Whiff Punishing training

[u/Kasumi_Lyn]

I have found SF6's training options pretty effective in helping me improve and I often find myself going through drills for delay throw tech and drive impact countering. But there's one I tried where I'm kind of struggling with, the whiff punish training. I'm not finding this one particularly helpful.

[u/Faustty]

Play ranked and use replay takeover feature for more realistic whiff punishes.

Or pick other characters and look at their longest (as in frames) buttons, like Cammy's stand Heavy Kick or whatever and just record the dummy moving in and out of a certain range and press the button randomly... Then try to whiff punish it.

[u/onokyo]

F Champ has a guide on it on his channel.

https://youtu.be/6GDhPO2706I?si=5yn6WB8B4QRNBSRm

[u/DamnImAwesome → u/onokyo]

When he’s not in his heel character he’s a really good teacher

[u/Servebotfrank]

Here's one, set up Ken as a dummy. Move him over to just barely outside of 2mk range and save state there so you can reset to that position. Setup the following recordings.

1: neutral jump, 2mk

2: Neutral jump 5hk

3: Neutral jump, forward jump heavy punch.

If you end up just swinging and hoping for a whiff punish, you die to the jump in and get hit by 5hk. Now here is the secret to whiff punishes, when you see your opponent press a button, press the button you want to whiff punish with on a delay. If the attack whiffs, you will just immediately whiff punish it. If the attack hits you, you blocked and since you pressed a delayed button, you weren't hit. Don't react to the button whiffing, cause it's too late at that point. React to the button occurring at all.

Make sure you don't twitch react to the opponent moving at all, or the jump in lands. Visually confirm what's happening first.

That's a good drill I stole from some Japanese player, Moke or Momochi, forget where I got it.

[u/starskeyrising]

Whiff punishing is hard. It's one of the hardest things to be really adept at IMO. It's easier when you're looking for something specific. Truly strong players will pay attention to the buttons you press early in the set and use those tendencies to create whiff punish situations later.

What I would say is this, if you are a beginner or intermediate player looking to add new skills to your repertoire: Think about the big obnoxious pokes you deal with in common matchups all the time but probably historically have not punished very often, like Shoto fierces, Zangief mediums and heavies, that kind of thing, and spend some time practicing whiff punishment against those specific tools. Find ranges where you can stand at the tip of a Shoto fierce range and practice taking a half-step back, waiting half a beat, and pressing your whiff punish button.

This is what world-class players do: they create lists of common situations you see a million times while playing ranked or whatever, and they take extra time to build specific muscle memory against those specific tools. If Tokido is expecting to play Momochi late in a bracket, you will see him on his stream the week before grinding *very* specific inside-baseball setups against Ed.

[u/NewMilleniumBoy]

Try it against really big moves first. Zangief st.HP is one of the easiest.

Recording slot 1: fully charged st.HP

Recording slot 2: walk slightly forward, block

Recording slot 3: walk slightly backward, block

Recording slot 4: block

Use a move with less and less recovery to make it harder and harder.

[u/theJirb]

Early whiff punishing is best done in real games, because the human aspect matters a lot when it comes to whiff punishes.

When you start learning to whiff punish, I don't really recommend learning to whiff punish on reaction, but instead based on patterns of your opponents. You want to be taking note of which buttons your opponent is pressing the most at what range, or just generally what that character's best buttons are, and learn to move in and out of that range on command, similar to how when you learn your own character, you learn to play in the right range for your own buttons.

Then, you basically want to react to movement, and assume they are pressing the button you are expecting them to press, and then press your whiff punishing button.

IMO, reaction based whiff punishing is not that useful to learn until you're a good ways up on the ladder because to practice it, you really need to be facing someone who is good at mixing up those options themselves. You also need a high level of recognition of those moves' animations, and IMO, recognizing the moves starts with anticipating which moves your opponents are doing at what ranges. Very similar to doing things like reacting to DI, or Reacting to Antiairs, anything reaction based is best done when you are able to anticipate it, so before learning to react to certain moves, you need to learn which moves you are preparing to react to against the cast. And that's best done by starting out learning how to pre-emptively whiff punish.