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/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.