I know I was suppose to do the poker analogy article first but I need to vet it with a friend who actually plays poker so because its been so long in between drinks I want to talk about a more basic topic, Health bars.



It seems like when most people think “Health” they think “Blood”, and therefore just like blood, they think health as some kind of liquid that can be measured in millilitres and therefore someone with 405 mls of health has more than someone who has 395mls (I’m Australian, we use metric) as if that means that that person consequently has a “Life lead”. Which in the abstract makes sense, Player A has more health then Player B, therefore Player A has the life lead.



But if you think about how attacks work in Street Fighter, besides Fang’s poison, there is no attack in the game that actually leaches out 1 hit point at a time, your health isnt dripping out, So instead of thinking “Blood” think Blocks.







Why Blocks

Attacks do chunks of damage at a time. Most light attacks for example do about 30 damage, a heavy attack 90-100, your standard bnb combo maybe about 200-250, a CA confirm somewhere between 350 to 450+. In other words your opponent can take set increments off of you at a time.



What this really means is the amount of life you have is intrinsically related to how much damage an opponent can output. This Idea is not something I came up with, this is actually something I learned from watching and speaking to RAZER Xian when he came to BAM 11 last year.







Story Time: RZR|Xian vs Dooky

I was sitting behind Xian and watched him play a lot of casual sets against 5-6 people and the last set he played was against a friend of mine, Dooky. Very good Akuma player, pretty aggressive in his play.



The set came down to last game last round and Xian was on pixel and had run out of kunai, Dooky with about 1/3 health decided he had enough of a health lead to try and push and look for the last pixel. In his mind because of his life lead, he felt the risk reward to look for the last pixel outweighed any damage he may take in doing so. Effectively trying to force a scramble where even a trade gives him the win. By also being present and threatening he doesn’t give Xian an opportunity to reload kunai. Dooky lost the round slowly losing health being aggro and by the time he backed off and played more reserve they were both on pixel.

What Xian would tell us after and what Dooky didn’t take into an account was that Xian had full CA bar. So even though Dooky had more life then he did, Dooky was still one hit from death as well.



When Dooky was on pixel health instead of 300, he did not play nearly as recklessly as he did but because of Xian’s resources he effectively was already the same as if he was on pixel health, so his plan needed to account for that.







The Idea of Health and Meter as a single currency



If we go back to the idea of thinking in blocks of health instead of just the health percentage itself we will see that people who have the “same health” are in very different situations.



Lets say for example you are playing vs a Karin player. They are on 30 health and you have 300 health. In one situation they have Full CA and the other they have 2 bars.



Even though the life totals are the same in both cases, can you start to see why you might act a little differently in both those instances. It maybe the difference in whether you walk freely in neutral or not. Or whether you attempt to micro walk back from strings because of the risk of a c.mk xx tenko confirm.



In other words the simple act of them having one less bar means you have more life to play with even though your health bars are the same in both cases.





What this can also do is try some different tactical decisions during an earlier part of a match, It may be worth trying to get the opponent to spend bar or two on somewhere they have to DP anti air or a reversal wake up for example and take the trade off of losing 120 damage if it then leads to lower damage potential in the late game.

This is essentially another aspect to factor into your risk reward play, and with this understanding you might find yourself changing and reconsidering how you choose to approach and adjust mid match depending on health, ex meter and v meter

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This may have been quite a simple topic for some of you (Health bars are the most fundamental part of the game), but its something I think people either haven’t thought about very deeply or they forget it all the time when they try and make a play that goes for a win and either wondering why they couldn’t get the player to bite, or found the only way to lose from a winning position.