes the only way to hit with an upsmash out of a tech chase or when you expect a spot dodge. Its performed the same way except you want to hit up on the c stick instead of Z. Also it can be done with up on the movement stick and the A button giving you the option to charge it.
A good example of when to charge this is you are fox your opponent is Marth he is at 100% and knows he will die if you grab him, instead of doing the grab you press up and a you charge it and he spot dodges the expected grab, you let go of a at the end of his dodge animation and then he dies gruesomely.
Practicing with a purpose
This can not be said better than where I first read it from Wobble’s
Practicing with Purpose
By wobblesthephoenix
This idea was taken directly from an article posted on Shoryuken, but since not everybody is going to read it there, I figured I'd post a segment of it I found important, interesting, and incredibly helpful.
I've also been inspired by Forward to share what (little) I know about being good at this game, so here goes.
The article is by a guy named Alex Wolfe. If you want to read the whole thing, go here: http://shoryuken.com/?p=115
This is the segment in question.
Practice with a Purpose
Don’t just play the game for hours on end with no game plan, this won’t get you anywhere. When Tito Ortiz, or Oscar De La Hoya are preparing, they don’t just train mindlessly, they have a game plan and so should you. It’s what makes champions. Find out what your weaknesses are, such as match you hate, set ups you always fall for, cheap tactics you can’t reverse, moves you can’t figure out how to counter…. and so on. Then practice with the purpose of improving the areas of weakness. If you do this right, you should see improvement immediately. Most people don’t realize it, but often time we lose because players take advantage of the same weakness over and over again, it’s your job to learn a counter and stop getting your *** kicked. There is an old saying “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."
So this is pretty self-explanatory, but I'm going to add a little bit of my own spin as well.
One thing I've been doing lately that has given me immediate benefits has been "playing for the counter." Without telling your opponent, watch for ONE move or setup that tends to defeat you. Come up with a solution to it that seems plausible, and practice it in friendlies. If it doesn't work after a lot of practice, try a different solution. It's important your training partner doesn't know what the move is, or else you won't get actual practice punishing it in a real match.
I've got some examples below.
Example 1: When I got hit by Sheik's forward-tilt, I would always be combo'd. So, when I finally decided to stop complaining, I decided to try and predict Sheik's f-tilt and crouch cancel only that move.
With a bit of practice I was able to see when my opponent liked to f-tilt and I was able to punish it with a much higher success rate. A fun fact about this story is that I play IC's, so I would crouch cancel into a grab. One crouch canceled forward-tilt became a massive chaingrab worth 50 percent to a stock. I love my character.
Example 2: I was playing against a friend's Marth and was sick of him SHFFL'ing forward-airs, finding it incredibly difficult to punish. I couldn't interrupt it, I couldn't trade, CC it, and it had a lot of range so I had trouble shieldgrabbing. So I tried waiting for the f-air, and practiced dash-dancing just out of range, then back into reach so I could grab them during the landing lag.
After practicing like this, I very quickly became good at doing those two things. With intelligent practice, you can rapidly become proficient in a wide variety of areas.
The lesson: every time you sit down to play, you can improve by focusing on a SINGLE aspect of your game and looking for ways to improve it. Don't play like a drone, practice with purpose.
- Another helpful practice tip
If you have the means, record your matches and watch them, it will help you immediately see some of your habits as well as analyze your timing spacing and combos you perform, perhaps you end a certain combo the same way often but there is a way it could be extended once your opponent is DIing that direction towards the end of it. Or perhaps where is a spot you normally would do a strong hit but if you stop 2 hits before that you can see a good spot to grab and start the whole thing over.
Learning to DI
Read Doraki’s Guide on DI if you really want some in depth information, if you don’t have the patience here is the shortened version.
DI (directional influence) is an amazingly useful tool to thwart combo’s live to outrageous percentages and to create huge swings in damage via crouch canceling.
Certain strings of hits that would be otherwise inescapable can sometimes become easily escapable given correct DI, a good example is Marth vs Peach if Peach gets grabbed by Marth and Marth forward throws he can run and grab her before she is capable of doing any actions and continue to forward throw all the way to a ledge and forward smash her with a perfect tipped swing of his retardedly powerful sword, with proper DI Marth can only grab peach this way at relatively low percents and once she is off the edge she will go to far for him to forward smash her thus receiving much less damage and being in a better overall position.
So a quick DI lesson, at high damages being knocked left or right you want to hold up and towards your opponent to be knocked higher and less far thus increasing your chances of making it back to the stage.
At any damages DIing away can often get you out of weaker comboing hits and into a safer position.
At low percentages you can crouch cancel attacks by holding down before being hit which greatly reduce and sometimes almost negate stun and knockback, if your character has a fast downsmash you can usually use it after this to start a combo. Example: Samus is at 0% and is on the ground Fox jumps at you with a neutral air, Samus has 2 options, she can shield and then upb out of shield for a few percent or she cant hold down and reduce the knockback to pretty much nothing then hit down on the c-stick sending fox flying and potentially comboing into a bair, the times for doing these changes based on Fox’s damage, if fox was at 150% then you would basically be trading 8%-12% for a kill.
Understanding DI can also help you to abuse “proper” DI in your opponent
G-Regulate
“people make the mistake of assuming that everyone will DI "correctly" all of the time, but this is never true. in reality, even the top level pros will DI well, but some combos can be performed no matter which way you DI, and its up to the person doing the combo to react quick enough to take advantage. theres no such thing as "perfect DI", its merely dependent on what your opponent attacks with.
for example, if i dair a fox at mid %, they will pop up right by my head or so, open for a free hit. now, in most cases i would just knee. if the fox is expecting my knee, he will hold up, DIing so the knee wont kill him or knock him far off the stage. if your opponent gets in that groove of DIing all of your knees up, then insert nairs and uairs where those knees were. he will merely be caught in the combo, popping around until you have an easy knee with more % and better stage position. i often get frustrated with people who get caught in one of my nasty combos, and will then say "man, I di'ed perfectly for you". while that may be partially true, they think that they are reacting incorrectly to what I am doing, but really, im just reacting correctly to what THEY are doing.”
Simple Effective Strategies
- Camping
What it is – Any act of extended non aggression
Camping’s purpose – To create openings in your opponents defenses
There are many ways of camping, the most common of which is to stand on one place and spam projectiles until your opponent comes to you. Another common form of camping is dash dancing and appearing threatening and punishing risky attacks with a grab. Yet another way to camp is to use aerial attacks in a way that cant be punished to provoke action on your opponents part. Then there is platform camping where you jump from platform to platform to avoid your opponent, there are edge stalls, just plain running away can be camping.
Just try and keep in mind what you are trying to accomplish, Fox’s lasers are brutal and the reason for this is not the 2-3% damage it does but rather the pressure the opponent feels to come to you and get a nair in the mouth. Just remember to watch carefully for your opponent to react to your camping or you could be caught off guard.
- Chain Grabs
Chain grabs and even just grabs in general are a great way to help control the match, they often lead to better stage position, free damage, and sometimes even kills. They also condition your opponent to use their shield less which allows you the freedom to mix up even more attacks and confuse them further.
- Think like your opponent
If you were your opponent and you were being comboed where would you tech? where would you think you were safe? when would you attack? With enough practice and observation you will be able to "just know" where your opponent will go, what they can't escape exactly when where and what moves they want to hit you with and you will decimate them.
I think this should help most people who ask how to beat their friends and brothers and fervently hope this will cut down a fraction of the spam melee discussion gets.
By Binx
I see a hundred posts a week asking the same questions. In this guide you will learn the following
- How to practice Short hop, fast fall, lag cancel and why you should bother
- How to practice with purpose
- Develop a stronger understanding of DI
- Learn simple effective strategies that you can build on that will make you into a better player.
Why is “so and so” better than I am. The simple answer is that they play more and practice better. To become good fast you have to play a lot with a focus, you need to fine tune each individual tactic that you can employ.
Firstly there is a counter tactic to any tactic in the game, if you know what to expect and how to properly time and execute and space your response then you have successfully thwarted your opponent and are now ahead by percentage, positioning or perhaps a stock.
Example: Your rival plays Marth, he likes to spam forward smashes and you always seem to run into them, or you block and it hits your shield but he just keeps doing it until you are forced to run away. Fortunately there is hope – if you expect that forward smash you can wait a moment and when he misses you will have plenty of time to rush in and get a free grab or perhaps a free aerial. If Marth forward smashs your shield then you quickly wavedash out of your shield and enjoy a free grab with most characters.
This brings me to my first point why you should learn to short hop, fast fall, and lag cancel your attacks.
All you need to know about Shffl-ing
Lets start with the simplest of these Lag Canceling, here by referred to as L-cancel. The reasoning to incorporate this one should be apparent it means you are HELPLESS and VULNERABLE for half the time when you do miss with an aerial and it allows you to string together longer more effective combos when you do land a hit.
Short hopping is a little more convoluted in it’s uses but the general idea is that when you jump you have committed yourself to a set of actions, from a jump you can do an aerial, a double jump, a waveland, a “b” move, or air dodge. Also certain characters like Luigi, and Ice Climbers move slower in the air and spend more time in the air so you want to be on the ground where you are faster and have more options. Short hopping also allows another degree of control to where your aerial attacks are going to be place, if you can’t short hop consistently your combos will suffer for it.
Fast falling allows you to spend less time in the air, continue combos that would otherwise be impossible and help you reach the ground quickly where you have more available options.
A good way to practice shuffling is to do my 40 minute training session with or without a friend. Basically spend 10 minutes practicing in vs mode (works best if done all at once so I would just have it set to a 10 minute time limit, what you do here is practice short hopping, wavedashing, fast falling, L canceling, after every action act as fast as your character is capable of acting, so basically you want to shffl all 4 aerials as fast as you can, mix them up too, don’t get in the habit of doing one attack pattern, you are just showing off your technical skill. Maybe create a mock battle in your head where you are tech chasing or something. This will make you faster and more fluid. The next 10 minutes are roughly the same however it will be in lightning melee, this will help you get used to different timings for l canceling, it will get you in the habit of realizing that every hit in smash is a new hit and you can’t rely of muscle memory alone (although it is important). Then spend 10 minutes on slow melee, this will get you to feel out how laggy your attacks really are, against a person this will help a lot with both of your mindgames as well as revealing open spots more often and allowing you to increase your level of awareness of what is and is not punishable, and what moves of yours are and are not punishable creating more solid play in all involved. Then wait about and hour and play normal mode for another 10 minutes and you should notice an improvement in the consistency in which you perform advanced techniques.
Another effective technique for you to learn is jump canceling, you can jump cancel up smashes and grabs. Lets start with grabs, to jump cancel a grab you jump (I use the control stick for jump canceling grabs but thats only because my timing with the jump botton is off, I suggest learning to use X or Y) wait a split second and grab if you did it right you should do a standing grab, a good character to see the difference is is Pikachu, if you miss the jump cancel grab with Chu while running he will do a laggy roll.
Jump canceling up smashes is sometimes the only way to hit with an upsmash out of a tech chase or when you expect a spot dodge. Its performed the same way except you want to hit up on the c stick instead of Z. Also it can be done with up on the movement stick and the A button giving you the option to charge it.
A good example of when to charge this is you are fox your opponent is Marth he is at 100% and knows he will die if you grab him, instead of doing the grab you press up and a you charge it and he spot dodges the expected grab, you let go of a at the end of his dodge animation and then he dies gruesomely.
Practicing with a purpose
This can not be said better than where I first read it from Wobble’s
Practicing with Purpose
By wobblesthephoenix
This idea was taken directly from an article posted on Shoryuken, but since not everybody is going to read it there, I figured I'd post a segment of it I found important, interesting, and incredibly helpful.
I've also been inspired by Forward to share what (little) I know about being good at this game, so here goes.
The article is by a guy named Alex Wolfe. If you want to read the whole thing, go here: http://shoryuken.com/?p=115
This is the segment in question.
Practice with a Purpose
Don’t just play the game for hours on end with no game plan, this won’t get you anywhere. When Tito Ortiz, or Oscar De La Hoya are preparing, they don’t just train mindlessly, they have a game plan and so should you. It’s what makes champions. Find out what your weaknesses are, such as match you hate, set ups you always fall for, cheap tactics you can’t reverse, moves you can’t figure out how to counter…. and so on. Then practice with the purpose of improving the areas of weakness. If you do this right, you should see improvement immediately. Most people don’t realize it, but often time we lose because players take advantage of the same weakness over and over again, it’s your job to learn a counter and stop getting your *** kicked. There is an old saying “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."
So this is pretty self-explanatory, but I'm going to add a little bit of my own spin as well.
One thing I've been doing lately that has given me immediate benefits has been "playing for the counter." Without telling your opponent, watch for ONE move or setup that tends to defeat you. Come up with a solution to it that seems plausible, and practice it in friendlies. If it doesn't work after a lot of practice, try a different solution. It's important your training partner doesn't know what the move is, or else you won't get actual practice punishing it in a real match.
I've got some examples below.
Example 1: When I got hit by Sheik's forward-tilt, I would always be combo'd. So, when I finally decided to stop complaining, I decided to try and predict Sheik's f-tilt and crouch cancel only that move.
With a bit of practice I was able to see when my opponent liked to f-tilt and I was able to punish it with a much higher success rate. A fun fact about this story is that I play IC's, so I would crouch cancel into a grab. One crouch canceled forward-tilt became a massive chaingrab worth 50 percent to a stock. I love my character.
Example 2: I was playing against a friend's Marth and was sick of him SHFFL'ing forward-airs, finding it incredibly difficult to punish. I couldn't interrupt it, I couldn't trade, CC it, and it had a lot of range so I had trouble shieldgrabbing. So I tried waiting for the f-air, and practiced dash-dancing just out of range, then back into reach so I could grab them during the landing lag.
After practicing like this, I very quickly became good at doing those two things. With intelligent practice, you can rapidly become proficient in a wide variety of areas.
The lesson: every time you sit down to play, you can improve by focusing on a SINGLE aspect of your game and looking for ways to improve it. Don't play like a drone, practice with purpose.
- Another helpful practice tip
If you have the means, record your matches and watch them, it will help you immediately see some of your habits as well as analyze your timing spacing and combos you perform, perhaps you end a certain combo the same way often but there is a way it could be extended once your opponent is DIing that direction towards the end of it. Or perhaps where is a spot you normally would do a strong hit but if you stop 2 hits before that you can see a good spot to grab and start the whole thing over.
Learning to DI
Read Doraki’s Guide on DI if you really want some in depth information, if you don’t have the patience here is the shortened version.
DI (directional influence) is an amazingly useful tool to thwart combo’s live to outrageous percentages and to create huge swings in damage via crouch canceling.
Certain strings of hits that would be otherwise inescapable can sometimes become easily escapable given correct DI, a good example is Marth vs Peach if Peach gets grabbed by Marth and Marth forward throws he can run and grab her before she is capable of doing any actions and continue to forward throw all the way to a ledge and forward smash her with a perfect tipped swing of his retardedly powerful sword, with proper DI Marth can only grab peach this way at relatively low percents and once she is off the edge she will go to far for him to forward smash her thus receiving much less damage and being in a better overall position.
So a quick DI lesson, at high damages being knocked left or right you want to hold up and towards your opponent to be knocked higher and less far thus increasing your chances of making it back to the stage.
At any damages DIing away can often get you out of weaker comboing hits and into a safer position.
At low percentages you can crouch cancel attacks by holding down before being hit which greatly reduce and sometimes almost negate stun and knockback, if your character has a fast downsmash you can usually use it after this to start a combo. Example: Samus is at 0% and is on the ground Fox jumps at you with a neutral air, Samus has 2 options, she can shield and then upb out of shield for a few percent or she cant hold down and reduce the knockback to pretty much nothing then hit down on the c-stick sending fox flying and potentially comboing into a bair, the times for doing these changes based on Fox’s damage, if fox was at 150% then you would basically be trading 8%-12% for a kill.
Understanding DI can also help you to abuse “proper” DI in your opponent
G-Regulate
“people make the mistake of assuming that everyone will DI "correctly" all of the time, but this is never true. in reality, even the top level pros will DI well, but some combos can be performed no matter which way you DI, and its up to the person doing the combo to react quick enough to take advantage. theres no such thing as "perfect DI", its merely dependent on what your opponent attacks with.
for example, if i dair a fox at mid %, they will pop up right by my head or so, open for a free hit. now, in most cases i would just knee. if the fox is expecting my knee, he will hold up, DIing so the knee wont kill him or knock him far off the stage. if your opponent gets in that groove of DIing all of your knees up, then insert nairs and uairs where those knees were. he will merely be caught in the combo, popping around until you have an easy knee with more % and better stage position. i often get frustrated with people who get caught in one of my nasty combos, and will then say "man, I di'ed perfectly for you". while that may be partially true, they think that they are reacting incorrectly to what I am doing, but really, im just reacting correctly to what THEY are doing.”
Simple Effective Strategies
- Camping
What it is – Any act of extended non aggression
Camping’s purpose – To create openings in your opponents defenses
There are many ways of camping, the most common of which is to stand on one place and spam projectiles until your opponent comes to you. Another common form of camping is dash dancing and appearing threatening and punishing risky attacks with a grab. Yet another way to camp is to use aerial attacks in a way that cant be punished to provoke action on your opponents part. Then there is platform camping where you jump from platform to platform to avoid your opponent, there are edge stalls, just plain running away can be camping.
Just try and keep in mind what you are trying to accomplish, Fox’s lasers are brutal and the reason for this is not the 2-3% damage it does but rather the pressure the opponent feels to come to you and get a nair in the mouth. Just remember to watch carefully for your opponent to react to your camping or you could be caught off guard.
- Chain Grabs
Chain grabs and even just grabs in general are a great way to help control the match, they often lead to better stage position, free damage, and sometimes even kills. They also condition your opponent to use their shield less which allows you the freedom to mix up even more attacks and confuse them further.
- Think like your opponent
If you were your opponent and you were being comboed where would you tech? where would you think you were safe? when would you attack? With enough practice and observation you will be able to "just know" where your opponent will go, what they can't escape exactly when where and what moves they want to hit you with and you will decimate them.
I think this should help most people who ask how to beat their friends and brothers and fervently hope this will cut down a fraction of the spam melee discussion gets.
.
