How to Make Reads: Observed Tactical Inflexibility
A core part of any fighting game is making reads — making a guess about what behaviour your opponent is going to do, and then picking an option of your own to condition them for later, to create additional advantage, or outright open them up and deal damage to them.
Sometimes you can make a read based on the type of player you think someone is. You may play against a very active player. Perhaps they invincible reversal, mash, and fish for Perfect Parry often. In the whole, you might adapt your gameplay to take your turn less often in hopes they do something risky that you can punish them for.
Sometimes, you can make a read based on your imagination of a player’s mental state. Maybe the opponent is burnt out and in the corner, and you think they’re hyper aware of trying to use a Super Art (or even visually buffering it) to counter your Drive Impact, so you decide to walk up and throw them since you believe they won’t be ready for that.
Other times, it might be better to not make a read at all, and simply choose your option based on general risk-reward assessments. In the most basic of these cases, you should always perform a checkmate sequence into a game win whenever it’s available to you as by definition it is the most rewarding result possible while at the same time being completely risk-free and without counterplay.
Today though, I want to talk about a very specific type of read and how to make it. It’s finding and recreating situations where you observe your opponent’s options are very limited — not because a character’s inherent lack of tools, but because a situation is unusual, uncomfortable, and where a player allows themselves to autopilot too frequently. It might be that they’re lacking practice, or simply that they don’t understand the situation at all and their imagination limits them in what they think are viable options in the moment.
I’ll call this “observed tactical inflexibility”.
There’s another form of inflexibility you can make reads on that I call “strategic inflexibility”, but we’ll talk about that another time (reminder that strategy is the overarching gameplan for how you want to win, while tactics refers to the individual moves, sequences, or interactions that happen in service of that overall strategy).
I delay tech after blocking jump-ins too much.
I’ll start with an example from my own gameplay. If I fail to anti-air, but block a jump-in, there’s an extremely high chance I’ll delay tech. If I had to put a number on it, it’s probably around 50% of the time. The higher pressure the situation is, and the less familiar I am with my opponent, this can go up to perhaps even 80% or 90%.
This means I get blown up often by opponents I haven’t played before who default to walk back shimmy, neutral jump shimmy, or delayed strike after blocked jump-ins. Even against players I’ve played a lot with, it takes me a fair number of games to remember that that specific autopilot is dangerous and for me to adjust to it, and the more stressful the situation, the more I rely on the autopilot.
There are a few ideas around tactical inflexibility that might help you spot it better.
The first behaviour displayed is the one that the opponent will likely continue to do.
This is the most important part about making reads based on observed inflexibility.
Especially in intense short sets like the FT2 format in Ranked or in an offline tournament, you might not have the time or ability to create a situation more than two times. You take the one instance you’ve seen from the opponent, and you operate on the assumption that they’re going to act in exactly that way in the same situation the next time.
This is not a behaviour that we explicitly had to put effort into creating, we are actively attempting to take advantage of something we think the opponent is doing automatically and/or not thinking deeply about.
Obviously, there’s no guarantee that it’s going to work. This is especially true if you were only able to create the situation one time before you had to make the read.
The more common a situation is, the more often opponents will have a large and practised decision tree of options to pull from.
Knockdowns (and in particular, knockdowns where you end up right beside the opponent) are by far the most common form of advantage in SF6, and there will very rarely be observable inflexibility here, even from intermediate level opponents (Platinum+).
On any given knockdown, most competent players will be able to display a wide range of behaviours. Blocking, instant throw tech, delay tech, instant mash, delay mash, backdash, jumping, Perfect Parry, and invincible reversals. That’s nine different behaviours at minimum that you can expect that most people will be able to rotate around in some capacity.
That’s not even taking into account character-specific options like instant divekicks, wall jumps, armoured attacks, or aggressive turn stealing like wake-up plus-on-block normal, walk up throws, instant cancellable lows, or command grabs.
To a slightly lesser extent, the same thing applies for plus-on-block/standing plus-on-hit situations. Players are usually quite used to these as long as the situation results from a common sequence or bread and butter combo.
This is not to say it’s impossible that people can be inflexible in these scenarios — they definitely can be (as evidenced by my own play). But it’s less likely than in weirder ones.
In these kinds of situations, the type of read you make is usually not one based on observed inflexibility. This is the time to use other forms of reads like prior conditioning, or mental state reading, or not make a read at all and focus on conditioning, risk/reward assessments, or other gameplay related to the game state rather than the opponent themselves.
The more the situation appears to be a scramble or a mistake, the higher likelihood someone will display inflexibility.
Street Fighter 6 can be a very punishing and snowball-y game, and opponents rarely miss opportunities to shift the momentum in the other direction.
This is an example I found purely by chance. I’ve been trying to land more j.MP~MP air-to-airs on M. Bison. You can get a combo when landing this with the correct timing and the correct extension, but I’ve flubbed it many a time. This is one such flub, Drive Rush 5HP.
It looks like a mistake that can be punished, and opponents will often default to pressing here, thinking that they can combo me. At first, even I thought I would be punishable. What they don’t know is that this whiff is actually still plus, so it’s my turn, and I can counterhit them for attempting to punish me.
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In these scramble-y situations, many opponents lack either the discipline or knowledge to vary their options. Offensive actions like invincible reversals, mashing, and throws are common here, so it’ll be up to you to remember which one it was to take advantage for next time.
The more a situation resembles something the opponent is familiar with, the higher likelihood that someone will display inflexibility.
The following is a common Sagat setup. Pressing 5MP into another 5MP on block will trade with four-frame attacks, enabling Sagat to get a highly rewarding trade combo by following up with 2MP.
However, on E. Honda and a few other select characters, you can press a specific four-frame attack which still causes the trade (5LK), but changes the spacing after the trade. If Sagat attempts to use 2MP to combo like normal after seeing the trade, it will whiff, and that can be punished.
We can trick them by creating a trade that looks like the one where the followup is possible with 2MP, but actually isn’t. The inflexibility comes from Sagat players being able to recognize that a trade happens and letting their instincts take over to confirm into the combo, when the trade is not actually the specific one they were looking for.
Character-specific knowledge checks can be opportunities to observe tactical inflexibility.
Generally, your opponents will be less familiar with your character than you are. Even if they’ve learned some form of counterplay for the things you’re doing, it’s very possible they’re limited to just one or at best two options, and if you know one layer deeper than that, you can take advantage of the lack of depth in their counterplay.
M. Bison’s Head Press into Somersault Skull Diver ([2]8K~K~P) is a knowledge check with impressive reward that can be generically countered on almost every character by doing an immediate rising air attack after blocking Head Press (in this clip, it’s Chun Li’s j.MP).
Individual characters can sometimes have better options than this (both more rewarding and/or safer on failure). But if this is the only counterplay the opponent knows, not doing the Somersault Skull Diver and steering the jump away from the opponent can avoid the rising air attack completely, and you can punish their landing recovery from their whiffed air normal.
Here’s another setup that combines both character specific knowledge checks and exploiting opponents’ default counterplay. Training to Perfect Parry both Sumo Headbutt and Sumo Smash are basic forms of counterplay against E. Honda.
This looks like a Sumo Smash that is going to hit meaty. However, this H Sumo Smash actually lands one frame before the opponent is actually able to wakeup, and if they attempted to Parry it, it’s a free Oicho Throw in return.
It may be necessary to take some form of disadvantage or short-term loss in order to confirm inflexibility.
Sometimes you’ll have a strong feeling that the behaviour someone displayed was an autopilot and you can play the rest of the set out accepting that as a truth for the sake of your strategy.
But sometimes, it’s not as clear, and we have to tread the line of conditioning. By allowing someone’s autopilot or option to be successful more than one time, especially if that option is relatively low reward, we can both confirm the existence of the autopilot and lull our opponents into a false sense of security.
Checking for the second time whether someone does rising j.MP against Somersault Skull Diver is fairly low risk. The opponent deals a few hundred damage to us, and maybe they get some okizeme with Drive Rush.
Checking for the second time that Sagat is properly confirming trade combos into 2MP can lead to us losing over 60% of our health and sent to the corner. This is such high reward for Sagat that it may not even be necessary at all to check if they can do this — it’s may be fairly safe to assume that by default this autopilot will exist in Sagat players and to never mash 2LP or some other four frame attack that leads to a combo-able trade to begin with.
Be judicious about checking whether an autopilot exists. Sometimes if you’re not sure, it’s better to just assume the opponent’s gameplay is actually flexible in this situation and to make a more determined read elsewhere.
Reads based on observed tactical inflexibility lose value faster than other types of reads.
The last thing I want to say about this type of read is that once you show the opponent you can take advantage of something, many of them will wake up to the idea that their option is exploitable. It’s a jarring experience to have something you thought was completely low risk or risk-free lose you the game.
This type of read in my experience is extremely successful the first time, but quickly has diminishing returns. This is in contrast to other types of reads, like ones based on conditioning, mental state reading, strategic inflexibility, or game state, which in my experience usually have medium success rates but whose value does not usually diminish as the set progresses.
Save reads based on tactical inflexibility for an important moment, or accept that it likely won’t work the next time around.
tl;dr:
- Observed tactical inflexibility takes one (or more) instances of a behaviour in a specific situation, and extrapolates that to a player habit that they will always do in that situation.
- Tactical inflexibility usually arises out of situations that are either very unusual or uncomfortable, or ones that appear to be routine. Scrambles and “mistakes” can often trigger these kinds of automatic reactions. They usually do not appear in situations where players are used to being at a disadvantage like knockdowns or plus frame situations.
- Counterplay layer depth is key to figuring out what behaviours are punishable and how to punish them. Look for situations where ideally your opponent has only ever showed one option.
- Making reads based on observed tactical inflexibility has faster degradation in value in a way that other reads do not.
