OK, so I was watching a SSF4 stream yesterday, and it was a Ryu up against a Viper. And the Viper pretty much got pasted lol.

So after the match, the commentators asked the Viper player what the match-up was. And the Viper player said it could go either way, but the Ryu was blocking his attacks and reversaling his strings so it's hard for Viper. When I was watching the match, the Ryu player knew the match-up. He knew that Viper's strings weren't tight, so he could reversal or even press a normal to interrupt a string. He knew to option select Shoryu Viper on wake-up.

But the thing is, the Viper player obviously didn't really know what to do once the Viper gimmicks stopped working. He just fell apart. And this is a problem for lots of Viper players, when their gimmicks stop working, they've got nothing to fall back on because they haven't learnt what to do when that happens . Most people think Viper can mix-up people to death and do whatever she wants. They're wrong and they only feel like that because they don't know the match-up.

A certain former top Viper player(who nows plays Gief lol) told every Viper on SRK that they all played the same and they don't use enough of Viper's tools, they just play random and focus on set-ups. Which was true to an extent. Viper needs to use pokes, whiff punish, and zoning like other characters do.

The Viper player I was watching, was trying to force his way in for damage with BKs and mix-ups, which wasn't working. He never once used Seismos, which would have helped a lot more. Another thing is that he wasn't using Viper's normals. This is important. Viper's overhead can go over ground normals like Ryu's cr.mk, so can f.hk. Cr.hp can be used to whiff punish normals. Sweep is decent too. He only really used cr.mk.

Viper's normals are slow and hard to manage, but they're still usable and not using them will hinder your gameplan. At the same time, you can't stay on the ground and use your normals regularly vs every character, you simply can't, some characters eat up Viper's normals for breakfast. But Ryu's definitely managable, though Viper's groundgame ability is not the best.

In the end, it's easy for me to talk about a match when I wasn't there and feeling the pressure.