Important Carefully Ask PPMD about the Tiara Guy

[Dr Peepee]

an odd thought. perhaps I do.

I will say that style could certainly contribute, depending on how you define style. I would define style as an overarching set of pseduo-optimal decisions one makes when exposed to similar situations. In this case, it would mean my style is more refined than their styles(assuming I were more consistent).

Training helps tremendously in keeping immersion in a match and having a refined style overall. However, it also requires one to consistently direct their thoughts toward game-related elements while being motivated long before the tourney is happening. I often direct my thoughts toward simple things like "lasers" or "threaten" or "adjust space." These things help me tap into huge ideas I have and which allow me to continually adjust my play based on what I already (mostly) know.

Motivation long before the tournament deals with how I perceive competition, the game, and my opponents. I have found it best to perceive competition as empowering and beautifully cooperative. I now feel like the game is wonderful with so many secrets and chances for me to explore it and myself, as I did when I started playing. I respect my opponents highly and appreciate that without them I could not truly come to know the game or myself. These things all get me very excited to play and allow me to enter every tournament more or less ready to give it my all.

 

[Signia]

What do y'all think of the sheik vs marth matchup? they say its like 60:40 but it feels like 65:35 autocombos for days

Instead of throwing arbitrary numbers at you I'll help you out:

You can get out Shiek's chaingrab by not DIing against her dthrow and double jumping away. But, if you do that, she can ftilt you and get followups. So, SDI the ftilt to put you diagonally from her where her dead zone is, and double jump away and she can't follow up (in a wide range of low %). So mash those SDIs with quarter circles while timing the jump at the same time, and you've neutered her punish game quite a bit.

Even if she jumps and catches your jump, at a low %, her early aerials don't put her in a position to followup, and you might even get a free fair on her if she tries it.

 

[SpiderMad]

training a lot builds endurance

How do you not get any kind of hand problems though like the others?

Spoiler

 

[Dr Peepee]

Rest and relaxation. Small finger movements to keep blood flowing so repair is possible is good too.

I tend to stretch my fingers a bit in between matches sometimes if I grind for a while. I've never once had a hand or finger problem, even at my peak of training. Something I'm doing must be working haha.

 

[Elyssa Xey Hexen]

I would think the simplest solution is simply to take a break.

 

[Xyzz]

Just played some smash ... And realized whenever I get the chance I will do some pointless finger- movement (just like writing on a keyboard (a bit faster though)) and wipe my hand no matter whether they're actually sweaty :D

 

[Smooth Criminal]

Just played some smash ... And realized whenever I get the chance I will do some pointless finger- movement (just like writing on a keyboard (a bit faster though)) and wipe my hand no matter whether they're actually sweaty :D

I do the same exact thing, haha

Smooth Criminal

 

[Tee ay eye]

congratulations to the newest evil genius

 

[Bones0]

I'm just glad someone finally convinced him to stop going by "Dr. Peepee". LOL

 

[Elyssa Xey Hexen]

Evil geniuses need to be surmounted. A task everyone should accomplish.

 

[Dr Peepee]

good luck surmounting a steed like myself

 

[Elyssa Xey Hexen]

The struggle isn't just for a single horse.

 

[Dart!]

What matchup haven't we talked about lately? Was interested in talking about uodating the falco matchup.

 

[net1234]

What matchup haven't we talked about lately? Was interested in talking about uodating the falco matchup.

Shiek plz. Or kirby

 

[g_f]

do you actively search for new questions?

do you know your own questions?

by that, i mean the following: melee is a decision-based game. decisions are triggered by questions. the job of making the decision is your brain's duty, brain being a blackbox for thinking--a process by which stimuli are converted into symbols (e.g. letters, numbers) to be manipulated. thus, at a certain point during the thought process that leads you to a decision, you are indeed formulating a question in your plain motherlanguage. like, when deciding if approaching the opponent is any worth, your decision may descend from the question: (a) "what if my attack whiffs?" ((b) "i would get rekt" -> (c) "gotta space it better" -> (d) back to (a))

may a "quest for better questions" be a key to refinement? by which i mean (short) questions, the answers to which convey more relevant/specific information in in-game situations where decisions are needed.

 

[Xyzz]

That's a very interesting way to think about it.
I would think that melee is super complex though, so your questions can't explicitly answer every microsituation, but rather need to have to be rather generic and the actual implementation into actions needs to be somewhat unconscious... At least I doubt there's anyone who has a reason for everything he does, and not even have single instance of "just grab here, he's going to shield. What else is he gonna do?"... The more refined your strategy becomes from the most abstract "get a hit, make it count" down to "if in a situation X (that is described as concisely as possible) i do A, then based on what happened before my opponent will most likely do Y, which i can punish by Z" the better though, i guess.
E.g. the even the very simple "you are above Marth, what do you do?" boils down to tons of variables: exact stage position with platforms, exact distance to him, what exactly did he use to put you there (frame advantage stuff), how much percent is either of you at, and even things that aren't physical game things, but a metal relation between you and your opponent (e.g. I came down trying to dair him the last two times, and he punished me for it both times... time to switch it up... or will he really expect me to do it a third time, considering I've already shown him, that I also use airdodges to get away?)

 

[Elyssa Xey Hexen]

What matchup haven't we talked about lately? Was interested in talking about uodating the falco matchup.

10+ years I doubt will have changed anything. But, I never really realized that counter is a frame 5 move. About the same speed or so of his far. I wonder if there could be situations to reaction counter over trying to do a poorly timed attack.

 

[BTmoney]

I got to start playing this character again it's so much more fun than playing anyone else, PP and arc are also such huge inspirations. the best conversation takes place on the marth boards too, these are the only posts I read anymore

 

[nkd]

A paper I was reading for my studies seemed very relevant to this idea of how we arrive at our decision making process when playing melee. I'll quote a relevant section:

1. 
   Indeed, if learners feel that they can act only if they
   have reasons to guide them, this attitude will stunt their
   skill acquisition. A study of student nurses, for example,
   showed that those who remained detached and followed
   rules never progressed beyond competence, while only
   those who became emotionally involved and took to
   heart their successes and failures developed into experts
   (Benner et al. 1996). This suggests that, if something
   goes wrong, the way to achieve expertise is to resist a
   disinterested, objective examination of the problem and
   the temptation to formulate sophisticated rules to
   prevent it from happening again, and, instead, to stay
   involved and take to heart one’s failures and glory in
   one’s successes. Such emotional involvement seems to
   be necessary to facilitate the switchover from detached,
   analytic rule-following to an entirely different engaged,
   holistic mode of experience—from left- to right-hemisphere
   processing one might say.
   If the learner stays involved, he develops beyond
   competence by sharpening his perceptual ability to
   make more subtle and refined discriminations. Among
   many situations, all seen as similar with respect to plan
   or perspective, the expert learns to distinguish those
   situations requiring one reaction from those demanding
   another. That is, with enough experience in a
   variety of situations, all seen from the same perspective
   but requiring different tactical decisions, the brain of
   the expert gradually decomposes this class of situations
   into subclasses, each of which requires a specific
   response. This allows the immediate intuitive situational
   response that is characteristic of expertise.
   A chess grandmaster, for example, experiences a
   compelling sense of the issue and the best move. In a
   popular kind of blitz chess called lightning chess, the
   whole game has to be played in two minutes. Under
   such time pressure, grandmasters must make moves as
   fast as they can move their arms—less than a second a
   move—and yet they can still play master-level games.
   When the grandmaster is playing lightning chess, as far
   as he can tell, he is simply responding to the patterns
   on the board. At this speed he must depend entirely on
   intuition and not at all on analysis and comparison of
   alternatives. Herbert Simon has estimated that an expert
   chess player can distinguish roughly 50,000 types
   of positions. But this estimate presupposes the unsupported
   assumption that the master perceives an
   alphabet of chunks which he puts together by rule to
   recognize positions. The speed of lightning chess suggests
   that the master isn’t following rules at all and so
   must be able to directly discriminate perhaps hundreds
   of thousands of types of positions.
   Recent brain imaging research confirms that amateur
   and expert chess players use different parts of
   their brain. Researchers concluded that:
   The distribution of focal brain activity during
   chess playing points to differences in the mechanisms
   of brain processing and functional brain
   organization between grandmasters and amateurs
   (Amidzic et al. 2001).
   Empirical support is surely to be appreciated, but in
   any case, phenomenology shows that, although many
   forms of expertise pass through a stage in which one
   needs reasons to guide action, after much involved
   experience the learner develops a way of coping in
   which reasoning plays no role. Then, instead of relying
   on rules and standards to decide on and justify her
   actions, the expert immediately responds to the current
   concrete situation. After responding to hundreds of
   thousands of specific cases, the expert in a new situation
   spontaneously does something similar to what has
   previously worked, and lo and behold, it usually works.
   Of course, unlike infants and animals, we can
   deliberate. When a master has to deliberate in chess or
   in any skill domain, it’s because there has been some
   sort of disturbance that has disrupted her intuitive
   response. Perhaps, the situation is so unusual that no
   immediate response is called forth. Or perhaps, several
   responses are solicited with equal pull.

The full paper can be found here (http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/pdf/Dreyfus APA Address 10.22.05 .pdf) if you're interested.

I honestly just thought that this is pretty interesting stuff. Lightning chess seems to work as a good analogy for melee (better than just chess atleast), although an imperfect one. If the science, the author and the analogy are correct, it would suggest (similar to what @ Xyzz posted above) that descision making in experts doesn't involve any 'questions' per se - but descisions made intuitively based on past experience. That doesn't mean that reasoning, or asking yourself questions isn't a good tool for learning though.

 

[Dr Peepee]

intuition comes from independent thinking and muscle memory. this is why practice, and effectively restructured practice, and good theory, can be so helpful =)

 

[creep]

yo real talk how do i edgeguard peach? i don't have any trouble in neutral but when it comes time to seal the deal she lives forever and always recovers way high back to center stage. Am I forever doomed to ftilt her at 200% when I cant land tippers at kill percent?

 

[Xyzz]

Recovering high is putting them above you, except it's quite possibly they don't even have their float to trick you when coming down. Up airs keep getting them into the same situation repeatedly and if you can get it, an up tilt will seal the deal fairly early.

 

[Clebus]

How to Marth a Falcon?
A Fox main switched to Falcon and took me to DL64. It was close but he bopped me. He'd just neutral air me in the neutral. What do?

 

[Elyssa Xey Hexen]

The solution is simple. Place a sword in his air space. If you trade or whiff you are doing it wrong.

 

[Bones0]

At low percents, hold down, hold shield, mash A.

 

[FrootLoop]

Try out first hit sideB to anti-air him. It will always beat it, you can do it out of initial dash in either direction, and you get decent followups generally.

Really you probably want to be the one chasing him instead though.

 

[Clebus]

The solution is simple. Place a sword in his air space. If you trade or whiff you are doing it wrong.

Truly illuminating.

At low percents, hold down, hold shield, mash A.

I understand

Try out first hit sideB to anti-air him. It will always beat it, you can do it out of initial dash in either direction, and you get decent followups generally.

Really you probably want to be the one chasing him instead though.

Got it.

thaaaankzzzzzzzzz

 

[Tee ay eye]

may have posted this already recently but ill do it again

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3y0uZgNegyo

this set is a good watch for marths IMO

 

[Elyssa Xey Hexen]

Time to try this again
@Anyone
@ Dr Peepee

Question
In general, what should Marth's strategy be in this game overall? Additionally, what actions should one be taking to get those results?

Experience
From my own perspective I have been seeing a variety of opinions on how Marth should be played. For the longest time my driving factor has been to play as optimally as I possibly could. Its been a very helpful mentality in analyzing what options should I be using or not using in a variety of situations. For example, attempting to react to tech chases is far more successful means of playing than simply calling out random reads. Things like this. Overall, I would say this mentality has been very good for improving one's ability to punish better.

However, it has lead me to running circles around myself in how to win a neutral setting. Running around the stage is not going to do any good if you never actually attack. Eventually you will just run yourself into a corner and lose ground putting yourself in a bad situation where Marth cannot easily recover. To put it in another way attempting to play extremely non-committal (never throwing out a move) only works when your opponent is willing to just keep attacking you without reserve.

Ideas
Its been said a number of times to play marth more aggressively. Yet, I do not understand how Marth can play aggressively at all when all of his options it seems are terrible. I suppose I should mention now that when someone says to play aggressively it means to me that Marth needs to be making attacking moves (grab, tilt, smash, aerial, etc). If this is what people mean I do not understand. Most of his moves cannot be reliably used in neutral. To me, when I choose to attack in neutral it means to attack first while my opponent still has a variety of options available to them such as dodge, shield, attack, jump, etc. With that in mind most of his moves are indeed terrible. I cannot use Ftilt and expect the move to be safe against the threat of CC, shield, dodge, or even other grounded attacks. There are only two options I would consider viable to use in neutral (before my opponent can act) and they are Dtilt or Grab. Other moves are viable, but generally it is no longer in neutral when that happens. Your opponent might be shielding or in the air or in the middle of a tech situation or being edgeguarded or on a platform.

Summary
Maybe someone might be getting off track on what I would like to figure out. My goal with this post is to figure out how to force or set-up my opponent into situations where I win. Marth has a really good punish game like other characters in this game. I just do not understand how he can force his opponent into those situations where his punish begins.

As I stated before running around the stage being non-committal has never helped me force those situations. Being aggressive from my point of view does not make much sense with Marth as his options seem rather weak. So, if anyone has an idea of how to legitimately force people into my punishes I would very much like to hear it.

 

[Tee ay eye]

marth's sword isn't an initiation tool; it's a tool for denying your opponent's primary options, giving you the real-estate to do other things while they're focusing on beating your sword (by various means, such as jumping, shielding, trading, etc)

that being said, being aggressive about marth isn't about lunging and overextending like a ******, but it's more about taking this previous idea and applying it in a proactive way, recognizing good times to do it, forcing favorable situations, denying options in situations where they have fewer options available.

another note is that being good at marth's aggression requires you to be tricky and ambiguous with when you are and are not using your sword, otherwise they'll have no reason to respect your threat of sword unless you telegraph it.

being passive with marth uses your sword in a way that denies their options, yes, except the problem is that it puts the ball in your opponent's court, allowing them to play situations where they have more space (i.e. more options) to work with than you do, which is horribly limiting in the long-run. furthermore, marth doesn't have very good short-range, quick "getthe****offme" moves and has non-persistent swinging hitboxes so he's very easy to lock down once he's in bad corner position.

would you rather be playing the game under your own terms or your opponent's terms?

 

[Elyssa Xey Hexen]

1)marth's sword isn't an initiation tool; it's a tool for denying your opponent's primary options, giving you the real-estate to do other things while they're focusing on beating your sword (by various means, such as jumping, shielding, trading, etc)

2) that being said, being aggressive about marth isn't about lunging and overextending like a ******, but it's more about taking this previous idea and applying it in a proactive way, recognizing good times to do it, forcing favorable situations, denying options in situations where they have fewer options available.

3) another note is that being good at marth's aggression requires you to be tricky and ambiguous with when you are and are not using your sword, otherwise they'll have no reason to respect your threat of sword unless you telegraph it.

4) being passive with marth uses your sword in a way that denies their options, yes, except the problem is that it puts the ball in your opponent's court, allowing them to play situations where they have more space (i.e. more options) to work with than you do, which is horribly limiting in the long-run. furthermore, marth doesn't have very good short-range, quick "getthe****offme" moves and has non-persistent swinging hitboxes so he's very easy to lock down once he's in bad corner position.

5) would you rather be playing the game under your own terms or your opponent's terms?

This gives me a nice abstraction on your point of view, but can you be any more specific at all? For 1) and 2) how do you expect to force favorable situations if you are not attacking? What does it mean to deny actions? Perhaps denying actions is physically carrying out the action of say swinging your sword when captain falcon comes at you with an aerial. Or maybe you mean the threat of denying actions. You put yourself in a situation where you can deny a variety of options of your opponent. If this later case, then what?

For 3) I dislike this notion of being tricky and ambiguous. What actions are you performing to achieve this? Plus, some people will not respect your actions regardless of what you do. So, it seems ineffective to rely upon strategies which mean having to rely upon your opponent acting in certain ways. Maybe Marth cannot cover all possible options in neutral and therefore must rely upon your opponent from making said action in the first place.

4) and 5) seems like a rehash of what I said before in my last post. Nothing to really comment on.

 

[Crispus]

My goal with this post is to figure out how to force or set-up my opponent into situations where I win.

If any one person knew exactly how to do this and could execute it, they'd be the best in the world at this game already. That is the definition of a perfect offense. :3

Marth has a really good punish game like other characters in this game. I just do not understand how he can force his opponent into those situations where his punish begins.

Well, in order to "punish", the other player has to do something wrong (big assumption) or you have to trick them into doing something wrong and have a reliable answer for it. Really, the best ways to do that seems to be the two things you stated are viable in neutral - d-tilt and grab. I was thinking about something similar to what you said, where I've heard different people say "o yea boii, marf is super aggro" and/or "Just let them approach you. Don't have fun, just wait.". In all honesty, this quote from DN works fairly well.

"You can't ever win if you're always on the defensive. To win, you have to attack."

Put more into smash terms, you cannot WIN if neither player ever approaches (We don't want Brawl, yo). However, by the same token, if you want to win, you need a reliable approach, and the only two things that are pretty viable are...wait for it...d-tilt and grab EEEEEYYYYY. This of course relies on the assumption that players are perfect, which they are not and can never be since they would need a reaction time of 0. That is good news however, because it just means there is more variance and ambiguity, aka, tricking your opponent. This just leads into mix-ups. All I can really say about that is to have a tricky dash dance or do an M2Killer.


tl;dr: Yo, read it.

 

[Bones0]

If any one person knew exactly how to do this and could execute it, they'd be the best in the world at this game already.

That's why he tagged PP.

 

[Deleted member]

Edit: Removed

 

[Clebus]

You have a sword to cut projectiles. You have a shield
and you can shield grab
you can also shield directly out of dash dance.

 

[Bones0]

Learning to powershield can help vs. spammy Samuses, but I wouldn't rely entirely on that because some projectile heights are really hard to PS.

 

[net1234]

What do I do against a Samus that just fires missiles and B's, runs away when I get close, and if I do manage to get close either dash attacks or down smashes?

get grab, upthrow, free juggles, death

 

[Bones0]

get grab, upthrow, free juggles, death

Going for raw grabs is probably the worst idea vs. the strategy he described...

 

[net1234]

Going for raw grabs is probably the worst idea vs. the strategy he described...

You can grab dash attack and downsmash is rlly punishable. Marth is way faster than samus he shud be able to keep on top of her and corner her.

 

[Bones0]

You can grab dash attack and downsmash is rlly punishable. Marth is way faster than samus he shud be able to keep on top of her and corner her.

You absolutely have to be swinging your sword if she's spamming projectiles, at least to protect yourself. If you always wait until after she DAs or dsmashes, yeah, you should be DDWD grabbing those, but the problem is you can't wait to grab those options when she's spamming stuff in your face unless the Samus is bad and goes for random attacks all the time. I obviously don't think Samus can beat Marth just with projectiles, DA, and dsmash spam, but for me personally, trying to get a grab is the last thing on my mind in that situation. I'm more focused on hitting with dtilt or a spaced aerial so she is forced to do something (at which point the desperation DA and dsmash tend to come out and THEN you can grab her).