I hear people often say they dislike guessing or 50/50s in fighting games, but the reality is virtually every interaction in a fighting game was a guess itself, or the result of your opponent's guess. Guessing is baked into the very fabric of the genre; you cannot escape it.

It's important we understand the fundamentals of FGs -- you are constantly acting on imperfect information, ~20f behind your opponent's actions. If there was no guessing, nobody would ever take damage, even in neutral.

A poke is simply you preemptively taking up space because you don't know if your opponent will be there or not. A whiff punish is you reacting to your opponent making a poor guess as to your position. The most basic of offense, throw or strike, always contains guessing.

Not all guesses lead to the loss of a life bar, of course -- often they are low risk, low reward guesses. But the reason you buffer pokes, the reason we have OSes, the reason we *ever get hit at all* is because we have to make snap decisions without all the information.

This is one of the main reasons I dislike the "FGs are chess" analogy, since chess truly is a perfect information game, but the DNA of fighting games is so strongly composed of real-time decisions made without knowing the outcome.

I'll also say that making correct guesses or understanding your opponent's tendencies to make poor guesses is a fascinating skill that we should be happy to test in our fighting games! Don't shy away from the concept itself, let's tune the risk/reward so it's as good as it can be

So next time you want to say "I hate guessing", make a meaningful statement about risk/reward instead. "I hate safe, unseeable high/lows that both lead to 100% damage" is a discussable statement about game design. "I hate guessing" shows you don't understand the genre.