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If You Don’t Know, You Deserve to Get Hit

Last edited: 2026-01-19 03:30:10 · 25 · Edit Request · Discussion · History

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Categories: Fighting game terminology · Tekken series · Internet memes / games · Internet memes / sports / South Korea

🎮 Video game terminology

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1. Overview

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\n “10-hit combo! Ten-hit! Ten-hit! Ten-hit! Don’t you know it?! Don’t you know?! Don’t you knowwww!!!! If you don’t know, you deserve to get hit!!!!!”\n

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The origin of the phrase is a broadcast of the final match of Group B in the quarterfinals during the TEKKEN CRASH Season 2 event, which took place from August to October 2009.

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In that match, Han Kuma of Specialist used Kuma’s 10-hit combo against Ran’s Christie from Team Sanggu Captain. Unexpectedly, Ran failed to respond properly, got pushed back, was cornered, and then lost after being hit by a wall combo. It was in that situation that the famous comment was made. Right before Ran was KO’d without ever finding an answer, commentator Nin shouted, “Don’t you know?! Don’t you know?! If you don’t know, you deserve to get hit!!” The line became a huge hit, came to be treated as a legendary quote that expressed Tekken in the most compressed possible form, and ultimately transcended the fighting-game genre to become a line remembered in e-sports history.

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Tekken’s 10-hit combos mix high, mid, and low attacks, and although there are some guaranteed hits in the middle, in principle you can usually block the next attack even after getting hit by the first seven or eight. However, unlike the typical high-low guessing attacks found in many fighting games, these strings have almost no telegraphed startup, so you have to memorize for each hit whether you need to block standing or crouching. Of course, memorizing everything is difficult, but most of the damage is concentrated in the final attack, so as long as you block the guaranteed ender that leads into the last hit, the damage usually is not too severe. Players appearing in tournaments generally know most major characters’ 10-hit combos by heart. The problem was that the Kuma shown in the video was a fringe character who almost never appeared in pro-level play, so Ran really did get hit because he simply did not know it.[1]

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It was a meaningful scene that gave birth to a legendary quote, but unfortunately Specialist did not get a happy ending from it. Even though Han Kuma took two wins, Specialist was eliminated when Tongbal Love, the ace of Team Sanggu Captain, went on a tremendous reverse all-kill run.[2]

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2. Explanation

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This is, in effect, the direct meaning of the term first-time kill itself.

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In fighting games, it refers to overwhelming an opponent with a character, pattern, combo, mind game, or similar tactic that the opponent does not know how to deal with. It includes tactics that people are more or less bound to get hit by at least once, and it can apply not only to fighting games but to any competitive activity with versus elements.

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These situations often come up with low-pick-rate characters or newly released characters. Even in the incident that gave rise to this famous quote, Kuma was a niche character throughout the series, with rock-bottom pick rates and ambiguous performance. In contrast, infamously broken or simply strong characters usually have a lot of matchup knowledge already established, so this kind of thing happens less often with them. Of course, those are the cases where people often get hit even when they do know what is coming—which is precisely why those characters are considered broken or top-tier.

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Even outside of fighting action games, when playing RPGs or action games without prior knowledge, you often run into situations where you get stuck, fall into traps, or die to enemies. Games made by the Japanese company FromSoftware—well known under the “soulslike” label—are famous for this trait. Representative works such as the Souls series, Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Elden Ring, all of which attempted something new, are likewise known for their unfriendly systems and demanding trial-and-error. You can be damaged or killed by ambushes and traps lining ordinary routes, and if you fail to properly understand a tough enemy’s or boss’s patterns, you may die without ever mounting a real offense. Because of this, Korean fans jokingly say “If you don’t know, you deserve to get hit” as a self-deprecating way of talking about the unfairness.

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Even in the real-time strategy game StarCraft, there are “cheese” strategies—tactics that will steal one win if you do not know them. Even in real life, Kang Ho-dong, a legendary ssireum wrestler, once said that during his active years the opponents he feared most were ones he had never seen before. If you do not have the information and cannot prepare, then even a veteran is bound to get blown out at least once.

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In Japan, similar ideas are expressed with terms such as neta-goroshi, wakaran-goroshi (わからん殺し), or shoken-goroshi (初見殺し). The latter two can be translated roughly as “if you don’t understand it, it kills you” and “if you are seeing it for the first time, it kills you.” The expression is not used as often these days, but in North America, one-off gimmicks that will get you at least once if you do not know them were sometimes called shenanigans, meaning something like a trick, scam, or hustle. It seems people are basically the same everywhere.

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The phrase is not only used for cases where you get hit because you do not know an enemy’s technique. It can also be used in RPGs and similar games when you suffer losses because you misunderstood an event or a system. In such cases it is related to RTFM, in the sense that the point is usually that you were supposed to understand the system first. On the other hand, even if you know the relevant information, there are cases where the underlying numbers are simply overwhelming or the design itself is unreasonable. In those cases there is also a variation meaning “So what if you know?”—used to stress that the situation is unfair enough that knowing changes nothing. In Tekken 8, for example, Jack is so oppressive that people say you have to take it even when you know it, giving rise to the meme “healthy applause.”

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Sometimes only the line itself gets parodied. In particular, when a Ghost in StarCraft launches a nuke, people say things like, “If you don’t know where the Ghost is, you deserve to get hit!” It was actually used in a match between Lim Yo-hwan and Hong Jin-ho. Later, Park Sang-hyeon parodied it in StarCraft II as an announcer. There is even a variation that goes beyond simply getting beaten up: “If you don’t know, you deserve to die.”

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Even in grappling, a genre within martial arts, most situations are like this: if you do not know, you are going to get caught. In striking arts like boxing or Muay Thai, when an attack comes in, anyone can at least imagine the idea of dodging it or blocking with their arms and legs, whether or not they can actually do it. But in grappling arts such as wrestling, judo, or jiu-jitsu, the opponent grabs and controls you, advances into a favorable position, and then applies a submission to finish the exchange. For someone experiencing it for the first time, it is very hard to understand why the situation is disadvantageous, what the position means, or what they are about to get hit with next.

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In Fall Guys, custom maps made with Fall Creator do not let you view the overall map layout at all, so you cannot study the course even a little before the game begins. For that reason, people say it matches this idea exactly even though it is not a fighting game.

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Even in the ancient stratagems known as the Thirty-Six Stratagems, there is a tactic called confusing the enemy in troubled waters, whose purpose is to throw the other side into confusion. It works in the exact opposite direction from “know yourself and know your enemy.” Just as it is valuable to know both yourself and your opponent, it is also an excellent strategy to prevent your opponent from understanding you. In information-theory terms, it leads to the idea that information asymmetry directly becomes choice asymmetry, echoing Newcomb’s paradox.

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Because of this, the phrase has remained alive for more than a decade thanks to its extraordinary versatility. It can be applied not only to fighting games, but also to surprise strategies or cheese in strategy games and sports, and even to broader situations in life where people are rattled by something they have never seen before. It is also short and intuitive: even someone who does not play games can instantly understand the two simple ideas, “If you don’t know, you get hit,” without needing to learn any complicated gaming terminology. Even though quite a lot of time has passed since commentator Park Hyun-gyu said it, the line is still quoted all over the place. It is, quite literally, an immortal classic of the Tekken scene.

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3. Miscellaneous

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Up until the early 2010s, when teacher authority was excessively strong, it was very common in South Korean schools for students to be physically punished if they “didn’t know” something. For example, an English teacher might call on a student in class and have them translate a passage from the textbook, or a math teacher might bring a student up to the board and order them to solve a problem. If the student failed to interpret the passage or solve the math problem, they would be caned on the palm.[3] The reason was simple: they were literally being hit because they really did not know. This was true not only in public schools but also among private cram-school instructors. Entering the 2020s, however, teacher authority has declined so drastically that paradoxical situations have emerged in which teachers are instead the ones being hit by students.

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There is also a sister phrase: “If you skip it, you deserve to die.” It existed before, but StarCraft pro gamer Kim Sung-hyun popularized it.

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The motto of the South Korean military’s chemical, biological, and radiological branch is “You must know in order to survive.” If you go around not knowing what this stuff is, you are going to die…

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Footnotes

At the time, the Tekken series had not yet been released on PC (though Tekken 6 and Tag 2 did at least come out on Xbox 360). That meant that unless you owned a PlayStation, you had to go to an arcade and pay for each match. As a result, if there was no user at your regular arcade who played a particular character, then no matter how skilled you were, you had little chance to fight that character directly and learn their patterns through experience.
They did at least go on to win Season 3, take second place in Season 4, third in Season 5, second in Season 6, and fourth in Season 7, so aside from Season 1, which they did not enter, and Season 8, after the team had disbanded, they remained one of the storied flagship teams in TEKKEN CRASH history.
Depending on the teacher, the body part struck varied: besides the palms, it could be the soles of the feet, the buttocks, the thighs, and so on.

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If You Don’t Know, You Deserve to Get Hit

1. Overview

2. Explanation

3. Miscellaneous

Footnotes

License

Site Notice

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