“I think in England you eat too much sugar and meat and not enough vegetables,” Wenger told them of his philosophy for the future. “I lived for two years in Japan and it was the best diet I ever had. The whole way of life there is linked to health. The people there are known to work harder than anywhere else and they have the highest life expectancy. Their diet is basically boiled vegetables, fish and rice. No fat, no sugar. You notice when you live there that there are no fat people. Well, no fat people among the middle-aged and elderly.”

- Arsene Wenger, Coach, Arsenal.

Systran errors videos on Fundamentals. I don’t know who this guy is, but he has taught me more about the basics of the game than most people have. The other chap that did a great job was Sirlin, but we’ll get to him in a minute.

I) Zoning Part 1 Video Notes

1. Zoning is trying to get an advantage over the other player without you losing any. Zoning is using spacing, footsies, pokes and movement to control space. I

It isn’t always safe to combo, you must learn how to zone.

2. Frames
Every move in the game, whether it is a normal or special, has three types of frames.

Startup Frames – Frames before you reach the active frame. Nothing is hit here.
Active Frames – When you actually connect with the opponent
Recovery Frames – When your connect is done and the action retreats. Nothing is hit here.

Special moves often have many more startup frames that is why they are considered unsafe zoning tools.

Whether or not one move beats another is determined by frames and hitboxes (which are dependant on position). Hitboxes are the reason why it is very unsafe to jump because your frames in that position are in recovery from jumping in which you don’t do much damage?

There are certain moves that have invulnerability frames like dragon punches and ultras and they are important because they can hit opponents over active frames.

Slow fireballs are great for this reason, they are active longer and control space hence are preferred moves. A fireball is a hitbox that flies across the screen it greatly reduces your opponents options. This is zoning, you control more of the screen and your opponent has limited options.

Command grabs have longer range than normal throws. A command grab over rules active frames or hitboxes during the match.

II) Knocking and Setups

Knockdown

Part of the reason why knockdowns are so important are because you force your opponent into a block stun. During block stun the opponent cannot do anything. A meaty is a move that is in your opponents hitbox after they finish waking up. They are forced to block the remaining hits provided you combo off the meaty.

Mixups
Use meaties and knockdown theory to keep a guessing game going on with your opponent. Guessing low or overhead often forces your opponents to judge wrong and thus result in another knockdown.

One frame moves are exceptionally good here because after the opponent wakes up and blocks, they are still in blockstun when your recovery frames are finished (example:- Balrogs crouching low punch).

Tick Throw
Throwing your opponent the minute his block stun is over.

Block strings.
These are moves that help you finish your combo or set of moves while the opponent is blocking with a safe move or gives you a frame advantage or puts you at enough space to not take any damage. Waking up after a knockdown and immediately punching thinking it’ll stop them from throwing you is not a smart idea because the waking up part itself has some startup frames and the throw will just over ride those moves so you’ll get thrown. This is an important part of basic mechanics.

If you try to wake up and poke on waking up, the opponent can do just a meaty move and hit you for free. So the best choice after waking up is really blocking and watching out for tick throws, not doing random stupid shit.

Try doing meaty crossups and comboing into moves that give you a frame advantage after a knockdown from your opponent. Not every character has a way of crossing up and every characters cross up and spacing as well as timing has to be learned hence the reason why you should focus on one character.

Reversals

Reversals are move that become active on the first frame after you wake up (or after a blockstun etc). Moves with invulnerability frames as a reversal hit out your opponents meaty attacks and the active frames of your move hits the opponents.

Be careful with reversals. If you are baited out with reversals or are too predictable in your wake up options you will have the potential to lose half your life in the preceding fighting.

Time your meaties properly, always take advantage of your opponents knockdown.  Some moves end with a frame disadvantage, don’t end blockstrings with these. They are unsafe on block. Blockstrings are safe against some characters but very unsafe against the rest. Make sure you know your characters moves before you do them.

III) Adapting and Playing

Baiting is getting your opponent to do a reversal on wakeup, blocking and then punishing them for it. You can bait a throw and then punish the whiff animation for that throw.

When you take damage or get knocked down, take into account what are the things that forced you into that position. Smart players don’t repeat that.

Pressing the advantage is baiting or pressurising the opponent when you have a lead. Always look for a safe reversal to use when you are down.

If there is one combo you should learn for your character, it should be the combo you use for punishing a blocked reversal.

There is the famed story. You need 10,000 hours to be world class at any skill. While this translates to approximately 10 years in your life time, there are certain things you need to get very good at very quickly. One of those things happens to be this game I am currently addicted to.

The game is called Ruzzle.

Previously, I played a lot of scrabble online. Whether it was the zynga version or otherwise, it was addictive to the point where I started taking down 2 letter words in my notebook and keeping them in mind while looking at the board pieces to score those triple word and triple letter bonuses.

Ruzzle is nothing like that. This game is similar to Scramble with Friends without the typical social gaming add on of powerups and the similar bullshit. The UI is 10x better and the guys here have kept the most important thing in mind: responsiveness. While this isn’t a breakdown on how the UI for the game is, one of the important things to keep in mind is the instant sound response to a wrong word and over time you realise how important it is to play with your ear and mind synced together.

But enough of that. I am currently being destroyed by my very beautiful colleague and I wanted to get better and beat her (no pun intended) at this game. She’s got the head start of having played this type of game before but that is no excuse for losing the last 10 games to her. I am pretty sure I gave her the juggernaut badge too (way to go kageman, way to go). I decided to go with a new nick, maybe that’s why..

So being the disciplined learner that I have trained myself to be, I set out to learn how to get better at Ruzzle and I found absolutely nothing that was useful online. Obviously this game is super popular and you have some shitty websites that promote tips, but in separating the wheat from the chaff I came across a youtube video that shows a woman (yet again, wtf is going on) playing the game and I was blown away.

If you can get through the myriad of extremely fast finger movement, you will notice that two or three runs of her fingers goes through something like this.

Pe
Pen
Per
Pens
Pes
Pest
Peso
Ser
Sers
Sen
Stane
Stone
Stanes.. so on and so forth.

1. String maximisation.
So the first learning here is to take a starting string, or an ending string and get all the words you can within that string. So Pe, Pen, Pees, Pens, Pest etc all use the string PE to work with. This is more important when you have those letters having a DL or TL score (double letter, triple letter, double word etc etc).

2. Use bonuses.
Always aim for maximising the use of any letter that has a bonus tied to it. If there’s a triple word, triple letter, double word or double letter just use the shit out of it in all forms. The larger you do though the better it is.

3. Turn the sound on
This lets you know instantly words you already have inputted or words that are wrong therefore you know which direction generally you won’t be getting any words in. It is a little irritating in the beginning especially witha ll those bouncy starry sounds but eventually you get used to playing it better.

4. Studying the game and it’s words.
The first few times I played the game, I scored like 200 points. AFter about 15 games in I’m scoring about 400 odd. What changed were two things. I bought the premium account so I can see all the words in the tile. I also sat and noted down some combinations of words that I had no idea existed.

5. Write down words you don’t know and internalise it.
there are words like AA, NOES, ENOS, AE, NE, NA and stuff you’d never think were words because, well, who the eff uses such things. I thought my colleague was cheating by randomly clicking and it converting to the words (also a viable albeit short termed strategy) but apparently she’s got this internalised. I’ll add a page with words I learned somewhere in this blog a little later on but the last tip, which I think my colleague abuses is

6. Randomly moving in directions.
Works when you have less than 10 seconds left. Otherwise no.

What tips do you have?

2012 was a mess of a year. There was no focus. The world was ending and this blog was spread over 6 domains. The world didn’t end but what was consistent in this ghoulash of inconsistency was the lack of regular blogging from my end.

I tried experimenting with a number of things, Tumblr, Twitter, posterous, Read it later and reblogging. Turns out most of these things are great as consumers but not creators. From a number of different people I have seen, they feel content when they create and not just consume. As a guy who follows competitive gaming that is something I am trying to imbibe into my system. The concept of creation.

I did learn a few things in the process which would be the subject of many of the following posts. What better time to focus on writing, fleshing out ideas and observing the world with a detailed analysis than to do it on your own domain? Here I don’t have someone to answer to, someone to influence here and someone to constantly pay for my bills.

What would I focus on? Primarily three areas of interest. Lifehacking (experimentation with lifestyles and ways of working), Product Management (I do this on a daily basis with a gaming company) and Writing. Occasionally I diverge into movies because I’m a huge buff and I’ll spray posts on eSports, a competitive gaming environment that I am a fan of, but mostly it’s those three things.

People come here out of their choosing, people come to read what they would like to gain insights to and people can leave when they are done. This is like a pub on the information highway, you stop for a while but you can always leave.

Opinions are varied and many. True writing is not only grammatically correct but is emotionally captivating. Whether that be insights or links shared, there should be some sort of permanency in any endeavour ( I write the British way and it shall remain that way!). This re-blog or blog from the rise (I have been watching too much of Batman) is a humble attempt to create something of permanence. Hence there’s no strict schedule, there are many links and the idea is to develop and concretise my thinking and writing.

So starting today, Welcome to Karthick Gopal’s Blog. I hope you enjoy your stay here, please do comment and let me know. Namaste.

P.S – You should connect with me on Twitter and Facebook. Perhaps even Linkedin!