My friend recently started playing Street Fighter 6 after a long break of being hella esports. The last Street Fighter he played was SF4 and I wanted to give him a basic quickstart guide to Drive Rush and the basic applications.
Reviewing the Footsies Triangle
There are many good resources for this some of my personal written articles include Mago’s theory, and Machabo’s GG Fundamentals
tldr:
- Sticking out your poke say Ryu 2MK, takes up space so your opponent and just dash in on you. Here your Poke > Pressure
- Your opponent is throwing these pokes out like crazy so what do you do? Whiff punish them! So Whiff Punish > Poke
- Your opponent is playing really passively looking like they’re trying to punish something like your best poke. I’ll just walk forward or DRIVE rush at them. Here Pressure > Whiff punish
The last point leads me to the first application, which is actually the MOST controversial. Neutral Drive rush!
Neutral Drive Rush
Neutral drive rush is one of the most complained about things in SF6. It’s used as an approaching mechanic that allows the offensive player to start their offense. Neutral Drive rush only takes 1 bar of Drive Guage. One of the biggest benefits however is that Drive Rush gives your normals a +4 frame advantage.Here you can see Ken’s 2lp is -1 on block. However after drive rushing, It’s now +3!
Ryu is set to reversal jab and as you can see, he gets counter hit from the throw. This is where the scary stuff comes into play
This leads into another one of the controversial things about this game
Button Into Drive Rush. aka 2MK into drive rush
Chris F made a video about Bongchan saying people are looking too much into trying to whiff punish, when people should be looking to strike through. This is where the majority of your Strike / Throw / Shimmy mix is going to come from. This does take 3 bars though.Strike to beat mash or throw
Throw to beat blocking
Shimmy to bait the throw once established
What is the counterplay?
Besides the “Don’t get hit.” There are 2 specific things I can think of.- Reversal Option Select: If your opponent leaves too much of a gap, your reversal comes out, if it’s tight it doesn’t. Here is a Brian F video about it.
- Drive Reversal. Your Opponent Spends 3 bars and you also spend resources to go back to neutral.
Putting It All Together
So from our footsies triangle we can put our drive rush tools like this
Checking The Neutral Drive Rush
Say our opponent is the one that wants to initiate contact with a neutral drive rush. In this situation our poke wins. In this case Ken 2MP
This now leads to =>
Our Opponent looking to whiff punish
Since our opponent is looking to whiff punish our poke, it gives us a chance to throw in some aggression. Here let’s drive rush!
Our Opponent is trying to check our drive rush!
Now since our opponent is trying to poke and stop us from drive rushing, let’s do some good ol Street Fighter and whiff punish them.