Pokkén Basics Chapter 7 Part 3 Whiff Punishing

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Whiff punishing is the most important skill to master in Pokkén Tournament DX. It's your reward for perfect spacing and anticipation. Once you master it, you can base your entire game plan around this one tactic to beat even the top players in the game. I'm going to teach you what a whiff punish is and how to set one up.

So first what is a whiff punish? A whiff punish occurs when you make an opponent's attack miss your character, or whiff and then hit them- punish them - before they can block your attack. Think of it like a real fight: you want to make the other person's punches or kicks miss you and then counter strike them when their guard is down. Super simple strategy, and it can lead to full combos for punishing an opponent's mistake.

Now, how do you set up a whiff punish?

Even some of the best Pokkén players haven't properly incorporated whiff punishing into their game. And part of it is because of two misconceptions. Number one. It's not about having fast reactions. You can have trash reactions like me and still land these all day. Secondly, it's not about just walking back and forth, hoping your opponent throws something out, and swinging at the first thing that moves. A lot times you'll see people just blocking in neutral or walking themselves all the way to the corner for no reason looking for a move but they didn't bother to create the perfect spacing situation in the first place. So they can't capitalize

There are 3 steps to setting up and landing a whiff punish. Write these down and don't skip any of them:

-Provoke
-Anticipate
-React

Provoke

Strong players aren't going to be just throwing out high recovery attacks for no reason in neutral to let you punish for free. Actually scratch that, even top Pokkén players will do that, they can't control themselves. But after you get one or two launches from that, then they'll start to wise up and get a lot more conservative with their buttons. To get them to whiff another one, you have to provoke it. This means, you do something that makes your opponent think it is in their best interest to press a button.

There are 3 easy ways to do this. The first is to approach a range where you threaten a throw. In Pokkén you cannot break throws on reaction, so you have to preemptively guess and use a throw break. This means you can use a move or just basic movement like walking to get you close enough to the opponent to throw them and then quickly back out of that range by walking back or back dashing. 8Xs are universal throw crushes, but they also universally have really long whiff animations, so you can get a full combo with most characters.

The second method is to provoke a preemptive anti-air. Not every character can do this, but many characters have some tricky aerial attacks like Mewtwo, Blaziken, Decidueye, Gengar, really most of the cast honestly. The thing is, it can be hard to anti air some of the options on reaction, making them pretty obnoxious on defense. So throw them out once or twice in a row to make your opponent wary of it, and then just camp out at a range where opponents are looking for it but know they still can't react. When they get antsy and throw out their 8Y, you can hit it, in its recovery. A very obnoxious variant of this is to charge your counter attack just outside of an opponent's grab range. People will try to stuff it out, especially if your CA can be anti aired or beaten out with a low. CADC back to get a beefy, albeit, scummy whiff punish.

The last method is to convince your opponent to use their best general use preemptive poke. Chapter 7.2 was all about each character's best preemptive attacks. Keep walking into the very tip of that range and walking back out. Poke once or twice to try to push the opponent to the wall to make them uncomfortable. When they whiff their best move, make them think twice about it next time. This method is especially effective when your characters own preemptive buttons aren't necessarily that good or they're risky. You can still get massive damage by letting your opponent make mistakes for getting impatient.

Anticipate

Now that you know how to provoke 8Xs, 8Ys, and other lunges, let's talk about properly anticipating them.

It's not enough to just make an attack whiff. If you swing at the first thing that moves, you might try to punish something small like a 2Y, fail and then get hit by armor in neutral or an immediate whiffed button into a jump. But if you just stand around waiting for buttons and you try to confirm if a move has a high enough recovery to punish every time, you'll often react too slow, or you'll pay so much attention to that, that you won't be in the correct position to do anything about it. I notice a lot of Blaziken players do this. They have a great whiff punisher in 6A, but they either walk back too far, or they are super late on their punishes and end up getting bodied by preemptive anti airs anyway. So this is the way to anticipate a move and up your whiff punish success rate.

When you're provoking a move, pick one or two specific attacks you want your opponent to throw out. So let's say I'm Shadow Mewtwo playing footsies against a Lucario. I want to provoke move that I can react to like a throw break so 8X. And another far reaching poke like 6X. So I can use my own 6X into Miracle Eye or maybe throw out one or two Psywave Blasts. After I do this I want to walk or backdash juuust outside of 8X and 6X range. Close enough so that I can still punish the recovery animation, but far enough so that it still misses. A pro tip here is to let go of block, since blocking widens the distance that your character can be hit and thrown. You want your hurtbox to be as narrow as possible. Now that you've moved into the specific range you need to be, only look for those two attacks. If you see anything else, 8Y you're not gonna catch on reaction, 2Y, not gonna catch. Anything that's not those two buttons, just ignore it. This way, when you do see 6X or 8X your reactions will be primed to punish them hard. 

React

So let's talk briefly about reacting. A reaction is how fast you can do something, like press a button, after a given stimulus (or event). So in this instance, how fast you can press a button after seeing a move. But a reaction is different than recognition. Recognition is how fast you can differentiate between two different stimuli. By taking the time to differentiate between whether or not a move has a long enough recovery animation to be whiff punished, you slow down your reactions. A twitch reaction, is when you don't even consider what the heck happened on screen, you just press a button at the first thing that moves. This is the only way to whiff punish super fast recovery attacks like Lucario's 8Y. But it can still be done, and I've done it in tournament. The trick is, you have to use provoking, anticipating, and reacting all in tandem. So Lucario's 8Y is an anti air. You'll want to use some sort of obnoxious aerial attack once or twice like EX High Jump Kick or Mewtwo's Instant Air Dash jY to provoke. Back up just outside of its range and since you know 8Y is the the only thing Lucario would logically throw out to stop you from going into the air again, you skip the recognition and just straight to twitch reacting to the first thing that moves. Again you are very confident the 8Y is coming out. You know the 8Y is going to whiff since you put yourself at the right range. 

Then you react with your fastest whiff punisher. The best whiff punishers are fast and far reaching like 11f 2Ys from Shadow Mewtwo and Lucario, but work with the fastest thing you've got. The longer the whiff animation of the attack you're looking for, the slower the move you can use. Even 19f moves or slower can work as whiff punishers depending on the right attack. 

Remember the same concepts apply in field phase, but obviously you won't be baiting throw techs as often since you can't whiff punish homing cancels. But fYs and any other high recovery projectile can be side walked or side dashed and whiff punished with your own forward Y. With Togekiss and a decent speed homing, you can punish just with homing attack.

Alright that's it, Provoke, Anticipate, and React. Practice this every match you play, and you'll have a skill that you can use to dominate almost anyone.