Rikuto
[10] Knight
A little explanation into the mindset. Turtling is remarkably easy and makes the spacing game even easier. Gives you great insight into a persons sense of urgency too. You get the life lead first from any action you can manage to do it from and you treat the timer like the secondary lifebar. If your opponent doesn't want it to run down and lose by default then they HAVE to come in and this lets you make observations about how fast they will do that. It's difficult to measure a mans faults in subtle things like movement when he is under no pressure, but if he is going to lose by default a sense of urgency kicks in and makes those bad habits much more visible to the active observer.
Your primary goal should never be to arc across the screen and deal major damage to someone who whiffed. Of course you do it when you can, but if thats all you're waiting for you end up losing most of the time. Your goal should be to bash them in the face when they try to rush into you. Do anything you can to frustrate the living hell out of your opponent for being unable to come in when they want to come in and they develop a sense of tunnel vision. When they become conditioned to getting hit in the face they will start to run in and block momentarily instead, hoping to gain advantage in this manner and get in that way. This is when you start buffering in an offensive hold when they start dashing towards you.
7K/7KP is/was an excellent tool for turtling in this manner. If someone rushes in 7K will bop them in the face, launch them, and allow for the followup which puts them back to the other side of the screen where they will have to start all over again. Because it has that followup, even if the first move is blocked it keeps your opponent relatively scared of responding too fast while the backflip slowly sends you in retreat away from many of their options. Of course she has other options now, which should definitely be explored.
By the time you get the timer down to around 10-20 seconds or so you can begin 4P+K Mexican standoffs to stall the match out. Even if they block or hold, it does not damage to you and is draining the ever precious milliseconds off the timer. But most importantly, they HAVE to come in which means that more often than not they won't be blocking.
Your primary goal should never be to arc across the screen and deal major damage to someone who whiffed. Of course you do it when you can, but if thats all you're waiting for you end up losing most of the time. Your goal should be to bash them in the face when they try to rush into you. Do anything you can to frustrate the living hell out of your opponent for being unable to come in when they want to come in and they develop a sense of tunnel vision. When they become conditioned to getting hit in the face they will start to run in and block momentarily instead, hoping to gain advantage in this manner and get in that way. This is when you start buffering in an offensive hold when they start dashing towards you.
7K/7KP is/was an excellent tool for turtling in this manner. If someone rushes in 7K will bop them in the face, launch them, and allow for the followup which puts them back to the other side of the screen where they will have to start all over again. Because it has that followup, even if the first move is blocked it keeps your opponent relatively scared of responding too fast while the backflip slowly sends you in retreat away from many of their options. Of course she has other options now, which should definitely be explored.
By the time you get the timer down to around 10-20 seconds or so you can begin 4P+K Mexican standoffs to stall the match out. Even if they block or hold, it does not damage to you and is draining the ever precious milliseconds off the timer. But most importantly, they HAVE to come in which means that more often than not they won't be blocking.
