Gabedamien
I Want To Be Happy
You basically sank your own argument (advocacy?). The devil is disappointed, haha. As both of us mentioned, matchup knowledge is a necessary part of the tournament scene, and both of you had equal access to the roster, so both of you are responsible for knowing all the matchups. If you are exploiting the one weak spot in his matchup knowledge, so be it — he may know more about the game in general than you do, but in practice, you played the game better, including the metagame....With your logic, Hakan should be banned because any wins that I rack up may be due to my opponent not knowing the matchup; sure, it's due to his own laziness, but we are still not testing who is the best, as that guy that I eliminate may be able to beat EVERY OTHER CHARACTER perfectly, but simply struggles with Hakan.
Again, just playing devil's advocate here. Counter to my own point would be the fact that knowing matchups is part of skill and since my opponent doesn't know it, I am better than him.
This issue of incomplete matchup knowledge is self-balanced, by the way, because people naturally build strong matchup knowledge against high-tier characters, and tend to be most ignorant of low-tier characters. So in order to actually exploit such a weakness against an otherwise pro-level player, you have to somehow excel with a character that is acknowledged to be at a starting disadvantage.
None of this is to say that you don’t bring up a good point, of course. I fully admit that my original missive is highly unlikely to fully encapsulate all the subtleties and considerations surrounding fighting games, skill, tiers, tournaments, etc. In fact, I don’t think anyone has or ever will satisfactorily reconcile the contradictions or conflicts between all these fields in a truly absolute, universal sense; the issue is too complex and subjective and eventually it just devolves into unprovable philosophy. OK, I’ll stop waxing rhetorical now.