Ok, so here's the breakdown.
First fight was against SAR Aphex and it was on stream, so you should be able to see it when they put up the stream archive. Unfortunately, this was the only match I played on stream. He played Liu Kang and it was a victory for me, so I guess you can see how I handle heavy rushdown.
Second fight was against the VSM player Hitsoshura. He played noob saibot which is a horrific match up for against Smoke. It was a victory for me. I normally run the train on noob saibots because of this. I basically put him in the corner and locked him there for both matches.
One cool thing that happened was that at one point he threw a clone which I blocked, then I shook to bait out either a teleport or EX clone. He chose EX clone and I dash cancelled and jumped getting him to waste meter.
Third fight was against Citizen Snips, a nasty Reptile. I still have problems with Reptile. He spent the beginning of the match checking me with spit and FBs. I shook every one, and out came the dashes.
I actually handled this match really well and only lost because of my own fucking stupidity: I pulled an Aris. They were close games, but he took the first match and in the second match it came down to the third round. I had maybe 5% He had slightly less than half health. I caught him with a jump in punch and did a full combo and a successful f+4 reset bomb. Here's where the stupidity happened.
If I had just let him drop out of the reset bomb or done air throw, I would have won. But instead I tried to continue into a 3d12 and he broke it. He had just a pinch of health left and I thought for sure that EX TP would be enough to chip. It wasn't. His health bar appeared to be completely empty but he wasn't dead. He uppercutted me and that was that.
Fourth fight was against CD Jr.
Yea, not much to say about this. I have almost no Jax experience and it's CD fucking Jr; IMO the best player in the world right now, who used to main Smoke, so he knew all my tricks. Long story short I got bodied. It was depressing.
Ironically CD Jr and I were talking at the beginning of the night and I was telling him that the only two characters I was still scared of were Reptile and Jax... lmao
In all honesty, I'm becoming less optimistic about Smoke's tournament viability as the life of MK progresses. I'm seeing many other characters evolve and become more powerful but Smoke remains the same. He lacks versatility which is a very serious problem.
The more I think about it, the more I see how he really needed the original OTG (naked jump kick to smoke bomb) to compete against top players using top characters.
