Introduction
One of the most common problems that newer players seem to have with 3rd Strike is the double QCF motion, which is part of virtually every super in the game. Even players with limited or no real fighting game experience seem to know about the fireball and shoryuken motions, and don't have much trouble mastering them, but the double QCF is a somewhat different beast altogether. It can feel arduous and requiring a lot more effort than other typical fighting game motions (QCF, DP, HCF/HCB, etc.), and trying to pull off combos like Yun's 1-2-3 (LP,LK,MP) xx Genei-Jin or Ken's MP, FP (strong-fierce) xx SAIII can be an exercise in frustration. Thankfully, there are tricks that can mitigate or avoid these frustrations altogether.


Double QCF? More like 1.5x QCF

When one thinks of the double QCF motion, it's natural to think that "double QCF" = 2 full QCF motions - D, DF, F, D, DF, F + punch/kick. However, the 3S engine actually interprets the DF (down-forward) positioning of the joystick as both "down" and "forward" for the purposes of a button press.

This actually has surprisingly large ramifications in terms of the joystick motion necessary to pull off moves centered around the fireball (QCF) motion. The double QCF motion, thanks to this mechanic of the 3S engine, can actually be compressed to D --> F, D --> DF + punch/kick, or something closer to 1.5x QCF. Similarly, a regular fireball no longer requires doing the full 90° QCF motion, but just a 45° D --> DF + punch motion, and the shoryuken motion is condensed to F, D --> DF + punch.

This may not seem like much of a difference to the inexperienced player; after all, the gap between DF and F is fairly small, right? However, when it comes to pulling off tight combos like the 1-frame, crouching only combos mentioned in the previous post, the difference between DF and F goes from seemingly insignificant to actually quite important! In addition, more advanced tactics like punishing whiffed normals with Chun-li SAII or Ken SAIII involve very strict timing where good reaction time simply isn't enough - every frame counts, and minimizing your joystick motion by a frame or two can be critical. Even from a strictly mathematical standpoint, a fireball now requires half as much motion as before! How can that be anything but helpful?


Buffering the first QCF into another move

Ok, so we've found a way to cut down on the amount of joystick wiggling necessary to get a super to come out. But even so, double QCF is still a fairly unwieldy motion as a whole, still requires 3 directional shifts to come out. Is there anything else we can do to make getting supers out less difficult?

As it turns out, there is. Another mechanic of the 3S engine which most beginners aren't familiar with is the following:

Joystick inputs for one move will also count towards any subsequent moves in the near future.

As far as the double QCF is concerned, this means that the QCF involved to do, say, a fireball will also count towards the double QCF requirement for a super. So fireball xx super (say with Ken) becomes:

QCF, P --> QCF, K

In effect, you are "hiding" the first QCF requirement in another move which you execute before the super itself. The end result feels a lot smoother, since it involves a nice alternation of joystick movements and button presses, and the end result is akin to back-to-back fireballs rather than a complicated joystick movement followed by a button press. The whole thing still has to be executed quickly, but it feels a lot less clunky on the whole. Here are some common combos that use this technique:

1. b.+HP xx HCF+P (fireball) xx SAII (Chun-li)
2. cr. MK xx QCF+P (fireball) xx SAI (Akuma)
3. st. MP, HP xx QCF+P (fireball) xx SAIII (Ken)

The first two combos (back-fierce super with Chun, low-forward super with Akuma) are actually not very hard to do, even if the fireball is omitted; these combos utilize the extra fireball primarily for extra time to hit confirm. Just as I mentioned buffering QCFs so that you have less to do after seeing confirming the initial hit (just a button press) in my hit-confirms post, throwing out back-fierce xx fireball or low-forward xx fireball leaves you with only one more fireball motion to input for a super after confirming the hit. Both of these are somewhat tighter hit-confirms if you try to do them straight up (especially shoto low-forward, in general), but become much easier with the extra buffer from the fireball. Of course, the downside is that you leave yourself open to having the fireball parried and then getting punished, so you can't just throw in extra fireballs willy nilly, or exclusively use it as a crutch for poor execution or reaction time.

The third combo takes a combo that requires fairly quick hands (strong-fierce-super) and make it much easier to input. You do lose a point of damage because of damage scaling, but you gain a tiny bit of meter as compensation, so all in all it's a roughly even result either way.


Tackling the double QCF beast head on

So far, we've been covering ways to make life easier when comboing into supers, and that's fine and dandy up to a certain level. However, at some point you will run into stuff that you can't skate your way around, like 1-2-3 xx Genei-Jin or strong-fierce-super with Ken; there will be times when you want that 1 extra point of damage over strong-fierce-fireball super, or you just want to become a better player and develop the hand speed necessary to do the optimal combo at the optimal time.

Unfortunately, there's very little one can write on this point, other than "do the double QCF as fast as possible, as soon after the button press as possible" that can really elucidate matters much further. (Of course, I'm still going to try!) A video would be a lot more helpful in this situation, and I hope to make videos to supplement these posts some day, but unfortunately I just don't have the time or resources to do so at the moment.

The best I can do in trying to explain how to pull off the double QCF in combos like the aforementioned ones is as follows:

Whenever you do something involving multiple button presses, say Ken's strong-fierce chain or Akuma's Raging Demon, you're more likely to think of each press as a discrete input. On the other hand, when you consider something like a simple fireball, you generally don't think of it as two discrete motions, not "QCF, then P". A fireball generally feels more like "QCF into P" - like one, smooth, continuous process.

Doing a combo like Ken's strong-fierce-super, you have to think of fierce xx super in the exact same way, only in reverse. Instead of a joystick motion tapering into a button press, it's a button press flowing into a joystick motion. Just as the gap between the end of "QCF" and "pressing P" is more or less imperceptible for a fireball, "pressing fierce/HP" should be followed virtually immediately by the first QCF, as if "HP into QCF" into D --> DF is one continuous idea. That's the best description I can give for the time being.


Hopefully this post has made it clear that the double QCF is not quite the intimidating beast it may initially feel like, and with a little practice you can master the various techniques involves with the motion until it feels completely natural.

Introduction
Anyone who has reached a certain level of competency at 3S knows that crouching and standing affect various aspects of a fight. You've probably noticed that you take more damage when crouching, or that some combos don't seem to work unless they're standing, and so on. So let's tabulate the differences:

1. When crouching, you take more damage. The amount varies based on rounding, but it's ~25%.
2. When crouching, you take more hit stun. I don't have a precise figure for how much more, but it's a fact.
3. When crouching, your hitbox changes, usually becoming smaller. This affects how certain combos work.

Now, let's explore the ramifications of these 3 properties of crouching, as opposed to standing.


Crouching results in increased damage taken.

This is the simplest of the 3 to talk about, because it is exactly what it seems like - if you get hit while crouching, you take extra damage. This serves to deter a number of habits, such as:

- Spamming low pokes, which have the benefit of only being blockable low; if you get parried or punished on a whiff, you feel the pain a bit more.
- Spamming down parry, for much of the same reason as spamming low pokes.
- Always blocking low; although this is generally very safe, characters with good overheads (like Dudley, Makoto, Urien) can punish one-track turtling of this sort.

There is more to it than just "x% extra damage if you get hit while crouching," though. For starters, many moves/combos will result in you being juggled or airborne at some point; as soon as you leave the ground, subsequent hits will no longer benefit from the crouching bonus. This is part of the reason why something like Ken SAIII doesn't really pack much more heat if you get hit crouching; the last half of the combo is airborne, which when combined with damage scaling brings down the damage more than you would expect.

In addition, many moves (especially supers) will force you to stand up after the first hit, including Chun-li SAII and Ken SAIII. If you watch the animation closely, you'll see the character may be crouching when the super flash goes off, but they're standing up for the majority of the super itself. In these cases as well, the crouching penalty will only apply to the first hit, and perhaps wisely so - imagine Chun-li's SAII damage going up by a flat 25% if you were crouching when you got hit initially!


Crouching results in greater hit stun.

In addition to increasing the damage taken, crouching also increases the duration you're in hit stun for, which has two main effects.

In my previous post on drumming, you may recall I said something to the effect of "nothing can bail you out if your inputs are late." Well, upon reflection this is not completely true; since crouching means you're in hit stun longer, combos that are tight on standing opponents can become considerably easier on crouching ones. Classic examples of this are:

1. cr. LK xx LP dash punch xx SAI (Makoto) 
2. (close) st. MK xx SAI (Akuma)
3. cr. MP xx st. LK xx LP dash punch (Yun)

The difference between standing and crouching may only be a couple of frames of additional hit stun, but those couple of frames are often the difference between a successful combo and 1 frame too late, which leads to getting punished.

The other effect of this increased hit stun is crouching-only combos. There are some combos that rely on that extra frame or two of hit stun on crouching opponents to be doable in the first place. The 3 most common, by far, are:

1. (far) st. HK xx SAII (Chun-li)
2. b.+MK xx SAIII (Ken)
3. f.+HK xx SAIII (Dudley)

As it turns out, these are all 1 frame links, so techniques like drumming are especially crucial to landing them consistently. It's also important to be able to verify that they're crouching; sometimes it's easy, if they do something like get hit throwing out a low move, but most of the time you just have to visually verify it. All of these all deal hefty amounts of damage thanks to the crouching penalty.


Crouching affects your hitbox

I'm assuming readers of this blog are familiar with the concept of a hitbox; it more or less dictates how "hittable" your sprite is at any given time. It seems obvious that crouching makes your hitbox smaller; however, this does have the consequence of standing-only combos. It's quite self-explanatory; moves that would hit your sprite while they are standing up fail to do so when they are crouching, rendering the combo invalid.

The most notorious example, by far, occurs when Dudley attempts st. HK xx EX machinegun blow against Chun-li. Chun-li's crouching hit box in general is very frustrating, as it's one of the smallest, and causes a lot of stuff to whiff entirely.



So in conclusion, crouching impacts the game in many ways, and it's good to be cognizant of all the different possibilities it opens up, especially with respect to combos.

Typically, most beginner 3S players would take it for granted that "one button press = one input." I know I certainly did when I started out. After all, what could be simpler? Press kick, see kick. Press punch, see punch. Doesn't get much simpler than that, right?

As it turns out, the truth is a bit more complicated. In reality, one button press = 2 inputs; one input when you press the button, and one input when you release the button. You can verify this easily by doing to following: press any punch, say jab, then hold it down for the duration of a QCF motion, then release it. You will get a fireball to come out if you did it correctly, despite the fact that you didn't press punch at the end of the QCF motion.

So let's begin with one of the most fundamental techniques in 3rd strike - the hit-confirm.


What is hit-confirming? How can you do it?

In a nutshell, hit-confirming is exactly what it sounds like - confirming that a move has actually hit the opponent before continuing with a combo. There are quite a few ways to do this:

- Visually confirm that the move has connected (i.e. "my opponent Ken has a funny, 'ouch that hurts' look on his face'")
- Aurally hear that the move has connected, whether it's listening to the actually sound the move makes when it hits (which should be different from a block), or hearing the opponent's character make the "you've hit me" grunt
- See their lifebar go down after hitting the move, which occurs more or less instantaneously

Although it may seem like overkill to list all 3 of these - why listen for it when you can just see it? - I find myself using all 3 frequently enough to merit mentioning them all. For example, when the arcade is packed and it's very loud, listening for hit confirms is very difficult, so I naturally focus more on visual and lifebar confirmation. After resets where my character lands well before the opponent, I may end up throwing out a move before I can actually see my off-screen character (most common example is 2x air fierce after SAII), so I almost exclusively confirm using the lifebar in these situations, since the window for visual confirmation is fairly small in these scenarios. Ultimately, I find being able to use all 3 as the situation dictates is helpful in hit-confirming more consistently across the board.


Buffering joystick inputs, and how it helps with hit-confirming

One of the things that may initially seem hard to deal with is the combination of a fairly difficult input for supers (double-QCF + a button) with a short window in which to confirm. Even with easy confirms like Chun-li cr. MK xx SAII, you'd need lightning quick hands to get out the entire SAII input in time after seeing low-forward connect.

Thankfully, there is a way to make this process much easier to do, which involves buffering the double QCF during the low-foward animation. In other words, instead of trying to confirm like this:

Cr. MK --> (Did it hit?) --> QCF, QCF, K

You do this instead:

Cr. MK, QCF, QCF --> (Did it hit?) --> K

You do the cr. mk xx double QCF either before or while seeing if the move hits. That way, the only thing left for you to do after confirming that the move connected is to press a button. It may feel like a lot of wasted motion to input the QCFs every time when there's a high likelihood the move will be blocked, but you also have much less to do after confirming the hit, which means your effective window for the hit-confirm increases drastically.


Why is hit-confirming important?

So why is hit-confirming so important? Well, it should be fairly obvious that hit-confirming removes any random element from landing combos - if you're going for, say, cr. MK xx SAII with Chun-li, and you always wait to see that the low forward has connected, then you'll never, ever end up getting punished because they blocked the combo. Once you get good at hit-confirming, you'll find your play becomes considerably more consistent, and your opponents will no longer be able to play with the mindset "This person doesn't hit-confirm, so I can always just sit back and wait for an opportunity to punish a silly mistake." At the same time, they can't play overly aggressively because you will actually have the skills to follow up connected normals with specials/supers for big damage.


The issue of discipline with respect to hit-confirming

A big barrier when it comes to hit-confirming is discipline. It's easy to get frustrated when you miss the opportunity to combo a normal into a super, or the opponent blocks a whole bunch of normals in a row, denying you to opportunity to get off your big damage combos. However, it's important not to fall into the trap of getting impatient, and pulling the trigger just because you're tired of waiting or because you missed 2 or 3 hit-confirms in a row.

Every player, no matter how strong will miss hit-confirms from time to time. Watch enough videos of godlike players like Nuki and MOV, and you will see them miss an "easy" confirm like cr. MK xx SAII, and more frequently than you might think. The discipline aspect comes with internalizing the mindset: Failing to finish a hit-confirmed combo is just a missed opportunity; you still come out on top every time. Continuing a blocked combo is a death sentence; you will end up coming out well behind 100% of the time. (Of course, the major exception would be trying to chip out your opponent.) 

Although MOV and Nuki may fail to convert a connected low forward into super from time to time (say, maybe 1 out of every 10 times), they will virtually never follow up a blocked normal with a blocked super. Not 1 in 100 times, probably not even 1 in a 1000 times. That is the sort of discipline that one needs to develop with respect to hit confirms.

My name is Arindam Bhattacharya, and I have been an avid 3rd Strike player for more than 6 years. My first exposure to 3rd Strike was the famous Daigo video - at the time I'd never played any fighting game seriously, and I didn't have to foggiest clue what actually happened in the video. However, the reaction of the crowd caught my attention...

A couple of years later I moved to Austin, as I entered my freshman year of college, and had the good luck of stumbling across Einstein's Arcade, which was home to one of the largest competitive 3S scenes in the U.S. Although I initially went for the DDR, I saw the 3S cabinets, and I recalled the video which I'd seen years before, and figured it would be fun to derp around on the machine a bit. At the time I was little more than a button-masher, but my repeated trips to the machine caught the attention of a very strong 3S regular, who took me under his wing and helped me evolve from a button-mashing scrub to a real 3S player. 6 years later, I still find myself every bit as enamored with the game as I did when I first started over half a decade ago.

I was encouraged to start this blog by a close friend of mine, who I've known since elementary school - he recently started playing 3S with a bunch of his coworkers, and often asks me for advice regarding 3S. After one such conversation, he told me it would be a great idea to start a blog or website which could serve as a reference for beginner and early intermediate level players. Although I figured there were already plenty of resources out there - the game is more than a decade old, after all - he actually expressed a great deal of frustration at limited 3S resources are online.

Having had the benefit of learning 3S in one of the most competitive scenes in the U.S., I'd never really noticed or appreciated this - any time I had a question I could ask any number of elite players and would have an accurate, thorough answer in minutes. So I figured, why not? Although I don't consider myself to be a particularly strong player, I do think I have played the game long enough and at a sufficiently high level that I can provide good advice to players who are just starting out and looking to improve.

My primary goal with this blog is to provide accurate, easy to understand information that will help beginner and early-intermediate players improve their skills at the game. This isn't intended to provoke deep, advanced discussion for high level players; I wouldn't consider myself strong enough at the game to provide stuff like that. I do assume that the people reading this blog have a very basic understanding of the mechanics - if you need an explanation on what the 6 buttons do, or what the joystick motion for a shoryuken is, there are plenty of resources out there basic information like that. I will try to cover as much ground as possible, including general technical discussion, character specific information, and various common matchups, but this isn't intended to be a comprehensive, wiki-style page either. Most of my experience is with the higher tier characters, so if you're looking for tips on the Remy-Sean matchup, I'm afraid I can't really help you there.

So that should just about cover things; stay tuned for the actual content! I will try to update regularly, but the vicissitudes of work may mean long breaks between updates.