MELTBUTTER

A tell is a habit in how this player starts a round: something they do clearly more often in one situation than in the others — backing off more in round 2, say, or opening with one move more against one character. Each situation is compared with how they actually opened their rounds, and a tell is listed only if it is too strong to be a fluke even after allowing for how many situations were checked on this page. Anything weaker is left out, so a character with no tells listed may still have habits, just none the data can show for certain.

• An opener is filed by what the player did first: attack (a named move or any button), move in (forward dash, forward movement or crouch dash forward), wait (guard, crouch or no input), back off (backdash, crouch dash back or backward movement) or evade. Each is also tested as the exact opener: the character's five most used, and the rest together.
• Up to ten things known before a round starts are tested against the opener: which round it is, the opponent's character, the ring shape, how the player opened the round before and how the opponent did, whether they won or lost the round before, who landed the first hit of the round before, whether they go into it ahead, level or behind, and -- where a Shun is playing -- the drink points he starts it on: the player's own if they are Shun, the opponent's if they face one. Each is a chi-square test, divided by how much more alike the rounds of one match are than separate rounds would be, and never made more generous by it. Checked by shuffling the data so that nothing is there: the tests then find something no more often than chance allows.
• Round results and drink points come from each match's round record, matched to its openers by the two players and the date. A match whose record is missing, lacks rounds the openers have, or does not add up to the match's result sits out of those four tests only. These four are compared only between rounds of the same number -- the score and the drinks follow from which round it is (every match starts level and on no drinks), so a pattern that is only “the first round is different” is not counted as one of theirs. Drawn rounds count toward neither side of the score, and the round after one has no previous result. Drink points are grouped as on the Shun report (none, 1–4, 5–9 and so on), with neighbouring groups joined where they are thin.
• A character is tested with at least 300 rounds from 30 matches. Rare cases are pooled before testing, and a pattern is only named where it holds up after correcting for every test on this page (33 here; about 1.7 would come up by chance alone before the correction).
• Walls against open is tested per opponent with 30+ matches and 10+ different players on each side, allowing for both players' ranks, and corrected across every player page at once: 0 of 2,552 hold up. With stages shuffled at random: 0 of 2,651–2,673.

Tests behind each character's list

• Sarah: 10 of 18 tests hold up
• Jean: 3 of 15 tests hold up
• Lion: not tested (too few rounds)