An ancient Chinese tale tells of a race among animals, with the sequence they finished determining the 12-year zodiac cycle’s order. First came the rat, then the ox, the tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog and pig.

At the Sept 23-Oct 8 Asian Games in Hangzhou, Singapore’s 431-strong contingent will also be racing for honours. The Straits Times features 12 of them, each corresponding to one of the animals of the Chinese zodiac. In the ninth profile of the series, Kimberly Kwek interviews e-sports player Brandon Chia.

How did you get started in Street Fighter?

When I was very young, my parents used to go to NTUC at Tampines Mall and there was an arcade at the top floor so my mum would give me $5 to hang out there for an hour or two. The first game I started was Street Fighter Alpha 2.

I only started competing in 2017 after I met the local fighting game community in 2016. By nature, I’m quite a competitive person so in a matter of time the urge to join competitions came about and 2017 was my first major tournament.

What do you love about competition?

For me it’s the satisfaction of victory, it always feels good. The one that I enjoy the most is playing well in a tournament. Of course, winning is important, but if I play to a level that I’m happy with, even if I do go home a loser, it’s fine, because I know that I played my best and it just wasn’t enough.

It’s always that challenge of trying to get better and improving all the way because there definitely are people out there who are much better than me.

What does it take to be a good Street Fighter player?

There’s a physical and there’s a mental aspect to this. For the physical, if one is passionate about improving in fighting games in general, they can play non-stop every day and they will gradually improve.

From the mental aspect, definitely the most important one is focus level. Fighting games are most of the time first to two or first to three.

You can go home or you can progress to the next round of a tournament in 10 minutes. Decisions have to be made very quickly and if you have a low focus level, then it can just snowball into a very negative effect very quickly without you knowing how it actually happened.

The other one will be adaptation. So generally in fighting games, we find counterplays to hundreds of situations so generally we have strategies for every character match-up...