I noticed you played a crap ton better in your last tournament against doge.
was it simply breaking it down and getting the experience? Or did you just get into the dudes head?
Well after he bodied me the first time I fought him, I did a TON of thinking about the match up and it's really a combination of a lot of things.
First and foremost is that you cannot let him get momentum at match/round start because recovering from that is incredibly hard.
Some other big things were using cr.LK a lot more, shadow countering his buttons to make him think twice about mindless offense and using wind kicks to crush his lows, since all of Sabre's good buttons are low attacks. I was also dumping as much damage as possible into lockouts. Not letting him get away with back dashes for free is big, too.
Honestly, rewatching it I should have been throwing a lot more fireballs since I figured out a safe way to do that.
Dealing with the mix ups while on defense is still really hard, but the more you see them you become more familiar and shit starts to make more sense.
Safe jumping the eclipse was something I tried to do many times but kept timing it too late until the end of the set