As of July 2015, the record for this game was 16:24 by sinister1.  Now, in July 2016, just a year later, the time has been pushed all the way down to 15:12.  This is partially thanks to a number of new strats being developed by several different MTPO runners.  I'll go over those when I recap the run.

This game is incredibly frustrating to speedrun.  On top of extremely precise timings and often difficult inputs, the luck required to get a run like this is absolutely insane.  And, of course, at the end of it all is Mike Tyson, where if you don't land at least 20 frame perfect punches on top of getting a good pattern, you're out of contention to get a world record.  The luck that I got in this run was the best luck anybody had ever gotten in an MTPO run, and although the execution wasn't perfect, it was good enough to acheive my goal of sub 15:20.  Now then, on to the fights:

Glass Joe (42.00): Thanks to a strategy first thought of by ouijawii and later simplified by Chambers, 42.00, which incidentally ties both the IL record and the TAS record, is a guaranteed time.
    
Von Kaiser (36.25): This strategy is a modified version of the IL strategy, which zallard1 figured out.  I got both stars in phase 2, which guarantees a time under 37 seconds.  Best possible luck on this guy.

Piston Honda 1 (49.97): Pretty much the only fight with bad luck in the entire run.  He blocked my 2nd face punch in the first phase of the fight, which ended up costing me about 3 seconds.  Although not necessarily a bad fight, most future runs will gain time against this split.

Don Flamenco 1 (15.00): Couldn't quite match the TAS time, but thanks to zallard1's buffer strat, a time of 15.00 or better is guaranteed.

King Hippo (40.99): About 70% of runs don't make it past this guy, because in order for me to get past him, King Hippo needs to open his mouth a lot.  He has a 37.5% chance of opening his mouth on any given punch.  He opened 3 out of the first 4 opportunities in this fight, which happens extremely rarely.  Only crazy RNG can gain you time in this split, but probably about 85% of the time, you would be losing time.

Great Tiger (48.25): Pretty typical fight here.  This is the last fight without any RNG, and ironically, it comes right after a fight with one of the most RNG. Getting a .25 means that my execution was reasonably tight.

Bald Bull 1 (1:02.25): I had figured out a few strats for Bull 1 if you didn't get the lucky star in phase 2, but I did get it, along with a bunch of other stupid pieces of luck.  I got the lucky star (50%), rolling jabs in phase 2 (25%), the good refill in phase 3 (25%), and rolling jabs again in phase 3 (25%). That works out to 1/128, or a 0.78% chance of getting this luck.  Absolutely unreal.
    
Piston Honda 2 (45.97): A few months back, zallard1 found a new phase 1 strategy, which allowed you to get a 27 second time going into the second phase.  He then messed with the idea of using max damage stars in phase 2, but I wasn't able to land them consistently enough.  Then, I realized that if you buffer a left quick dodge, hold start and up, and then let go of up once his guard raises (4 frame window), it lets max damage star punches land.  Doing this was much easier than tying to time the stars manually.  It ended up being a huge discovery, as it ended up letting me save up to 10 seconds.  I ended up getting the good refill in phase 2 as well, which was yet again the best possible luck.

Soda Popinski (51.25): This guy and King Hippo are typically regarded as the two biggest run killers, because they are the most random.  In each phase, Soda can either throw uppercuts (good), or throw hooks (bad), with a delay somewhere between 0 and 4 in-game seconds right before them.  Not only did I get 3 uppercuts in a row, which is quite rare itself, but I got extremely small delays before each one.  The odds in getting a fight this good is probably about 1/30-1/40, so, once more, this was another fight with incredible luck.

Bald Bull 2 (1:30.25): A new strat I figrured ot for this guy was eliminating the chance of him blocking without retaliating in phase 1.  Unfortunately, he still has 3 chances to do it later, and he probably has about a 1/4 chance of doing on each of those punches.  He did it to me once, which is technically considered bad luck, but we only lost about a second because of it.

Don Flamenco 2 (1:26.99): Previously, this fight would typically yield times in the 1:40-1:50 range, or if you were really lucky, you could maybe squeeze out somewhere in the upper 1:30's.  Although these times are still very possible now, and you still will get a time in the 1:40's aroud 80% of the time, there now exist strategies where you can get times in the lower 1:30's, or if you're really lucky, even into the 1:20's.

Zallard figured out an opening for phase 1 where you have 9 chances at getting a random star.  Given that you have a 1/16 chance of getting a random star on any punch where you're holding a star, that works out to roughly a 44% chance of getting a star in phase 1.  After he found that, I put together a bunch of strategies of what to do depending on when you got a random star, how many you got, and what refill he gave in phase 2.  The odds in getting a fight this good ended up being around 1/50.  Funnily enough, I actually messed up pretty badly in phase 1- he blocked the first punch I threw.  The run probably would've been over if he didn't give me a random star right after, and he proceeded to give 2 more after that, along with a good refill.  Yet again, this fight gave the god luck  
    
By this point, I knew that this run was something special.  I felt like I was dreaming.  It was almost as if I couldn't get bad luck; the game wouldn't give it to me.  I was just hoping that I would be able to get a few decent fights to close out the run, but as it turns out, the game wasn't done giving perfect RNG.

Mr. Sandman (2:20.00): I press select to start with half health, because I want to take a knockdown late in the fight to get Sandman to do another dreamland express.  In order to get my health low enough, I take a few hits intentionally in the first phase.  

The two main pieces of RNG in this run are the refill Sandman gets for phase 3, and the delay he does once you get up from your knockdown.  I got the good refill (75%) and the shortest delay (50%), and this caused my time to be 2:20- pretty much as low as this fight can go for single segment.

Super Macho Man (55.97): In late 2015, MTPO speedrunner Ouijawii found out a way to sneak in extra hits on Super Macho Man.  When he told us the following day, the top 4 runners at the time (sinister1, zallard1, ouijawii, and myself) all collaborated for hours on sinister's stream and came up with 2 different strategies that use this mechanic to our advantage.  The first one gets him down at 30 seconds with either 1 or 2 stars, and the second one gets him down at 32-33 seconds with 2 stars guaranteed.  Having 2 stars going into the second phase is extremely beneficial, so I decided that I would use the guaranteed 2 stars strat if I was on a godlike pace, and if not, I would use the risky strat.

As it turned out, this was the most godlike pace I could imagine, so I went and did the safe strat.  I ended up getting the best luck possible in this fight, and although I don't know what the odds were in getting it, I would say probably <25%.  Even with the risky strat, you can't get less than a 53, so getting a 55 was pretty much ideal for the strategy used.

Before the Tyson fight, I had to pause to sort of appreciate the moment.  This was the best pace anybody had been on by a long shot, and it wasn't really because of execution.  It was because the game literally was trying to do everything nice to me that it could.  This pace was practically like a dream.  Nearly every fight had given me PERFECT RNG, which I didn't even know was possible.  Had I been on a pace a few seconds worse than this, I probably would have felt more nervous before Tyson, but instead, I was too in shock of the pace I was on to react.  I pretty much just assumed that the run was dead, and that I would choke on Tyson, or that he would give the 8 second delay.  As I pressed start, I didn't know what to expect, but I knew that regardless of how the Tyson fight went, this run would go down in history- whether it would be known as a world record or the greatest choke of all time, I wasn't sure.

Mike Tyson (2:27): If you don't know how the Tyson fight works, here's a run-down. In round 1, for the first 1:30, he exclusively throws uppercuts, and for the last 1:30, he throws hooks.  You can hit him twice after each punch, regardless of whether it's an uppercut or a hook. For the uppercuts, if you just dodge and hit him with the correct hand (same side of the screen as he threw his uppercut), your two punches deal 5 and 1 damage, respectively.  However, if you delay your 2nd punch just enough, that punch deals 5 damage instead of 1.  The timing on that window?  1 frame.  If you're too early, it deals just 1 damage, and if you're too late, he blocks it, and it deals no damage.  Tyson starts with 96 health.  That means that to do the first phase of the fight optimally, you need to land all frame perfect punches except for 1 (9 punches from Tyson where you deal a total of 90 damage, plus 1 punch where you deal the 6 damage necessary to get 96).  Unfortunately, you need to miss this punch by being early, or else you fall 1 damage short at 95.  He then would need to throw 1 more punch that you would need to dodge and counter, which on average, wastes 5 seconds in phase 1.

Once Tyson switches to hooks, your punches deal 2 damage each.  Meaning, each time he throws a hook, you can deal 4 damage to him.  Similar to uppercuts, there is a way to deal more damage- if you wait to throw your first punch until the last frame of Tyson's vunerability, it will deal 5 damage, and you won't get a chance to throw your second punch.  This is the optimal way to deal with his hooks, but it is very risky- if you're late, he blocks your punch, and instead of dealing 5 damage (or 4 if you're early), you deal 0 damage.  Note that even if you are perfect with your hooks, you can't deal as much damage to him here as when he does uppercuts.  This means that any time you lose to missing uppercuts in phase 1 ends up costing you more time overall, because the more uppercuts he throws in the 2nd phase of the fight (before 1:30), the more damage that can be dealt.

Tyson is also incredibly random.  He can do a variable delay after nearly every uppercut and hook, but the big killer is the 8 second delay that he has a 50% chance of doing in phase 1.  It actually wastes more than 8 seconds (typically between 10-16) because of the property that I explained above, so Tyson doing the 8 second delay pretty much kills any run.

In this particular fight, I start off by landing every frame perfect punch.  Then, I'm 1 frame too late, and I get blocked.  Thankfully, Tyson didn't do the 8 second delay, but I get my first knockdown at 1:02, which would've been 57 if I wasn't blocked.

He threw 5 uppercuts in phase 2, and he just BARELY got that 5th one out in time.  I hit all 5, and send him down for the second time at 1:42.  Given the same execution and pattern in phase 2, if my phase 1 had been a 57, the 2nd knockdown would've been 1:32.  

In phase 3, I hit 6 frame perfect punches on his hooks, which was good enough for a 45 second phase, ending the fight at 2:27 (would've been 2:17 if I wasn't blocked in phase 1).

In total, I hit 20 frame perfect punches.  If I had missed that one punch in the first phase by being too early instead of too late, it would have been 10 seconds faster.  In other words, even with the same amount of mistakes, this fight could have changed drastically.  Although, to be honest, it's a miracle to me that I pulled out a 2:27 on a pace this good.  2:27 is a really good fight, and although it could've been better, I'm fine with it on a run like this.

I'd like to thank the two guys who influenced me the most in terms of running this game- sinister1 and zallard1.  The reason I learned to run Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! was because of watching sinister's stream back in late 2013/early 2014, and his series of tutorials helped me learn some of the more difficult fights.  Zallard also was a big influence for me, as I watched his stream shortly after finding sinister's, and his encouragement helped me push this time down to as low as it is.  Without these two, this run would not have been possible.

In all, although this run is beatable, the luck required, as well as the execution on Tyson, would have to both be insane.  There are people who could do it.  However, I will say this- if this run does get beaten, without the use of any new strategies, I will not be the person to do it.

First off big thanks to the SDA crew who keeps things running nice and smooth around here.

I would like to give a very special thanks to Adelikat for all the hard work he did, and without whom this run would not have been completed. I would also like to thank Matt Turk who was a source of inspiration, support and help. He developed many of the strategies seen in this run and set the bar incredibly high with his record times in this game. Also big thanks to all the folks listed below in the strategy credits sections whose work over the years has made this run possible.

After completing my segmented run I found that I was still wanting to play this game. It is addictive like that. I knew I did not want to try a single segment run yet and the individual levels table seemed kind of overwhelming. I decided to put it out there though and see if anyone would want to help out. Lucky for me I got a very unexpected response on the GameFAQ's message boards from TASer extraordinaire, Adelikat. At first he was thinking he would just help with strategy and general knowledge, but it didn't take long before the console came calling and he could not resist. TAS master that he may be, Adelikat was heavily involved in console MTPO at one time and had some records on the infamous RedTom's record shrine. It did not take him long to get back into the swing of things and he was putting up good times within the first week of playing.

The biggest benefit Adelikat brought to the table was his in-depth knowledge of both MTPO and TASing. He would simply stream himself TASing fights so we could brainstorm ideas for new or improved strats. If you think this would be tedious you have obviously not seen this man TAS on ustream. It is like playing a game in the twilight zone, where up is down and down is up. Basically he is so proficient at it, it is like he is playing in real time, but can stop and rewind to fix things if needed. Doing this is how we came up with some monster strats on Piston Honda 1 and Super Machoman. Most of the other strats were already out there on the internet and good enough so we would only have to make minor adjustments if any. It did not take long before Adelikat had gotten submittable times on King Hippo (0:37.97), Great Tiger (0:47.99), Piston Honda 2 (0:52.25), Soda Popinski (0:53.00), and Bald Bull 2 (1:28.48). But, there was a problem. We were unable to find a way of converting his videos to the three required SDA .mp4 qualities. At this point we were both pretty frustrated. Adding to the frustration was my erasing three fights inadvertently and having to redo them. I decided I was not about to give up on this after all the work we had put in and got back on the console. And I was on fire. I cranked out the five fights we needed in probably less than 100 attempts combined. I even managed to get Glass Joe (with star), Von Kaiser, and King Hippo on the same day when I was home from work with the flu! OK, enough boasting, on to the fights:

Glass Joe (0:42.00): The first time I saw Adelikat's TAS of MTPO this fight stood out, because it is normally so boring. But if you add a star punch at the end, boring turns to awesome. This may look easy folks, but I assure you its not. It took me close to 100 attemtps to pull this off, and then I accidentally formatted the DVD it was on so I had to do this fight a second time. You need sick luck and sick timing for this one, all for the sake of entertainment and so people wouldn't have to endure another mindnumbingly boring 42.00 face jab on Glass Joe.

Strategy credits: Adelikat

Piston Honda (0:43.82): Apparently this fight is frame perfect for the strat used according to Adelikat. I was doing a single segment run and just happened to get the insane luck needed for this. There was also less pressure since I already had a 43.97 and was not even trying for an IL time. Worked out well I must say.

Taking it to the next level, I have actually found two alternative strategies that will yield faster times, however they are both incredibly difficult and require massive amounts of luck. I would estimate the number of attempts required to get a mid-high 42.xx would be in the 400 - 1200 range. Maybe one day, but for now I am quite happy with this fight. Thanks to Adelikat for the easy phase 3 technique which is used here, and is only slightly slower than the much more complicated, difficult, and random phase 3's that can yield 42.xx.

Strategy credits: Adelikat, Matt Turk, and Sinister1

Don Flamenco (0:14.97): Frame perfect Don as I like to call him. To get 0:14.97 which matches the TAS requires two frame perfect movements, the first, to obtain the star, and the second, to dodge late enough to start the speedy punches, but not so late as to lose a single frame which would yield 0:14.99. This fight was also on the DVD that got reformatted and it was redone.

Strategy credits: Daniel Teixeira, Martin Charlebois, and Adelikat

King Hippo (0:37.61): This fight was done by Andres Delikat of TASVideos.org. Here are some details he provided about this particular fight: Due to the way the clock works, a human player has a 2 frame margin of error in the entire fight to still get a .61 time. If the total frame error is between 3-6 the time will be 37.82. If the timing error is 7-10 it will be 37.97 and between 11-15 will result in a 38.00 time. In order to get max damage from the open mouth punch, the player can not be more than 5 frames late, so any margin over 15 will result in a failed attempt. The only randomness that matters with King Hippo is him opening his mouth. There is a 6/16 chance of him opening his mouth for any given punch. Thus the odds of getting the correct randomness to get the fastest possible time is a 6/16 * 6/16 * 6/16. This reduces to a 27/512 to approximately a 5% chance.

My personal best on King Hippo is 37.97 putting me in the 7-10 frames of timing error. To be quite honest I would have been perfectly satisfied with this time since you only get the correct randomness 5% of the time, but thankfully Adelikat came through with this fight and very appropriately equalled the TAS time.

Strategy credits: RedTom

So that is it for the MTPO IL table. These times are certainly very good, but definitely improvable with the exception of Glass Joe and Don Flamenco 1. I can confidently say that the only way to beat any of these times would require very, very good luck and some extremely precise execution.

* I originally thought Matt Turk invented the spin sucker and credited him as such in my segemented run. I later found out it was RedTom who came up with the move.

** I refer to Matt R. Turk as The Master when it comes to this game because of the fact that you can't see his fights, or prove that they are real. You simply must have faith. Now I have a bit more to go on than faith, in fact, I myself was a Turk doubter early on in my speed running of this game. But the exchanges we have had have opened my eyes to the truth. He is the ultimate in this game, No one else will ever come close to what he has done in this game, myself included.

Von Kaiser (0:35.61): First off, major thanks to McHazard for adjusting the strategy ever so slightly to where Phase 1 is much, much easier in real time than the pure TAS strategy is. It starts off with a face punch, then buffer a right gutter, then hold up as soon as Mac's gutter starts to come out, similar to a reverse dizzy destroyer. This adjustment is 1 frame slower than the TAS, but luckily, the TAS time is the earliest frame in the 35.61 increment, while this fight ends up being the latest while still being a 35.61. After the right gutter, you want to buffer 2 left gut punches, then tap up really fast after the 2nd left gutter to keep his guard up so you can land the next 2. Now this next punch is the toughest part of the fight right here. You need to delay at least 1 frame after the left gutters before you throw a jab. You also need to make sure that you tap up+punch extremely fast so Kaiser guard does not react to it by raising his guard up. Given perfect execution, you still only have a 3/16 chance of the punch to connect in the correct way. Punch #8 is the same as the punch in most of the other Kaiser strategies where you just buffer it and let go of up at the correct time. If phase 1 was done frame perfectly, then you will get a 0:20 on the clock instead of the standard 0:21, which I happened to get! In phase 2, you have to tap up when Kaiser drops his guard, then throw 2 gut punches. I did not get a frame perfect phase here since you can actually get it to where it looks like he doesn't duck when the 1st punch connects. In phase 3, you need to do a frame perfect duck in order to save 1 frame vs a frame perfect quick dodge. I happened to get it in this fight, which meant of the frames lost vs the TAS, I lost 1 in phase 1 intentionally, and one in phase 2 unintentionally.

Strategy credits: Matt Turk, Miles Hardinson, Brian Picchi, and McHazard

Great Tiger (0:47.48): Instead of going for gut punches to gather stars, I go for face punches which is very slightly faster than gut punches. The difficulty of this strategy is that for a face punch to actually yield a star it needs to be thrown frame perfectly or else you get nothing. I tried to find a buffer to get these stars, but there simply doesn't exist a set of movements that let you get them, so I hit all 4 of them manually. Thankfully, I found 2 buffers that work for the final 2 punches of the phase to where I will get a 47.48 as long as I actually get all 4 frame perfect stars. This one attempt finally got it, although it deviates from a standard Tiger fight because I threw a star a bit earlier than usual, but since I did not lose track of the stars thrown, it did not matter and I still matched the TAS time regardless.

Strategy credits: Matt Turk, Zallard1

Bald Bull 1 (0:56.25): This was a pretty brutal fight for a variety of reasons. First off this guy is 4 fights into the Major Circuit, which means every time I want to fight him 3 times, I have to fight Don, Hippo, and Tiger x 3; not fun. Secondly, this fight is very random and has 2 very difficult punches that often end runs.

Phase 1 is the standard 17 second knockdown, so nothing too wild yet. The good stuff starts in phase 2 where I need a 50% random star from the first punch. This allows me to gather 3 stars and unload one since holding 3 stars keeps Bull from dodging them, then I hold up for the moment before his first hook to manipulate his guard, dodge, then star punch. Here is where a good chunk of my attempts that got this far died; I need to get a star off of Bull dropping his guard, but my punch has only a 2 frame window to hit AND I can't be holding up when the punch is going off. If I'm too late on that window, Bull attempts to throw a hook, which means he blocks my attack. After that, I need to counter his hook which has a 50% chance of giving me a star, then I need a 25% likely rolling jab pattern out of him to finish off the phase with 3 stars. It's also worth noting that I used a buffer strategy that I made to throw the star frame perfectly.

Phase 3 hinges on whether or not you get the 1/4 refill, if Bull goes into the rolling jab pattern (you DON'T want this to happen), and the final uppercut in the fight. So if you are late on the final uppercut, there is a 9/16 chance that he won't dodge the uppercut, but if your quick dodge is frame perfect, it hits 100% of the time! In this fight, I believe I was 1 frame too late on the quick dodge, so I was luckily bailed out by Bull not dodging the final uppercut. Sub 56 is possible, but just barely. This fight took 344 attempts since I started going after it again. I didn't track how many it took for him when I got the 57.00, so I guess add about 100-200 to that or so. I don't think I will pursue it considering the annoyance of getting to this fight to do attempts.

Strategy credits: RedTom, Martin Charlebois, Matt Turk, Jack Wedge, McHazard, Zallard1

Soda Popinski (0:46.25): So, for the longest time, this record was pretty much the one that sinister and I thought we'd never see on SDA. The luck required is absurd and it just seemed like there wasn't enough there to get a time as low as this without knowing precisely what Matt Turk did for his run. I am pretty sure this strategy is different than what he used, because this was just baaarely possible thanks to a number of really important factors; the first being McHazard. He told us straight up that the TAS gutters were simply not recommended in real time for IL purposes. Even if they were reliable to execute, each one makes the luck for the fight skyrocket, which is not exactly something ideal for real time runs. However, he shared a strategy that can potentially beat Turk's 46.48... if you are real close to frame perfect. You also have to assume you get the ideal pattern every time of course, so you cannot slowly improve your PB into the 46.xx range; it's all or nothin' with this fight! Soda has this quirk with his uppercuts where if you are holding down, he will freeze in his crouch animation and allow you to punch him, which sets a flag that allows him to be knocked down with any subsequent star punch in that phase. You basically needed to do ducks where you don't let go of down then intercept Soda's uppercut early. Also, when that duck happen, you need to tap punch ahead of time, assuming you get the best possible delay out of Soda every single time. You also cannot have the punch button held for any significant amount of time, or else Soda reads your input and decides to uppercut your face. I didn't realize how important assuming the best pattern was until recently when McHazard pointed it out to me, so up until now I could never ever land the early uppercut counters. So I ended up getting a 46.82 in a mere 8 attempts... which is very unusual considering the ~1/150 odds required for all the luck. Check out the VOD here: http://www.twitch.tv/zallard1/c/5958592

So, I was ready to give up on this unless something new were to be found, and I'll be damned, something new popped up the day after I did this! Enter Jack Wedge. I've actually conversed with Jack in the past in the early early days of routing Punch Out Wii on the GameFAQs forums, so I know he's a pretty great Punch Out player & overall strategist. He also had a history with MTPO related things, and his blindfolded endeavors seemed to conveniently bring him back just in time, because Soda IL attempts were starting on my end. He was in the middle of finding interesting random stuff for Soda, two of which actually give you more options in single segment runs if the luck goes sour! However... the 3rd thing he found was exactly what was needed... a way to execute a buffer strategy in the Soda fight. There are no options for buffers, except the duck. But because the duck locks your down input and freely lets you punch, it seemed like the duck was required. Well, Jack found that you can buffer a right dodge and tap punch then down sequentially, which both let the punch get thrown, and keeps Soda frozen to take the hit. This little strategy has been named the Screwdriver by Jack. The Screwdriver may seem minor just because it accomplishes the same thing the duck does on the surface, but the kicker is that this maneuver is consistently frame perfect in real time, whereas the duck cannot be because of the nature of the input. This was the consistency I needed to convince me to keep going on attempts, because the increments are about 3 frames long on average for Soda. Considering the Screwdriver saves ~6 frames on average compared to the 46.82, this simply had to be included in the fight. Amazingly enough, I got the run a mere 46 attempts after the initial 8 to get the 46.82, totaling out at 54. Did I mention that this fight has ~1/150 luck? Because these sets of attempts sure could have fooled me...

The other 46 attempts: http://www.twitch.tv/zallard1/c/5990665

This concludes the journey of not only getting every single MTPO IL WR onto SDA, but getting each record to have a video at all. This was a team effort between me, sinister1, McHazard, and Khananaphone (with special mention to Jack). RedTom's website listed records in the form of text, with no video attached to any of them, so it's real great to have been able to honor every one of Matt Turk's records as legitimate competition to raise the IL table to the standards this game truly deserves. Even though I have not spoken to you in great excess, thank you Matt Turk for giving this game all the time you did. You always have, and always will be, one of the greatest MTPO players of all time, and this is proof that your efforts will never be forgotten.

Strategy credits: Daniel Teixeira, Chrome Virus, Adelikat, McHazard, Sinister1, and Jack Wedge.

Bald Bull 2 (1:19.82): Because I was going for multiple IL's at once, I paired this with Honda 2 attempts for efficiency reasons since you need to go through that fight to get here anyways. Not much has changed since sinister's 1:20.82 submission not long ago aside from tighter execution, but I'll recap some of the more important info. The original strategy for real time runs of Bull 2 would include a technique called the "Bull Dozer" which gave you a 1/16 chance at an extra star. Matt Turk had a time of 1:21.82 which included two dozers, which is 1/256 luck, pretty rough to say the least. However with McHazard on the case, he found a way to effectively gutter Bull 2. Thankfully each gutter only required 1/4 luck as opposed to 1/16 like the Bull Dozers did, which is an enormous advantage! The fight needed to be worked around how the gutters work, but this seems to be solid.

Phase 1 starts off with provoking 2 attacks and gathering stars with delayed gut punches. I do a left gut punch because it's a few frames faster and the HP ends up to where the extra damage from both rights isn't needed. As I throw the star punch, I'm holding up so Bull's guard is raised during the uppercut. Then I need to buffer a left gut, and immediately as Mac's punch goes off, I need to hold up again. After the gutter is landed, the rest of the phase is pretty self explanatory. Phase 2 starts by holding up+B to get the freebie star, then I buffer B and hold up as soon as Mac's gut punch goes off, same as the gutter in phase 1. Then you use 2 stars and pray he goes into an "ear-run" pattern at the end of the phase. The odds of it happening are 1/4 likely, but once it lands, the rest of the fight is mostly over. Phase 3 you just need to land the gut punches and finish the fight off like normal. As far as any improvement to this, the most likely thing you could do would be to fit in another gutter in phase 3 to mirror the one in phase 2, but that increases the luck to 1/256. Not completely impossible or anything, but still quite a grind considering the execution for this is also really tricky. I might revisit this one one day, but until then, sub 1:20 is pretty great. This fight took 124 attempts to get.

Strategy credits: Matt Turk, Adelikat, Daniel Browne, and McHazard

Don Flamenco 2 (1:23.61): This fight is dumb, outrageously luck based and doesn't deserve intensely detailed comments, so I'll just go over some of the basic guidelines. You need to hit the Select button before the fight even begins to reduce your health by half. This considers you as damaged, which unlocks a 1/8 likely refill in phase 3 that's far lower than usual. The first counter off of Don 2 will yield a star, and as long as you're holding a star in reserve, you also have a 1/16 chance of a subsequent counter to also yield a star. You do get a guaranteed star every few counters or so (forget the # of counters at the moment), so that helps a little. You want to end phase 1 at around 44-45 seconds or so for most of the situations you will likely get for phase 1. Phase 2 is dictated by your refill, which is 50% likely to be useless. Phase 3 also depends on the luck/execution from phase 2, but is most often the same as the one in this fight. Of all the IL's on this table, this is the one that is the most improvable, but good luck on that grind if you go for it, you'll need it all and then some. This fight took 689 attempts to get just to give you an idea.

Strategy credits: RedTom, Matt Turk, Adelikat

Mr Sandman (2:16.97): I have to give HUGE shoutouts to McHazard for this improvement, because the dude was very helpful in breaking down this fight to me to where I could even cut this much time off. He tested pretty much everything I suggested almost immediately. Thanks man!

As far as the fight goes, in light of McHazard's findings in his new MTPO TAS, it is now possible to deal more damage to Mr. Sandman in the first 50 seconds of the fight compared to the older strategies where you have to punch Sandman in the face. If you raise Sandman's guard before he starts any of his jabs, you can land gut punches that deal extra damage, which let you skip 4 punches in the Nightmare combos for phase 1. However, because of how optimized my Sandman time on SDA already was, this time I opted to completely forgo the Nightmare combos and go straight up with the full TAS strategy for phase 1. This saves a very miniscule amount of time while ramping up both the difficulty and the luck of this fight significantly! You now need Sandman to naturally throw hooks, which is quite rare. You also need to hit Sandman with a frame perfect right gut punch in order to deal the correct amount of damage without getting blocked. Thankfully, McHazard found a right-quick-dodge buffer strategy that eliminates this concern, making this realistically feasible. For the final attack in phase 1, I hit Sandman's gut after his natural hook, then quick dodge into a jab, which results in a really minimal frame loss for the buffer while maintaining 100% consistency, which is so important in this fight now.

Phase 2 starts with 2 Extended Nightmares, then here's the unusual part, I buffer 3 left dodges, but I am required to tap the A button during the dodges to heighten the odds of Sandman doing a secret faster delay that would be 0% without any button manipulations, then I quick dodge all 3 uppercuts in the Dreamland Express to where I don't waste 2 frames on the final dodge (this lets me deal the max amount of punches in his stun). Because of the intense luck of this fight, I do not even risk the frame perfect gutter like last time because a left quick dodge only costs 2 frames, which is very miniscule in this fight since Sandman has the longest timer for round 1 compared to every other boxer in the game. At this point I have a 1:51, so I can provoke Sandman into throwing a punch so I can quickly get some extra damage in before he knocks me down after 1:59 + 1 frame (I can't get knocked down earlier than 1:59 + 1 frame or else Sandman wont do the 2nd dreamland express). I deal 3 hits since my pace is more similar to the TAS's pace than some of my previous submissions.

As soon as I get up for the final phase, I buffer a left dodge so I get a perfect visual cue on when to start dodging Sandman's Dreamland Express, which is the instant I see Mac completely centered. This allows me to dodge before he even flashes, which saves a nice chunk of time. Plus considering the extra damage I dealt before I got knocked down, I get to throw far less punches than older strategies. This is the only 2:16.xx Sandman time performed on console at the moment and rests a mere 0.49 seconds away from the TAS time. It also took 635 attempts of just fighting Sandman to get this particular fight. I will never improve this time... and this time I actually mean it.

Strategy credits: RedTom, Matt Turk, Adelikat, Sinister1, Zallard1, McHazard

Mike Tyson (02:07.82): So, it looks like the 2:10 submission from a while back just simply wasn't enough. It is identical to the 2:10 execution wise, but gets much better luck than that run while still pulling off all of the frame perfect punches required for the fight.

I had been working on improving my Mike Tyson PB pretty much the moment I started learning how to speedrun this game. Just beating him in round 1 was incredibly difficult considering you needed anywhere from 11 to 13 frame perfect hits just to see him hit the mat for the 3rd time in the first round. I slowly improved my times on him from the 2:50's, to 2:40's, 2:30's, 2:20's all the way down to my first sub 2:20 time, which was the 2:17 I had first submitted to SDA. I was pretty content with that for the time being, so I ended up leaving it alone for a while. Eventually, sinister1 and I were gunning for either matching or obsoleting every IL run we could that Matt Turk had on RedTom's leaderboards in hopes of each record having videos. We got to the point where the only two fights that remained were Soda Popinski and Mike Tyson, and since Soda Pop seems super unlikely to fall, we turned our attention to Tyson. Sinister got a 2:16, a 2:14 & a 2:13 shortly after that tied Turk's record on Tyson. I ended up doing some attempts a few days later on stream that I wasn't too happy with, so I ended up doing a bit of offline attempts for practice. I had eventually gotten the 2:10 fight on Tyson, which marked the first time that the optimal real-time strategy had ever been accomplished.

Anyways, onto the fight itself. Mike Tyson throws 10 uppercuts in phase 1 if you get a good enough pattern. You must match each of his uppercuts by dodging them and countering with a punch of the opposite hand. This deals 5 damage instead of 1, which is absolutely necessary for a 1 round fight. When you dodge and punch Tyson, it stuns him which leaves him open for a second punch. If you punch him again, it will deal 1 damage, but if you delay it to where it hits him on the latest possible frame in the stun, it will deal 5 damage instead of 1! Because Tyson has 96HP and you can cause either 6 or 10 damage per uppercut, you are allowed to miss one frame perfect punch in the first phase, so long as you hit the other 8. The pattern that I got was one of the fastest ever, and allowed me to score a 0:54 second phase 1; which was the 3rd time that had ever occurred on Mike Tyson ever. I had also landed every single frame perfect punch in the phase, so I was able to just buffer the final hit of phase 1 without delaying for max damage, which saves a couple of frames. A time anywhere from 0:54 to 0:59 makes it doable to get enough uppercuts in the next phase, so 0:54 is completely outstanding.

Phase 2 has Tyson get up with 56HP, which is enough to go down to 5 frame perfect punches with 6 uppercuts thrown. Getting a pattern where Tyson throws 6 in phase 2 is pretty strict depending on how fast you got Tyson down in phase 1. I missed the frame perfect punch on Tyson's 3rd uppercut, but the frames I lose from it actually doesn't matter in the long run (I'll explain that in a bit). He goes down at 1:28, which is only the 2nd time that has ever happened in a Tyson fight (first was from Matt Turk's 2:13 fight), and the one and only time that has been captured on video.

Phase 3 is the most difficult phase in this fight by a long shot. Tyson gets up with 40HP, but he no longer throws uppercuts since it is past the 1:30 mark on the clock when Tyson is fully centered, so instead you need to let him throw his hooks & counter it with a single frame perfect punch 8 times in a row. The frame perfect punches in phases 1 & 2 have pretty intuitive visual & sound cues that help out immensely, plus they're preceded by an initial punch so there's something of a rhythm to it, but the ones in phase 3 are different. You only throw one punch, so there is no rhythm to help you. There is no nice visual cue since Tyson is still for like half a second, and the sound cue isn't super helpful because Tyson's punch sound is going on continuously during the spot you need to punch, but I will say it's slightly more helpful than the visual cue you get here. Each successful punch deals 5 damage, so if every single one is hit, you save a cycle compared to missing one of the punches. The start of the phase begins with me slow dodging left and quick dodging right, which is a perfect buffer for the first frame perfect punch, but then I'm on my own for the other 7. It's worth noting here that I'm playing off of a 1:28 instead of a 1:30+ phase 1. You are able to do the buffer off of a 1:28, but only if the phase 2 time is a very high 1:28. The 1:28 I got was literally as early as it could possibly be while still working, so it's good I missed a punch in phase 2 or else this attempt would have ended here! I somehow pulled off the remaining 7 frame perfect hits in a row with the best pace I've ever had on this fight! Granted I didn't get the best luck in phase 3, the luck in phases 1 and 2 definitely give this fight an edge. To beat this, you would need a similar pace and incredible luck for phase 3, while equaling the execution from this fight & the 2:10 fight from before, which is no small feat. I'll include links to the live stream where I got this, as well as a link to all the attempts leading up to this fight.

Highlight of 2:07 only - https://www.twitch.tv/zallard1/v/8048403
Highlight of all attempts leading to 2:07 - https://www.twitch.tv/zallard1/v/8048512

I want to thank plenty of people. Dtysonator, DK28, Mr K, and Hurblat for cheering me on and believing that I can push records in this game too, McHazard for tirelessly testing things out for me for this fight, which ended up helping with finding the phase 3 buffer, Ouijawii for his 2:08 Tyson fight at the time, and of course sinister1. Back when I didn't even know anything about how to play Mike Tyson's Punch Out, let alone speedrun it, sinister really believed I could do well in this game based on my play in Super Punch Out. Ever since then, he has been more than helpful in showing me how to do strategies for everything in this game. If it weren't for him, I definitely would have never even thought about speedrunning this game.

Strategy credits: RedTom, McHazard, Zallard1