Its been a while since yours truly got absolutely washed at Justin Wong’s charity tournament, but our efforts to perform better in the Fighting Game Community are always ongoing. Since then, we’ve been all in on Street Fighter 6. Our love of the game, however, has not translated into results. In 2024, I went out to EVO and got washed. I signed up for several online tournaments, including the Central Illinois weekly, and got washed — on stream again, even. Since then we’ve been participating in a biweekly tournament hosted by the Newbie Fight Club, and the laundry is lookin’ mighty clean because guess what? Washed.

With Combo Breaker coming up, I thought a change of pace would be nice. What if instead of these endless Ls, we took a W or two at a tournament? Just to see what it feels like?

I put some time and effort into learning Luke and quickly ascend to Diamond 5... and then one night later, we take loss after loss until we’re down to Diamond 3. Our training arc was falling apart fast.

So I sought out a coach.

Coaching with Diaphone

For those of you who follow the fighting game scene, an introduction is hardly necessary. For the rest of you, however, a short primer to get you up to speed.

Diaphone is a fighting game player and content creator with expansive tastes. While many FGC creators stick to specific genres or games, Diaphone’s content is often unpredictable. It ranges from the mainstream, like Street Fighter 6 and Guilty Gear: Strive, to truly unexplored depths, such as the Roblox Tekken game Crash Out.

Whatever fighting game you’re thinking of picking up, there's almost certainly a starter guide somewhere on his channel.

In terms of his solo content, look no farther than Diaphone’s One Handed Mai Challenge, where watching the process to engineer a functional control scheme is just as compelling as the actual run.

As for offline events, last month Diaphone competed in the Sajam Slam International Championship. For the unfamiliar, The Sajam Slam is an event where popular streamers break off into teams, with a pro from the respective game acting as their Coach. The teams then compete in a series of round robin battles until the two top performing teams advance. In a special twist this year, however, the winners also went up against finalists from the Reject Fight Night in Japan, and the competition was fierce.

While Team Diaphone didn’t take the championship, Diaphone himself clutched out a win in Grand Finals against Tokido to save his team from complete 5-0 annihilation.

While there’s quite a few Street Fighter 6 coaches out there on Metafy, watching Diaphone coach his team for the Slam convinced me he’d be the one to try. I signed up and waited for the day.

Our coaching session was a two-step process. First up...

Replay Review

After exchanging a few pleasantries, we hopped into my replay log and observed a few recent games together via Discord screen share. It didn’t take long for Diaphone to identify an issue with my inputs, but we had a different problem to solve first. Diaphone’s mouse hovered over my input readout. “Do you see this discord overlay? It’s right over the buttons I want to show you.”

“Oh, yup, yeah, I see that.”

“Okay, just... don’t talk for a sec.”

Once my discord name dimmed, Diaphone rewound the replay to explain what he saw.

“You went from downback, then switched to down, then medium punch. So basically, you’re just making your life like ten times harder.”

A few seconds later, he notices the same issue on a crouch jab attempt.

“If you’re at downback, and you have the impulse to say ‘I wanna jab here,’ how long does it take? Four frames, right? One, two, three, four. The way you did it, you had the brain impulse ‘I wanna jab’ and then you press down, then jab. One, two, three, one, two, three, four. So like, while most characters have four frame crouch jabs, you just did a seven frame crouch jab.”

For those of you who might not be following, I don’t blame you. We’re deep into the nuance of Street Fighter here, so I’ll do my best to translate — every time I think about doing something, I’m adding a slight wait for no beneficial reason. A quirk of some bad muscle memory I’d ingrained over the years.

We don’t even make it out of the first replay until something embarrassing occurs. For whatever reason, I go for some combo that literally doesn’t work on Luke. Diaphone rewound the moment twice while asking, “what’d you go for here?”

He studied the combo for a few seconds, then added, “that just doesn’t work.”

Watching it now, I truly am not sure what I was going for either. Past me just threw it in for future embarassment in an article.

It doesn’t take long until another disaster occurs, as Luke lets a DP fly against a Ken who’s miles away.

I want to curl up and die.

However, this is also where Diaphone noticed the recurring pattern that defines all my biggest issues. He rewound to watch the inputs again. “If you wanna get really good at DPs, the key is you gotta clean up the input.” Diaphone is distracted as my DP haymaker whiffs again. “It’s not terrible, it’s honestly not terrible. I liked the idea. The issue with this input is the forward here. You could hit the punch at downforward instead of forward, so you’re basically doing this DP like three frames slower.”

After a second he added, “and it’s actually worse than three frames, because for these three frames you’re actually standing. So they can hit you earlier than if you were crouching.”

This observation explains so many issues I’ve had since Street Fighter 6’s release. Anti-airs have long been my biggest weakness.

After our third match review, Diaphone picked up on another pattern. “So if you notice, you did fireball round start two times in a row.” Diaphone precedeed to start each round in succession to see the pattern repeat.

“I’m guessing you haven’t really mastered a fireball character yet — this’ll be easier in training mode, but I wanna talk a lot about how fireballs are meant to be used.” He’s extremely correct on that observation. My only master characters so far — Kimberly and Honda — have no projectiles.

Maybe you could count Honda’s forehead, but I wouldn’t.

We moved on to a new replay against a Mai who immediately jumped over my fireball (you can spot the moment in the compilation above). Diaphone paused to break down the issue. “The short answer is fireballs are really good at convincing people to jump. But it’s a pretty low percentage option, because if you hit someone you do sixty damage. But if they get a jump in, they do three thousand damage.” Diaphone glanced at the damage readout in the replay UI. “Or two-thousand and eight hundred damage.”

“You never want to lead off with a risky option, and this is a risky option in this case because we know nothing about this guy. This is the first time you’ve played this guy, you have no clue how he plays. He might be a jumper, he might have the patience of a saint. You don’t know.”

Before we jumped into training mode, I made a request. “Can we watch a replay on the other account?” So far, all the replays were from the PC version. I wanted to see if my inputs changed at all between platforms. We quickly noticed that is not the case; my issues were consistent across PC and PS5, which is valuable information.

The end of the next match gets outrageously scrappy. I throw out a super, whiff, somehow land a lucky Suppressor anyway, then drop the combo, eat their super instead — it’s a mess.

“You wanted me to watch this match? Okay,” Diaphone said laughing as chaos ensued.

If I’d known what was going to transpire at the end of this match, absolutely not. But too late, we saw it. We can't unsee it. After another dose of embarrassment, it was time for some hands-on training.

Training Mode

Once in the training room, Diaphone’s lesson plan began. “Okay, first thing. If we’re not gonna do fireball round start, best way to get rid of a bad habit is to replace it with another one,” he says, repeating something my therapist has stressed as well. “So what are we doing on round start?”

Without saying a word, I Drive Rush into his face with a crouching medium punch.

“Yes, yeah, okay, I guess you can technically do that. But it comes down to do you want to play like Noah The Prodigy, or do you wanna play like Chris Wong?”

I thought about it for a second, then answered, “Chris Wong.” No offense to Noah, but I need to learn to slow down more than I need overwhelming offense.

“What does Chris Wong do most of the time round start?”

The answer is immediately obvious to anyone who’s seen Chris Wong play. “I feel like nothing?” I said.

“Exactly, right. He’s just looking for something to react to. So if you Drive Rush, I’m checking you, if you jump, I’m anti-airing.”

I’m extremely used to playing characters who just bully their way to victory on offense, and it’s here I realize that’s not necessary on Luke. He’s got all the tools to watch and wait. There’s no need to get down in the muck and go ham. I made a mental note to do less.

“The cool thing about Luke is if people are bad at parrying — here, just try parrying my fireballs at this range.”

I perfect parried a few, then Drive Rush canceled into his face again.

“Okay, that’s cute. I guess you can do that, yeah, you’re a born Luke player,” he says. “Makes sense, coming from a Luke player who mastered Honda.”

After my interruption, he demonstrated what he really wanted to show off. On the next parry attempt, he drive rushed in and grabbed.

“So once they start looking for the fireball, you can mix in this.” It’s a nifty trick to add to the belt.

After that, we move on to the main lesson. “You had a couple good anti-airs so I know you know how to do it, but getting rid of that forward input is so key,” he said. After this, Diaphone showed off a few other methods to input a DP. “There’s a couple different ways to input DPs, and any shoto player above 1600 knows how to do this crap.”

So, instead of inputting the default notation:

You can also input:

And get a DP all the same. The trick here is the downforward input counts as a forward for the purposes of the input — technically, you're pressing down and forward after all. In addition to just getting the move out faster this way, losing the forward input also saves you from accidental fireballs instead.

Next comes a big one, a technique I understood conceptually but not how to execute reliably. A cross-cut DP. “When you see me jump, just hold forward,” he said. It's a common way to block a cross-up. After blocking his cross-ups a few times, the lesson continued. “Cross-cut is an extended application of that. To cross-cut, you’re gonna do this forward input, then right as I go over your head, do a half-circle back.”

To put the notation tool to work again, the input he describes looks like:

After this explanation, I landed the cross-cut on the very first try.

“That’s it,” he said. “You learned cross-cut. And if you wanna get super optimal with it, you can hit the button on the diagonal.”

Until this lesson, I never knew it was so easy. It also explains what makes the Shoto cast so strong, generally. Jumping over a skilled shoto is never free.

To conclude, Diaphone had a few last words of wisdom. “I think there’s an easy way to hit Master, where I just tell you ‘use Drive Rush more and here’s some oki setups,’ but realistically, you’re looking to get better at the game. I think getting Master the slow way, learning better footsies and that sorta thing, is the direction you wanna go.”

As a Honda Master, I understood what he meant. Honda is a belligerent menace, and was even more of one in season one. I headbutted my way to the top without really learning the fundamentals, and I’ve paid for it since.

There’s a few other small tricks Diaphone taught along the way, largely regarding whiff punishes and neutral mind games, but the messy inputs, fireball use, and cross-cuts are the main takeaways. If I clean those skills up, it saves me from a lot of online grief.

What Coaching Doesn’t Get You

On reflecting upon the session, I had a few observations. First up is what the session didn't help with.

Instant Master Rank

Let’s get the easy one out of the way — if you're new, a one hour session with Diaphone will not get you to Master overnight. Perhaps the most surprising revelation from a single coaching session is that an hour barely gets you started in a game as complex as Street Fighter 6. We really only had time to focus on the weakest parts in my gameplan: Messy inputs, understanding when to throw a fireball, and cross-cut DPs. Are there other weaknesses to work on? You bet, but we can only improve so many skills at once. And right now, those weaknesses are getting me bullied out of Master rank.

A Cure for Tournament Nerves

I knew Diaphone couldn't fix this one already, but the topic came up nonetheless. What can I say? Yours truly is known for going the way of the San Jose sharks when it's time to perform. We choke hard here. But there’s only one cure, and it is both difficult and easy at the same time.

Start showing up.

You have to put yourself in the situation enough times you start to adapt. You’re gonna get your ass beat. You’re gonna drop combos, eat safe jumps, and you might even look like a fool on stream. Twice. The trick is to realize even if you go 0-2, you’re still lapping the guy watching at home. You’re a competitor, they’re a non-entity. When starting at the bottom, keep that in mind.

What Coaching Does Get You

While plenty of Diaphone’s advice is readily available on his own YouTube channel, there are some serious benefits you only get from coaching. The difficult thing about fighting games is the higher your rank, the tinier the corrections needed to perform well. The devil’s in the minutia.

Personalized Corrections

My DP inputs were the very first thing Diaphone zeroed in on while watching replays, and it revealed perhaps the biggest weakness I had — possibly since I first started playing any Street Fighter. Little me learned to do a DP this way while playing Street Fighter 2 on an SNES and kept doing it forever and ever. If it wasn't for this coaching session, we'd still be doing it.

It’s something that not only no one around me noticed, but I personally would never look for. Heck, I’ve watched god knows how many of my own replays and never noticed. I would’ve gone on thinking I was simply slow and bad. It seems like a small thing, and yet, this one extra input is likely responsible for half my losses, if not more. Three extra frames is the difference between an anti-air and losing 50% of a life bar to a wall-to-wall AKI combo.

The “Why” Behind the Mistakes

Let’s be honest — Diaphone should probably not be the one who needs to tell me to stop doing round start Sand Blast. Getting jumped on at 99 seconds ought to be all the indication one needs. But for people like me who don’t quite comprehend what’s happening, Diaphone’s advanced knowledge of Street Fighter 6 and its systems help break down the Cost-Benefit Analysis.

Let’s consider this; what do I get from this option if I’m right?

• 60 damage.
• Maybe a step or two forward, as a treat.

But if I’m wrong?

• Lose 30% of your lifebar.
• Hold the corner, bozo.

There’s basically no reason to do this, at least not right at the 99 second mark with no information.

Progress Log

So next, we did what any good student does. That night, I ran some drills, got a feel for a proper cross-cut DP, and worked on losing that extra forward input. Then it was time to go into ranked and...

Day One

...we did worse. Much worse.

At this point, I think many aspiring students would assume their training was a bust. But here’s a harsh truth anyone who’s played any sport knows — when you begin implementing a new skill, you will do worse. Even if you understand the concept in your mind, it takes time to ingrain new muscle memory. In fighting games, this means when you begin improving your anti-airs, you might start losing in ranked to opponents you would’ve beat the day before; if you’re focused on the air, opponents with a strong grounded approach get away with more.

But we’re looking at the long game here, not the immediate one. The Ls we take now pave the way for more Ws overall than if we hadn’t begun refining new skills to begin with.

And you know what? Despite the losses, we actually ended the day slightly above where we started, albeit not by much. Sometimes, staying steady is a win (especially after tanking two ranks the previous week).

Day Two

After watching Day One’s replays, it becomes clear some things from the lesson are sticking better than others. It’s about 50/50 if that extra input sneaks into a DP still, and while we’re cross-cutting consistently in training mode excercises, we’re struggling to land it in matches. We’re even struggling to just DP normally now sometimes. More often than not, we’re getting accidental level one supers.

What I also notice though, is we are still tossing that fireball at round start. A lot. Remember that tip from earlier, the one both Diaphone and my therapist mirrored? It’s much easier to replace a bad habit with something else than to stop it all together. So I came up with an unorthodox solution.

At round start, before FIGHT appears on the screen, I do the input for fireball. That way, the urge is out of my system before the match begins. For a pointless ritual, this works oddly well.

We end Day Two at about the same place we started. Not ideal, but again, a week ago we tanked so hard we fell two placements. Still an improvement.

Day Three

We finally crack into Diamond 4 again, but it’s around this time I learn something unfortunate — my DPs are cleaning up when facing right, but when facing left? Nope. Still slow, still messy, still extra inputs. It takes longer than I’d like to admit running drills to iron this out.

It’s hard to say if cross-cuts are working out, because we encounter very few jumpers on Day Three. Day Three is an army of Ryus with strong, grounded fundamentals. They’re much more interested in crouching-medium-kick-into-fireball than they are into cross up attempts.

Day Four

Things are starting to come together. Cross-cuts still aren’t happening in matches yet, despite having near perfect execution in training — by the time I recognize I need to do one in a match, it's always too late. But we win much more than we lose this night, and our anti-airs are getting better. We end halfway through Diamond 4.

Day Five

We learn a valuable lesson on Day Five: quit when you’re ahead.

Day Five starts strong. We still aren’t 100% on DP inputs and we’re not landing many cross-cuts, but there’s noticeable improvement in reactions. We’re slowing down and watching our opponent, especially on round start. We sail halfway through Diamond 4.

Here’s the thing — up until now, these logs reflect about an hour a night in Street Fighter 6. Tonight however, since it was going so well, we kept on queueing. Why quit now? I’m the next Daigo, baby!

By the end of the next hour, all the day's gains are erased, just like the stock market in 2025. We take L after L, but hey, at least we helped two Diamond 5’s become masters. Good for them. Schmucks.

Day Five feels very, very bad, but on a bright note, something magical does happen.

Five days in, we finally land a cross-cut in ranked.

Day Six

Day Six is, without a doubt, the most demoralizing day since the coaching session. Whatever trend started the day before continues until we’re in Diamond 3 again. While the DPs are better, the only cross-cut we land all day is against a teleport-happy Dhalsim.

The trend is clear — I’m getting read all day. This is my second time dropping down to Diamond 3 with Luke. While I like Luke’s Flash Knuckle combos, confidence I can play him at a high level is quickly waning.

Day Seven

Fuck Luke, we’re Ryu mains now.

Diaphone’s lessons were applicable to any shoto, so I figured let's see what happens If I apply the same concepts elsewhere. We still have cross-cut DPs, we still have to work on our anti-air inputs, but now we don’t have to perfectly time Flash Knuckles to maximize damage. I’ll miss blowing through other fireballs with OD Sand Blast, but hey, at least I have a projectile that goes full screen.

When we last left Ryu he was Platinum 3. That doesn’t last long. It’s unbelievably easy to pile on the damage as Ryu and we quickly sail to Diamond 1.

We also return to Mai, who we last left in Diamond 3. Sure enough, the lessons helped there too. The DPs feel way more reliable and she’s in Diamond 4 in no time.

Day Eight

We let Luke out of the doghouse and immediately win seven games in a row. After almost a whole week, we’re finally back in Diamond 5. Sometimes, you just gotta take a breather.

We even land a cross-cut on a Chun Li abusing Falling Crane again. Feels good!

I realize something on Day Eight — one of the situations where I get hit the most is after a jump in. Even though I successfully block or parry most of them, the pressure after catches me eventually. Instead of holding the pressure better, anti-airs resolve the entire situation. It’s a good motivation to keep at it.

Day Nine

We only find time for a few games this day, but we do end up matched against a fellow Newbie Fight Club member in ranked. A fun surprise. Bagel takes the W in a close set.

Sometimes its nice to get a reminder there's a real person on the other side. It's easy to depersonalize the endless sea of nameless opponents in a nonstop ranked grind.

Day Ten

We are halfway through Diamond 5.

This is officially the closest I’ve been to Master with Luke. Something that really stands out in retrospect, especially after watching all these replays; even though we never fully mastered cross-cuts or fixed every anti-air input, the mere act of landing both of those slightly more led to way more wins overall. Opponents stop jumping after only a couple successful DPs. Joke’s on them, the next one might’ve worked.

We also devise a new strategy on Day Ten that makes a big impact. Keeping in mind what Diaphone said about waiting and watching in Street Fighter 6, we come up with two game plans — one for players who are patient, and one for Ken players with names like “IMissCocaine” who play like they just got out of rehab and are tweaking out on the controller. If someone is playing like an absolute Mad Lad, we slow down the offense. Let them go ham for a while. If someone is playing a more patient game, we get aggressive, especially if they have a way to harass me at full screen. I will not suffer a JP with full screen real estate.

Day Eleven

This is the day. Eleven days since the coaching session, averaging about an hour a night, Luke hits Master.

We play a few Master games just to see where we’re at, and sure enough, we drop to 1400 in no time. It’s not all losses, though. We even out around there, bouncing around between 1400 and 1350. For now, I take that to be an accurate baseline.

Ed. — Writing from the future to say I must not be as good a student as I thought, because a week later I'm 1100 MMR. For those of you who don't know what that means, lets keep it that way.

Conclusion

So, here’s the question: Would I have gotten Master just from putting in the time, or was there no hope without a Diaphone in my corner?

I think there’s a world where I could’ve gotten Luke to Master without coaching, but that’s a world where my gameplay remains inconsistent once I get there. The real benefit of coaching isn’t quick and easy answers to get a rank, it’s direction. Diaphone identified the weakest holes in my gameplan, and in doing so, gave me something to focus on. There are plenty of things I could tell were bad calls during our replay review, like letting a wakeup DP rip when my opponent was half the screen away, but those bad calls were, oddly enough, not the most detrimental aspects of my gameplan overall. Without Diaphone’s observations, I might’ve started trying to fix the wrong mistakes. Heck, when I look back, I already was. I was trying to emulate Chris Wong's play style without understanding the underlying inputs. It's like trying to master the butterfly stroke before you know how to swim.

Make no mistake, it's within your power to hit Master without outside assistance. When you think about it, you have to; no amount of coaching saves you from putting in the work to get better. But good coaching helps draw your focus to the right skills to work on, and gets you a stronger foundation.

When I hit Master on Honda and Kim last year, without any coaching, my MMR plummeted like a rock and I had no idea how to improve. This time around, even though I'm struggling in Master all over again, I'm more aware of where the holes in the gameplan lie. Previously Master felt like a brick wall, but now there's a light at the end of the tunnel, provided I stay the course.

If you too feel lost on the road to Master, Diaphone's available to be your guide.

Diaphone is available to hire on Metafy for the game of your choosing. Maybe even Roblox Tekken, if you ask nicely.