guide

Street Fighter 6 glossary

The words players use, defined

Street Fighter 6 has its own vocabulary, and most of it is never explained in the game. Here are the terms you will hear in a lobby, read in a patch discussion, or see on a Parry Portal profile, in plain language. Nothing here is frame data: these are the concepts, which stay true across patches.

The Drive system

Drive Gauge. The meter every character shares between their defensive and offensive options. Spending it is how you get anything above a plain normal, and it refills on its own when you are not using it.
Drive Impact. An armored attack that absorbs an incoming hit and lets you keep going. Landing it near a wall crumples the opponent and hands you a full combo, which is why cornered players get so cautious.
Drive Parry. A hold-to-absorb stance that eats attacks and builds gauge back. Time it to the exact moment of the hit and you get a perfect parry, which slows the game for a beat and gives you a punish on something that is otherwise safe.
Drive Rush. A forward dash cancelled out of a parry or a cancellable normal. It is the main way space gets closed and the main reason a blocked normal can turn straight into more pressure.
Drive Reversal. A gauge-spending push-off from block that buys you room when a turn has gone badly.
OD move. The stronger version of a special, paid for out of the Drive Gauge. Often faster, often armored or invincible, always expensive.
Burnout. The state you enter when the gauge empties. No Drive options, chip damage on block, and a wall splat waiting if you get pushed into the corner. Getting the other player into Burnout is a win condition on its own.
Super Art. The meter-driven supers, numbered one to three. The level three is the big one, and several characters get an upgraded version of it when their health is low.

Ranked vocabulary

LP (League Points). The running score that carries a character from Rookie to Master. Explained in full in how LP and MR work.
MR (Master Rating). The rating that separates Master players from each other once LP has topped out.
Tier and sub-rank. The named bracket (Gold) and the step inside it (Gold 3). Every tier below Master has five. The tiers are listed here.
Placement matches. The first ranked matches on a new character, which decide the rank it starts at.
Modern and Classic. The two control schemes allowed in ranked, covered in Modern vs Classic controls.

Neutral and pressure

Neutral. The part of the round where nobody is committed to anything: both players moving, threatening, waiting for a mistake.
Footsies. The mid-range dance of pokes and walking, aimed at getting a hit or a whiff punish without giving one up.
Whiff punish. Hitting an attack that missed, during the recovery it cannot cancel out of. The cleanest damage in the game.
Anti-air. Any answer to a jump-in that beats it before it lands. A player who never anti-airs teaches the opponent to keep jumping.
Okizeme (oki). What you do while the opponent is getting up. Good oki means their wake-up is a guess and yours is not.
Meaty. An attack timed so its active frames are already out as the opponent stands up, which makes it safer and gives you more advantage than hitting them cleanly would.
Frame trap. A deliberate small gap in a blockstring that beats an opponent who tries to press a button in it.
Shimmy. Walking back out of throw range so a throw attempt whiffs, then punishing it. The standard counter to a throw-heavy player.
Plus and minus on block. Whether the attacker or the defender gets to act first after a blocked attack. Plus means your turn continues; minus means it is theirs.
Punish counter. The bonus state for hitting an opponent during a vulnerable recovery, which opens up combo routes that a normal hit does not allow.
Mix-up. Any situation where the defender has to guess between two or more answers that cannot all be covered.
Corner carry. How far a combo drags the opponent toward the wall. Damage matters, but position often matters more.

Terms you will see on Parry Portal

fighter_id. The name a player picks in game, and the thing you type into our search box to find them.
Matchup matrix. A player's win rate against each opponent character, graded so the characters that genuinely trouble them stand apart from the ones they have only played twice.
Win-rate band. We draw every win rate as a range rather than a single figure. A thin sample produces a wide band, which is the page telling you not to read much into it yet.
Replay log. The ranked match history behind every chart on a profile. It grows as matches are played and is never back-filled, so a profile gets richer the longer it is tracked.

If a term you were looking for is missing, tell us and it can go in. To see the vocabulary applied to real numbers, open the SF6 ranked leaderboard and pick a player.