Jack and Ten of Diamonds on Fourth and Fifth Street

Learning how to move your character is one of the first things you learned in Smash. Tilting the control stick left or right will make your character walk left or right respectively. Tapping your control stick fast left or right will make your character dash, which is faster than walking. This is all basic information and you can get this information if you watch the tutorial. Beyond walking and dashing, there are more movement options that could give you a competitive edge over your opponent. Dashdancing doesn't look to hard to do, you dash one way, then you dash the other way. However, it is not as easy as it seems. Every character has a "dash" state, and a "run" state. When you first tap the control stick one way, you are in the dash state. Depending on your character, after 7-18 frames (remember, 60 frames = 1 second), your character is in the run state. If you tilt the control stick the control stick the other the way, you will do a turn-around animation,

Super Smash Brothers is an iconic game series enjoyed by many people. Although Masahiro Sakurai (the creator of the Smash series) intended Super Smash Bros. Melee (the second game in the series for the Nintendo GameCube) to be a party game, there were many advanced techniques that if used correctly in competitive Smash, you could get an edge. Mastering advanced techniques in Melee, can lead to combos or being able to input an attack faster, which gives you a significant edge over people who don't know that these techniques exist. The most "basic" technique is L-canceling. Every time you use an aerial attack, which is a non-special move in the air (you can input with jump (X, Y, or Up on the control stick), then the attack button (A) for neutral air, or C-stick one of 4 ways to do other aerial attacks (You can also point on the left control stick and the A button at the same time). While doing an aerial attack, your character is falling towards the ground. When your char

The chess season starts today as Uni hosts Regionals. Regionals is part of the "regular" season where Uni takes part in a round-robin with 5 other schools in the area (Bismarck Henning, Georgetown Ridge Farm, Notre Dame de la Salette, and Urbana). Today we were supposed to play Georgetown, however they couldn't make it so we will have to play another time... My Chess Career I started playing chess when I was 5 years old. I would just bring my queen out, and try to checkmate as fast as possible. When I joined a chess club in first grade at Robeson, I would soon realize that bring the queen out early is a bad idea, since it can be chased away while your opponents develop their pieces at the same time. Despite this early setback in my playstyle, I would soon become one of the best player at the school. One day, we played a match against Dr. Howard, and I played Blair Hu. He completely destroyed me, and Dr. Howard 10-0 us. I was applying to the gifted program, and I reme

When I first did cross-country, I did not expect to do it for over a year. I joined cross-country because my friend, Evan was also doing it, and at the time, I would just follow what he does (I am 100% positive that in 6th grade, I was willing to jump off a bridge if he did). When I went to the first practice, I went in thinking that racing was like what was describe in the Chinese manga called "Đường Đua Thần Tốc" in Vietnamese (it was the rage in Vietnam in 2012), which was about remote control car racing. Clearly I did not know anything about cross-country before practice. The first practice was also brutal, we had to run 3 miles straight, despite racing was 2 miles. I finished dead last, out of everyone. I felt so miserable and tired that after the practice I took a shower and slept until dinner. During the weeks before my first day in middle school, I improved a lot. From dead last on the team, to being top 7 in the first meet, and I was never not top 7 in my schoo

This week is the first week of WOOT (Worldwide Online Olympiad Training). WOOT is an online math class that specializes in higher-level math competitions like the USAMO (United States of American Mathematical Olympiad) and IMO (International Mathematical Olympiad). To qualify for USAMO, you must do well on the AMC (American Mathematics Competition), and the AIME (American Invitational Mathematics Exam). The course costs $700 (although you can get a full refund by October 1), and everyone who was a winner in the USAMO (there are always 12 "winners") took the class last year. Seeing that WOOT was a well known class and famous for "creating" good high school math students, I wanted to try it out. When I said this was the first week of WOOT, there was technically a Week 0. Last week was orientation, and there were a couple of problem of the days. Monday Problem of the Days were one of the "easier" problems, although they would be very challenging to almost e

Welcome to my blog, Jack and Ten of Diamonds on Fourth and Fifth Street. I am Tri Do, a junior at University Laboratory High School in Urbana, Illinois. This is a blog for my class  Non-Fiction Writing,  however I may continue to use this blog after the class has ended. Now, you may be wondering "What does the title of the blog mean?" The title is related to a game of Texas hold'em poker,  one of my all-time favorite hobbies. I started playing poker in 4th grade during Spanish club. We were playing Five-card draw , the version of poker everyone first learns. I don't remember the details of that session, however I remember it as being a much more fun card game than Go Fish or Vietnamese card games my parents played when they were young. In middle school, one of my friends had poker chips, and taught my brother and I how to play Texas hold'em,  the most popular form of poker. I remember a lot of fun times and dumb plays I did (like betting the limit on a pair of A