How to be a bit better at Tekken

Don’t throw the rock, save the paper and put away the scissors

Original publish date: 04 August 2024

At this point, I expect that you have heard multiple expressions alluding that Tekken is a ‘guessing’ game. Generally, you’ll hear this in the form of statements such as “It’s a 50/50” or “It’s all up to the RPS”, probably followed by moaning, sighing, and acceptance of defeat. The bad news for you is that there is a great deal of truth behind this. It’s always going to be a guessing game. But you need to remember that what elevates decision making in Tekken beyond simple RPS are two things; the number of possible outcomes and your risk-reward analysis.

I think this is an easily agreeable concept that all of you know conceptually, but how many of you practice this when things get difficult? How many of you let go of your hands and assume your faith is just in a roulette wheel in situations where you might have more autonomy than you think? Even when you’re tech rolling on the floor and Kazuya is about to do a 50/50, or when Lars punished you with 2, 1 and he’s about to do some Limited Entry 50/50. You are absolutely limited in what you can do here and you are at a severe disadvantage. I need you to step back and assess, given the life situation, stage position and their habits, what is the smarter thing to do. Being greedy and trying to win every outcome is a sure way to lose performance consistency.

On a tangent, what you may think is a mixup, may actually not be. Perhaps when you get better with time you will understand more. Maybe something is ‘reactable’ or ‘pseudo-reactable’. Maybe you can fuzzy the mixups. Maybe you can interrupt the mixups. Once you accumulate all this knowledge and practice the skills required to execute them and you play opponents at a competent level, you will rarely find one option that beats everything. That’s the game. You will then need to go back and apply that risk-reward analysis. What are you willing to get hit by to get information now? How bad do you need to make a comeback right now? You cannot win every interaction because at the end of the day it’s all a guess. You can only try and make the best decisions.

Master document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/15AbGC7qDMmGddKGvJGOnNbT7vKeYXwcGM_LIXczvf1A/edit?usp=sharing