I got asked a question recently about what I consider to be “good practice.” Earlier tonight I was playing Ryu in Championship mode and played a Blanka in one of the rounds. I’m trying to learn Ryu to complement Balrog and counterpick certain bad matchups that Balrog has. I was in the corner with my back to the wall and blocked Blanka’s Ultra. I held Up Forward as I blocked so that I would jump as soon as the block stun was over and then cross him up with MK. The only problem was, I didn’t know what to follow up with because:

1. I wasn’t paying attention to my meter because I’m still a Ryu noob
2. I didn’t know if a combo existed that would allow me to end it with an Ultra in the corner

What ended up happening was that I did something to the effect of D+MK xx Fireball and probably ended up losing the match. But afterward, I still wanted to know if I could end the combo with an Ultra so I went into Training Mode to find out. This was the hourlong process:

1. In Training Mode, I set the Action option to Record and then did an Ultra with Blanka.  Then I changed Action back to Playback and then got ready to try out a combo with Ryu.
2. I blocked the Ultra and then started holding Up Forward when Blanka was on the second half of the Ultra (when he’s rolling toward you) so that Ryu would jump as soon as the auto-block finished.  I crossed up with MK and then tried to do D+LK, D+LP, D+LP, D+MK xx EX Fireball -> Ultra.  I tried it a bunch of times and couldn’t get the D+MK to connect.
3. I decided to try it without the D+LK and was then able to get the D+MK to connect.  Unfortunately it was still hard for me to connect the D+MK reliably even after several minutes of trying.  I then decided to look at the Frame Data. I saw that both D+LK and D+LP had the same Start-Up and Hit Stun so I knew that in addition to it being easier to do two D+LPs, it wasn’t making anything more difficult.  Using D+MK, however, was making things more difficult.
4. I looked at the Frame Data for D+MP and saw that it actually starts up in four frames as opposed to D+MK which starts up in five.  One frame may not sound like a lot, but when you think about it, that’s a 25% increase which means that doing D+MK instead of D+MP after two D+LPs is actually harder because you have to be 25% faster.
5. Once I knew that I had a solid cross-up combo on Blanka I worked on getting the EX Fireball attached to the end of the combo.  (It might sound silly to you that I had to figure all of this stuff out but I’m not a Ryu player so combos and I don’t have a lot of really situation-specific knowledge with him such as this Blanka Ultra situation.)  I spent at least 15-2o minutes working on getting the combo down to a rhythm where I wasn’t actually registering the button presses in my head.  I don’t know about you guys, but generally I say the combo in my head as I’m doing it, as weird as that might sound.  But I actually got this combo to the point where I didn’t have to do that anymore, it was just a reflex, similar to playing a short guitar riff.
6. The last step was to just Ultra afterwards which worked.  Whee!

But then after that I wondered what I would do if I was in the middle of the screen or too far away from the corner to just tack on the Ultra at the end.  The obvious choice was to do the same combo with the EX Fireball ender but to Focus Attack Dash Cancel (FADC) into Ultra.  The only catch is (aside from requiring my to step up my execution) that it takes three EX Meters to do so instead of the one you would need if you were closer to the corner.  Here was the process:

1. I started out with the same combo (D+LP, D+LP, D+MP XX EX Fireball) and then hit Focus after.  It took a few tries but then I was able to do it every time.
2. Then I just tried to get the dash in after the Focus by holding MP+MK, dashing, then releasing the buttons.
3. Once I was able to do those additions to the combo, I tacked the Ultra on to the end.  That took a while (maybe between five and ten minutes).
4. After I could get that down most of the time, then I added the crossover jumping MK at the beginning and the whole thing came together

After I felt comfortable with the combo, I went back into Championship Mode and of course my first match is against Blanka.  I tried to do the combo every opening I got.  Before I would always try to do D+MK because it felt more natural but now that I knew I was making my life 25% easier because of the difference in Start-Up, I was landing it a lot more!  Unfortunately, when I finally got the opportunity to do the combo, I messed it up, so that just goes to show that Training Mode is no substitute for a real match.  But now it’s only a matter of time before I’ve had to do it enough times when it counts that I can hit it every time.  Overall, I feel like it was a productive session.