Street Fighter IV

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How scrubs play SF4 and how to beat them. There are several different types of players. If you see someone pick any of the following characters, there's a 98% chance they'll play this way.

Ken:
see flowchart. WILL NOT ADAPT if you anti air him, even six times in a row. Just block random uppercuts, random EX uppercuts, random super uppercuts, random ultra uppercuts and just...well, wait for him to do something stupid. Cause he will. Like, even ultra when you're on the ground.

Ryu:
Still somewhat flowchart, much more likely to randomly do ultras. Fireballs more. Slightly smarter than Ken players. Likes doing jumping HK > sweep, that's his only combo. You can stop this with: any anti air you have time to do, most good ones will work. Or you can block the sweep and punish that with certain moves (Rose's cr.MP works). Will do random hurricane kicks. There are 50000 ways to beat that:

duck under it, hit them with any move
beat it without ducking
jump over it and punish them
block it, then punish them
super
ultra
whatever

Guile:
Tries to turtle, doesn't know how. Will abuse the hell out of cr.HK, the double sweep. If you block both hits, you can't do anything to him. Thing is though, you can block the first hit and punish him before the second one comes out. Rose for instance can ultra him every time. You can also just Focus it, super, uppercut if you have one, anything fast or invincible. If you do this to him a few times, some of them will realize they're not winning now but most of them will keep doing the sweep anyway. Otherwise, nothing special here. They don't ultra because they can't probably.

Zangief:
They just kinda spin the stick around and mash all three punches when they're close to you, or do the super armor move. They think they're smart/good because they own the other scrubs for free. You throw fireballs at him. Unless he's intelligent, he won't know what to do about it. If he gets close to you, you're probably in the corner, do a move that lets you escape the corner or just hit him after coming down from a neutral jump (easiest way to beat lariats). ALWAYS use slowest fireballs, you can mix up occasionally with EXs and faster ones to throw them off. Once you condition them to jump too much in anticipation of fireballs, anti air them.

Cammy:
The Cammy player will just do random moves. Block them, they're all punishable. If they have meter, they'll start trying to do EX Hooligan throw (the thing where she flies around in the air and comes down to grab you). You can hit her out of this with anything, or just move out of the way with a backdash. This move only works for her if you stay still and don't do anything. Quite likely to randomly ultra, cause they think it's hard to punish, but it's not. When she's coming down, you should have something.

Blanka:
Blankas are annoying and harder to fight because he has a lot of abusable stuff at low level. You can't jump at him in any way since he has electricity, sometimes Blanka balls are unpunishable unless you have meter/ultra and they LOVE using the crossup move if you don't know how to deal with it. When Blanka flies upwards with a ball, you can just: Focus it and punish him when he lands, beat it with an anti air, just block it backwards (he CAN steer it to hit you in the front like normal, but chances are he'll try the crossup every time). If he's randomly doing horizontal balls, you can beat those with fireballs, most normals (jabs are classically good at this), uppercuts, supers or whatever.

His ultra is tricky, and a lot of times they'll just do it. It's hard to deal with if you don't know how. The first hit is LOW, and then he flies upwards and you should block this high. The whole thing does a lot of chip damage. It can be beaten out after blocking the first low hit, though, while he's going upwards. At this point, you may be able to ultra him back or do an invincible move to beat it.

Bison:
They just do stuff. Scissor kicks pretty often. You have to block those or interrupt the startup. They like to sweep a lot (sliding kick), which is very punishable. If you're not blocking low at half screen away, you'll be kocked down, but you should be either throwing fireballs or blocking low that far away anyway. You can anti air his air stomps and crap, and if he goes up for dives a lot you can meet him in the air with most characters' jumping HK.

Balrog:
Nothing is really -that- unsafe with Balrog, but they're gonna do stuff. There's terrible ones and bad ones. The terrible ones will just jump at you like they're doing Ryu jump kick > sweep except now it's punches, deal with that how you want. If you have fireballs, use them. Now for the bad ones: if he uses EX dash punches, you can armor break them with whatever move you have that armor breaks. His punches can be interrupted while he's dashing at you with a low hit. The turn-around-punch (TAP) which is invincible to fireballs can be punished fairly easily after blocking it. A lot of this goes for fighting good Balrogs too, which may or may not spam crouching LP, which is a ridiculous move. His headbutt thing where he leaves the ground is like an uppercut, you can punish it.

Interesting note on Balrog: he has nothing on getting up off the ground that he can do to stop a meaty if you have it out when he's getting up off the ground, so you get "free pressure".

Vega:
They wall dive a lot. Tough to block, sure, so just focus it. If they sweep, that's punishable, so there you go. Otherwise, not much to be scared of, don't try to attack him after a blocked close HP (the double claw swipe) since he's at frame advantage.

Gouken:
Will randomly do the dash punch move, or use it to go through fireballs...often not travelling far enough with it to hit you, so punish him for that. May throw a lot of fireballs. There are several ways around that (focus, your own fireballs, avoiding them, reflect them if you're Rose etc). If they do demon flip stuff, anti air them if at all possible or get away. If he has ultra meter, MASH ON THROW when he's close because he will be trying to throw you so he can get his ultra out. If you don't let him throw you, chances are he can't do it unless you really screw up and he punishes you for something...but scrubs aren't smart enough to do that usually.

Akuma:
Heh. Not too hard here. These guys like to think they know what they're doing, but in the end they just want to randomly use Raging Demon. If they do that, you can hit them out of it, jump over it, whatever...you have to set that up to hit with it. If they're not doing kara demons (very unusual) or punishing something you did, their demon CANNOT hit you, so just get out of the way or throw something at them. You can even throw them out of these if you want to make them look really stupid.

Sagat:
Sagat players are really bad. He's the best character in the game, but you do have to kinda think about what you're doing. They love random ultra. They want their gameplan to be "bait over guy into jumping at me so I can do something to them" but they can never pull that off and instead just tiger shot at bad times.

Actually, more often you'll see Sagats that just jump backwards and throw fireballs. Even when they're losing. It's really sad.

Fei Long/Sakura/Rose/Dan/Dhalsim/Abel/everybody else:
If somebody picks one of these characters, chances are they know what they're doing.

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^ I backed that up so no worries about the forum restore eating it lol