I got third at a tourney yesterday. Number-wise, that's the worst I've done in the past six or months minus Genesis 2, but we actually had a decent turnout for a change, so I'm not upset about it; at most recent tourneys here, there have been only a couple heavy hitters at any one event, so it was nice to have lots of solid players together (me/S2J/Lovage/Wes in particular, but also Stab/Sung/Hyprid and some other respectably decent players).
Some poorly formatted and somewhat improvisational remarks/thoughts:
S2J is hard. I played him in WF and I generally felt that I was playing really solidly; aside from a few typical moments of idiocy, I generally stayed level-headed and executed well. He still beat me 3-1, though. I'll need to watch over the videos later, but I think the big deciding factor is that he kills me at way lower percentages than I kill him. I think it's inevitable that this will always be the case to some extent, but as it is, I generally don't kill him until something like 150% whereas he can typically kill me around 100%; killing me around 80% wasn't uncommon, either. The only thing I can think of at the moment to help alleviate this is to stick more firmly to the center of the stage. I generally like to stay a little off to the sides (although still decently far from the edges since ICs are terrible there), but it might help a little to try to stay as far from the opposite edge as possible; if nothing else, this should help prevent dthrow -> knee KOs at 70-80%. I also recall some Falcon saying that Chu could always get out of dthrow -> knee whereas other ICs wouldn't, so I think I'll trying varying my DI a bit and maybe trying some other stuff to get away from that. On one occasion, I did escape a dthrow -> knee by DI'ing away and mashing X/Y to jump as soon as possible and then airdodging up and in, which did avoid the knee; generally speaking, I think Falcon could punish me for that afterwards, but I might be able to get away with airdodging at a different angle. Overall, I'm sure there are other little things that I could have done better which I'll have to identify when videos get up.
Lovage was on-and-off at this tourney. I beat him convincingly in winners-semis. and while I do feel that I was playing quite well this set, he was also less precise and adaptive than he usually is. This carried on into his set with Wes in losers-semis, but he sharpened up near the end of that and he then beat me in LFs. He wrecked me in the first two games, but I managed to bring the set to a close game 5; it was too little to late, though, and the better player won. In a kind of strange way, I was a little reassured by this set, but more on that later. I was confused during and after the first two rounds; the way Lovage was playing wasn't really fundamentally /that/ different than how he was playing in winners; IIRC, his execution was notably better and he did a much better job of killing off Nana, but I wasn't noticing anything else drastically out of the ordinary. I think I realized sometime during the second round that I simply just wasn't playing the match-up the same way I was in winners and Oscar was catching me with stuff that I wasn't falling for earlier. This simple realization came too late, though, and Oscar caught onto on my revisions in the fifth game, in which he was much more cautious about how he approached me and it payed off; kudos to him for being great, as always.
On the bright side, I know why I didn't catch onto what I needed to change earlier and I think I can hence adapt more quickly in the future. After I lose a game, I like to ask myself what went wrong. Since I beat Oscar solidly in winners, I was initially thinking he must have been doing something notably different, but I wasn't noticing much, hence my confusion that I noted earlier. Instead of asking myself "What is he doing differently now?", I should have reverted to the more basic question: "What went wrong?" I think if I had done this, I might have corrected my faults sooner.
I think I should also add "Don't get desperate" to the list of things that I should periodically remind myself of mid-match given certain cues. Like, I can't punish/counter a full-jump Fox bair with dsmash/CC dsmash, yet I try it anyways sometimes; my hope that this will sometimes work against a good player is a pipe dream that needs to die. If I catch myself doing it, I need to quickly break that habit. (retrospective note: huge tangent warning) Dsmash isn't even all that good in many regards in a lot of match-ups. Its strength is that it doesn't have much lag, it has good knockback, and it comes out very quickly. However, its hitbox is low and it doesn't cover all that much space, so for straight-up beating things, its applications are limited. Also, it only comes out quickly in the back, and hence is often not a great CC move when facing foward. I should try to remind myself not to use this move unless I'm confident I can hit a grounded foe with it. On a related note, I think I'll replace some of my jab -> dsmashes with jab -> ftilt, due to the aforementioned speed issue. I'm also starting to use a decent amount of CC -> dtilt instead of CC -> dsmash for similar reasons if I CC a move that was spaced-decently well in front of me, but not outside of dtilt's range. /tangent
Unless I'm forgetting something, that's more or less all I wanted to cover. It's nice playing very good opponents again since I haven't had a chance to really reflect/identify many of my faults lately, and I think I had gotten a bit lazy when it comes to improvement the past several months since I didn't have much incentive to then, but my competitive drive is acting up again. Cheers to Melee.
Also, I do plan on getting an ICs guide up within the next couple weeks (I'll aim for this week, which I should easily be able to achieve provided I don't procrastinate). It's largely going to be an introductory thing that won't be of much use to the regulars here, but will hopefully be helpful for people looking to pick up the character.