I never had any serious offline training partner. Just online rivals and inspirations. The rest was just me trying to get better because I was getting bodied pretty badly in SF4 and I didn't understand why.
For overall inspiration I would have to name guys like Alex Valle, Justin Wong, JuiceboxAbel, Aris, Arturo Sanchez, Tom Brady and REO. These players are always sharing their knowledge, analysis and strats either on twitter, twitch, youtube or on forums to help players step up their game to the next level. And that's what I respect most about them, not their tournament record. (PR Balrog, Chris G, Tokido and Daigo are some of my favorite top players but they didn't help me become better at fighting games).
I can't name Ultradavid and James Chen because I was already good at fighting games before they even started UltraChenTV lol! Same with Gootecks and Mike Ross. These guys didn't really help me but I'm sure they helped and continue to help many new players.
But the two biggest things that made me go from mid-level scrub to high level was reading the Sonic Hurricane handbook of footsies and watching Vesper Arcade's SF4 tutorial on youtube. That's when everything became obvious to me and I finally understood things like fundamentals, spacing, footsies, frame data, 50/50s, frametraps, safe jumps and option-selects. That was when I became good at fighting games. From that point on I could hop into any fighting game and hold my own against top level players. Because I just understood how fighting games worked and I understood that fundamentals, footsies and mindgames were universal to every fighting game and couldn't be lost or forgotten.
