Example of Yomi Layer 3 from SSBM

Let’s say Fox does a shine on Captain Falcon’s shield. After the shine hits, Falcon is in shield-stun from the shine until 2 frames after the first frame that Fox can jump out of his shine. If he cancels this jump into a grab, Falcon will only have 5 actionable frames before the grab connects.



Fox would like to do his best combo starter (grab) and be done with it. Even though Fox is +2 on shield with this shine, that still leaves time for Falcon to escape with a buffered roll before the grab hits. The throw is guaranteed to “start” but Falcon may escape with a roll.



In practice, a skilled Falcon is well aware that a grab is coming here – it’s common knowledge that shine-grab is a nearly inescapable move, and it’s only obvious that Fox would want to land his best combo starter. Therefore, the grab after the shine is yomi 0, or m from our eariler example. After all, this situation has happened a hundred times before against a hundred Foxes and they all do the same thing. It’s really conditioning, not strategy, that tells Falcon he needs to buffer a roll here (that’s his c1, aka y1). In fact, it will become his natural, unthinking reaction after a while.

Fox is tired of having his shinegrabs escaped again and again. He decides to be tricky and wavedash down, or wavedash back (we’ll just lump those both into c2, or y2). Why does a wavedash work in this situation? Well, if Falcon attempts his buffered roll and Fox simply holds position with a wavedash, he can very easily react with a grab or an attack (he can also easily charge a smash attack and react by releasing the charge) . By the way, this c2 move does just as much damage as the shinegrab, m, does. The next time this situation arises, Falcon doesn’t know what to do. His instincts tell him to buffer roll, but if he does, he’s vulnerable to Fox’s c2 attacks. Rather than go for the standard roll, Falcon does a c3 move – he does an aerial out of shield (stomp, or low uair/nair). With this, he’ll be able to hit Fox with a move that’s safe on shield before Fox can input an attack after his wavedash.

So, what does Fox do if he expects this? In fact, he needs no c4 move since his original shinegrab (M) naturally counters all of Falcon’s options except roll.

In summary,

Fox has shine>grab and shine>wait.

Falcon has buffer roll and aerial OoS.



As I tried to show, it’s actually pretty reasonable to expect players to be thinking on yomi layer 3, 4, or even higher. It’s because conditioning makes doing the buffer roll an unthinking, natural reaction. But against a clever opponent, you’ll have to think twice about doing a standard roll, or trying an out of shield option. A good Fox player will occasionally do slow, patient reactive options just to put his enemy off-balance and abandon his instinct to perform a buffer roll. Then Fox can go back to his original goal: shine grab into upthrow.

Another very interesting property is “beginner’s luck.” Notice that a beginner Fox in this situation will go for the shinegrab, since that works on other beginners who haven’t learned to buffer roll. The beginner Fox will never land the shinegrab on an intermediate player, though, since the intermediate player knows to always buffer roll. But strangely, the beginner will sometimes land the throw on the expert because the expert is aware of the whole guessing game and might try an aerial rather than buffer roll. Of course, the expert will soon learn that the beginner is, in fact, a beginner, and then he’ll be able to yomi almost every move.

Just as a final note on Melee to further demonstrate the complexity of its guessing games, I actually greatly simplified the example above. I left out, for example, that as a c3 move, Falcon could fullhop instead of doing an aerial. He could also simply grab to beat a wavedash down. He could also wavedash out of shield. Fox can also do aerials after the shine to continue pressure on shield while also beating the Falcon options I’ve just listed.

The point I’m making here is that despite Melee’s absurd complexity, players really are able to think on the levels I’m talking about. While having a mental mastery of the structure and payoffs of these guessing games is important, the master of yomi can cut to the chase by guessing correctly in a particular situation, rather than merely following a good rule of thumb for similar situations.