"To put it bluntly, the training session program being implemented by haunts and his stable of players over at iplaywinner.com is absolutely phenomenal, and I say that with complete confidence.

Aside from the actual training itself, a big reason as to why I love this program is the channel of dialogue it opens. This allows top players to speak directly and interact with people like myself that have the skills and the potential to be good, but aren’t quite there yet. However, the focus is broad. To only target such a niche audience wouldn’t be very effective, so people of all skill levels are openly invited to participate. I personally think this is excellent for the community.

Now, onto the session itself: I had the honor of being the first person to receive a training session. Despite being the guinea pig, and haunts still not having a complete idea of how to go about the session, you would have thought that he had already had some experience doing one. The session was structured and the atmosphere was very conducive to learning. Haunts definitely has the mindset and patience of a great teacher, and it was a pleasure to be trained by him. We started off by playing a few matches so that haunts could properly assess my skill level. We then played a few matches while haunts gave me tips and advice on what to do in certain situations against certain characters, what moves are safe, what isn’t, etc. You could tell that there was a genuine desire for me to learn and to ask questions, and I felt perfectly comfortable doing so no matter how stupid I may have thought the question was.

Next, in the second half of the session, we focused on matchup specific training. Haunts asked me what characters I had trouble fighting. I rattled off several and we went through the list, once again with haunts giving me advice. One thing in particular that helped my self-esteem was haunts telling me that he had to start playing harder as I was implementing the techniques he was teaching me right away. Not to say he wasn’t giving his all, because he was, but sometimes he would do things to test me like jump at me a lot to see if I would punish it, which was another aspect that I liked.

It didn’t stop there. Haunts also sent me a document detailing exactly what we went over in the session. It included what he felt were my strengths and weaknesses, techniques and key combos I need to master, and the character specific strategies we went over. This was especially nice because while the information I got in the session was great, there was a lot of it, so having this document to refer to was great. In addition to the document, he provided me with a video of the session that he edited and added the feature in youtube that allows you to insert pop-up messages (annotations? I’m not sure what exactly the feature is called) showing exactly what we covered in the session. Having this visual aid in addition to the document helped immensely and I have watched it several times analyzing my game.

Since the session, I have attended two ranbats at my local arcade. I placed top 10 (7^th place) in the first one, and after the
second one, I moved up to top 5 (5^th place). I feel like haunts’ advice and training had a direct hand in my performance at the ranbats.

Finally, since the session, I have maintained contact with haunts and chatted with him about all sorts of things, both SF and non-SF related. It’s good to know that these guys are just regular dudes like me that just love SF. They just happen to be crazy good at it, haha. I have already expressed to him that I want to help him out in any way I can with the site, and at this point I think it goes without saying that I highly recommend the Training Session!

Thanks again to haunts and the iplaywinner crew!"

- Chris