Recently playing SSF4 I realized something that has ultimately been hurting my game, or at least now that I think about it, I think it has. I've been playing Rufus since SF4 came out, and I like to think that I'm an okay player now. But of course it's hard to lose. Eventually I convinced myself that: 1. Rufus is free to jump-ins. 2. He has no reliable anti-air and 3. Sucks at footsies.  Then I started cursing people who have 3/4 frame uppercuts, I started never using jump forward HK, and never using Snakes Strike. I thought, hey, jumping is stupid, I can just get uppercut out of divekick, and snakes strike sucks because it's so slow.

A few days ago though, I played against a bison player, he owned me. Then I ran into him again, this time I picked Ken, he picked Adon. He knew a few combos, but I didn't really care. All I did was spam different versions of the uppercut, block, throw and ultra and I ended up winning. This just made me more mad. I ended up losing a bunch more rounds, while winning a few, and quit for the day.

Then today, I played again. I thought, you know what... I should just start using Snakes Strike and jf.HK more, see what happens. I've heard it before, "just go random". That's basically what I tried to do, I lost a few rounds and won a few rounds as usual. But what really made me think about things differently was these 2 games I had against a Viper player. The first game, I thought, okay this guy just wants to super jump, flame kick, seismo me when I'm on the ground and thunder knuckle me to death. So I'm just going to spam Snakes Strike. Then, to my surprise, I beat most of his superjumps or jumpins. I ended up winning a round, but he won the other 2 rounds. He messaged me after saying something like, "noob stupid spammer." I replied saying, "yeah nd u lost a round, I wasn't even trying." Which was true, I just didn't care, screw my slow uppercut, I just do it.

Then I ran into the Viper player again. We picked same characters, same ultras. I basically did the same thing as before, except I realized that now he was looking for the random snake strike, and doing HP thunder knuckle. So I started blocking a little more, and punishing his knuckle. I ended up winning 2 rounds to 1. If I remember right, I won both rounds with Ultra 2, first round he jumped at me, the winning round I caught him doing a backdash as I woke up.

Honestly I feel like a changed Rufus. I realize now that I can't cut off my options like that by saying things like, "Snakes Strike sucks I don't want to use it" or blaming other characters for being "better" in certain areas. I'm not saying that all of a sudden I'm so good, I still get owned by some people and get mad, like today I lost 2-0 to a bison and a balrog because they were smarter than me and I didn't know what to do. But now, hopefully, I can be more open about Rufus' strength, weaknesses, and how to keep it random, but also smart.

It's like Poker, if you can make your opponent think your going to do something, and you know he thinks that and what he's going to do about it, you can beat him. I still don't really know what the balance is between "random" and "smart", but hopefully now that I'm actually using 2 moves (Snakes Strike and jf.HK) that I had avoided using before, I can keep getting better, and not being scare.