What Playing the Least Popular Street Fighter Character Taught Me About Being Mid

Dhalsim isn’t escapism. He’s a mirror.

Dhalsim is the least popular character in Street Fighter 6.

According to official statistics, he’s the least picked character, having been played in a paltry 0.83% of all ranked matches¹. He makes no goddamn sense—a stretchy-limbed yoga master who breathes fire, teleports, and floats like he’s glitching through reality itself. Everyone else in the game plays more or less the same: fireball, fireball, uppercut. Dhalsim is out here doing some shamanistic nonsense that requires you to rewire your brain completely.

I tell you this not because I’m a strategic genius who saw the untapped potential in an underdog character. I recognized Dhalsim’s strengths and built a playstyle around exploiting the meta. But that would be a lie. The truth is simpler and stupider: I picked Dhalsim because he’s a goofy, bumbling weirdo who yells the word “YOGA” while incinerating his opponents, and yet is completely unremarkable at first glance—and at 48, single again, and back living in the condo my dad bought for me years ago—a loyalty test disguised as a real estate investment. That felt about right.

It’s been a year and a half since I moved back to the Bay Area from Florida. Thirteen years in Miami, gone. The relationship that defined my adult life ended. And here I am in Fremont, a city I spent my entire adolescence and young adult life trying to escape, now the reluctant caretaker of aging parents I never asked to be responsible for—though “asking” was never part of the arrangement.

Most of my old friends from San Francisco? We just drifted apart. It wasn’t dramatic. I didn’t unfriend anyone or make declarations. I was just too tired to make the drive from Fremont to the city, and I knew they weren’t coming out here. And too embarrassed to pick up the phone to reach out again.

It’s easier to pick up a controller than to pick up the phone.

Street Fighter 6 came out in June 2023, about seven months after I’d “settled”—if you can call it that—back into California. I hadn’t played a fighting game seriously since high school, back when Silverball Arcade in Berkeley was my Sunday ritual. The arcade was escapism. Healthier than some of the later ones I’d develop, sure—but still, running from something.

A dark room full of CRT monitors and the smell of teenage desperation, where you could plug in quarters and forget, for a few hours, that you didn’t fit anywhere else.

I bought SF6, telling myself it was nostalgia—a trip down memory lane. Maybe I’d play through story mode, mess around in training, remember what it felt like to pull off a combo.

Then I hit “Ranked Match.”

Ranked Match is a competitive online mode where you’re matched up with a similarly skilled player. Ranks are split into leagues, from “aww, baby’s first controller” Rookie to Master. What makes Ranked Match brutal is that you can climb by winning or tumble back down by losing.

Three hundred hours later, I’m still here. 7,800 matches played. A spectacular 40% win rate. Platinum 2 rank—which, for anyone who doesn’t play fighting games, is the definition of “mid.” Better than a casual, sure. But that’s it. Just… okay.

And I’m okay with that.

Here’s the thing about playing Dhalsim: when you play a character that only appears in 0.83% of all Street Fighter matches, there’s a high percentage that, at least early on, people have NEVER played against Dhalsim before. They may know Dhalsim as “the guy who breathes fire,” or “the guy with the slow-ass jump,” or, for some people, “the only other person I recognize from India who isn’t Gandhi.” None of these people may have actually played against another Dhalsim before. I’m banking on that. And for the most part, it works!

Of course, when you see another Dhalsim player in ranked, you get weirdly giddy. We’re rare. Like spotting another driver with the same car on the highway—except instead of a Ferrari, it’s a 2005 Saturn, and you’re both deeply confused about why you’re still driving it.

You give each other this mental nod. Fellow weirdo. I see you.

And then they proceed to absolutely demolish you because they play Dhalsim the way he’s supposed to be played, and you’re out here doing… whatever it is you do.

That’s the thing about improvement in fighting games—it’s invisible until it isn’t. You lose and lose and lose, and then one day you anti-air someone in reaction and think, Huh, when did I learn that? Getting better is never glamorous. It’s not a montage. It’s eating shit 600 times until the 601st attempt, something clicks.

Most of the time, all you see are the lopsided defeats.

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I keep playing because—well, what else am I going to do?

I could reach out to old friends, but that would mean admitting how much time has passed. I could process the breakup, but that means feeling things I’m not ready to feel. I could face that I’m 48, living in a condo bought with my dad in my twenties, caring for parents who are both physically and emotionally falling apart—but that means confronting the reality that this isn’t some temporary detour.

It’s easier to queue up another match.

Street Fighter 6 isn’t replacing anything. It’s not protecting me from feeling things. It’s more like… a waiting room. Purgatory. A place to sit while I figure out what comes next. Except the wait is indefinite, and I’ve gotten pretty comfortable in the chair.

Sometimes I think about the Ernie who used to pump quarters into arcade machines at Silverball—the one who believed escaping Fremont meant he’d finally become someone. And here I am, decades later, back in the same city, playing the same game, except now the arcade is in my living room, and the quarters are all the potential I spent.

Dhalsim stretches across the screen. His limbs extend in ways that defy physics, keeping everyone at a distance. He doesn’t play like anyone else.

He doesn’t fit. He never did. Neither do I.

Platinum 2 is fine.

Mid is fine.

I’m fine.

1. As of August 2025.