Melee Tutorial: How Game Knowledge Improves Your Punish Game 

People who don't play or fully understand jazz after years of playing usually have pre-conceived notions about it. Like the musicians are entirely playing something completely new Every time or they're just "noodling" all of the time. While on the contrary, for the most part, they are playing stuff they have probably played before. A good musician will be able to have some tricks like being familiar with scales and important tension and release between the changes and utilize them while improvising. But a great jazz musician will analyze things other jazz musicians have played to understand it at a deeper level, sometimes even deeper than the original musician intended. This way, the great musician can understand the tools available to him better and maybe even take the concepts used before and take them one step further. This is true also with melee! We should all watch for fun, but also analyze what our favorite players are doing, understand WHY they're doing it, having that it in our pockets, and be practicing those techniques to not just use them on the spot, but to experiment with different ways of implementing them to your advantage. Also, jazz musicians can't just be entirely focused on what THEY are playing during their solo. They also have to be listening carefully to what the other people are playing! During a sax solo, the piano player, drummer, and bassist are all providing complimentary patterns and responses to what the sax player is singing. The sax could play a lick that sounds like a question and in anticipation of the soloist playing a line that sounds like an answer, the rhythm section could work in unison to do a kick into the sax players incomi by line during a time where the soloist leaves some space. Or a pianist of guitar player, comping for the sax player, could slightly alter the harmonic support on the fly and the soloist will have to hear that and adapt to the altered chords being played and sing something that matches the specific substituted chords being used. Once again this is a lot like melee. You can't just focused on your solo, i.e. your own movement, combos, and approaches. You have to watch carefully for what your opponent is doing i.e. how they move, combo, or approach. This hivemind-like interactivity between more than one human consciousness is the connection jazz and melee and really just so many other art forms. Really an amazing concept and I'd love to see more examples of it if you guys have any!

Awesome video, really great ideas coming through. Your intro was super well structured and drew me in, but when it came to the demos you sort of lingered on the same thing for a while, would probably help to just script out a few things and leave it at that to keep it more concise. Still really helpful nonetheless, thanks man!

This tutorial is GODLIKE. Thanks for the knowledge

can't believe i found a succinct and accessible argument as to why music theory is so crucial for any musician to learn in a super smash brothers melee tutorial lol

Just found this channel and I'm thoroughly enjoying the content so far. Excited to see what's to come!

Finally the content I’ve always been looking for. Thanks so much!

Ok this 5 years videos just help me so much lmao thanks

Everything you're explaining has already been explained and explored in the game of Chess. A lot of casuals think chess is just memorization or tactics 100% of the time but that simply isn't true. A lot of chess grandmasters are so strong consistently because they do something that's known as "Clumping" which is basically the ability to recognize certain positions and know more or less what's good vs bad in any given position. Melee works the same way. Creativity flows through the context of good options.

You skills on explaining things are so sharp. Not preachy or know-it-all like at all. Super clear explanation, everyone starting out and actually all players should watch this. Great video!

a cool way to think of opponents is see them as their own Key for any music majors out there

"certain moves make people end up close enough to continue a combo, and certain moves don't. so pick the moves that do if you want to combo and think they will DI for a combo, and pick the moves that don't if you want to finish a combo."

"When you fail think of something that will succeed." And that's how I won my first local. Though that was years ago

Your channel is producing my favorite melee content right now thanks so much for the guide!

Great video and I really understand what you mean. However I think that as in jazz you do not only need the knowledge to improvise but also a feeling for the game and the other person. Maybe I'm not that good yet in order to implement these kind of things, but for me personally most of the fun I have playing is combining weird options with techskill in order to confuse my opponent. Loving the style of the video anyhow - thanks!

One of the best videos on learning melee I've seen.

Love your videos as an aspiring falco main, you are the freakin man.

what you've explained is something ive thought about, but never really thought to practice until now. thanks for the tutorial :P

2:21 "I need to pick a grab that combos into shine, or a shine that combos into shine, grab, shine, shine, shine, s...." "... because those are all good ways to rack up damage."

good content. helpful for new players

well done

Fantastic video

Your content is great!

Very good video

damn you're good. Sub hype

dope stuff

Amazing

can you help me with Fox flowcharts against Sheik in neutral? I get grabbed killed 9 out of 10 times

thx ma guy

Honestly this isn't how I got my combo game tbh although I think your method of developing is much better than mine. What I would do is for hours on end just watch melee combo videos and since I had nobody to play with I would sit around for hours until I could replicate every combo, and learn the nuances of each until I was able to interchange any extensions, enders, etc. At will, so I had all these combos but would be confused because they wouldn't work on people because I wouldn't mix them up at all because I was always going for the long extended combos that require hard DI in when my opponent always DI'd out. I asked around at my local and someone explained the concept of DI mixups and why those combos work. And pretty much ever since I've had a super strong combo game but my neutral needs work😅😅 what's the point of being able to kill you everytime I touch you if I can't touch you😂😂

This is the reason i can play like 10 different characters to reasonable level. Because once you get to a certain point.... you've seen it all before. (unfortunately this makes combos way less hype)

Sick

ya like Jazz?

Great videos. I disagree that melee comboes are creative. Unlike music, there are objective measurable differences between what you want to do. Comboes can be judged based on what damage/stocks and stage positioning they produce in a numerical way. The only thing that makes the answers not stagnent is how much risk (either with how much you'll get punished if wrong or with how few extra options you cover) you are willing to take with a read. So the bare minimum you get is the "optimal" combo that gets the most damage assuming the opponent reads everything you will do. This is the least risk optimal flow chart. However, there then may be other options where if you read that they won't make a certain decision or will make others, you may be able to get even more damage. And if you hard read exactly one choice you may be able to get far more damage. This may seem like the comboes become infinite, but they don't. If you chose one combo when another could have dealt more damage or resulted in better positioning for the same risk than it was objectively incorrect. The only difference between mango and old m2k is that mango kept the slider raised to higher risk reads for possibly greater reward, while old m2k kept the slider to low risk pretty much all the time. Mango isn't being more creative, he's being riskier. The other differences can occurre when people value damage vs positioning, or potential punish risk vs option coverage risk differently. Like how HBox will often not go for the guarunteed up-throw rest on a 0% fox for guarunteed 40 damage to instead opt for the uair into 50/50 rest from the stock. He values positioning into the 50/50 more than the extra damage. But I'd argue that that's just value engineering. Not creativity persay.

Yup, this is why the TOP 5 players aka "Gods" are not even that skilled. They just have more game knowledge LOL. Any other scenario they get trashed, aka ESAM bodying Armada in the crew battle