Hey whats up guys good morning!

I want to help enlighten you all on what I feel is the best way to choose a character for tournament as far as knowing when I feel you should and shouldn’t counter pick.
These are strategies I have used throughout my competitive career and they have proved very successful for me. However there are times I make a bad call and it ends up costing me.
Before I go into it I just want to say that you need extensive knowledge and know exactly how a character match up plays out. If you have questions its best to test things on your own instead of 100% abiding by what someone has told you a match up is. Match ups between two characters are so intricate that one small finding can change the match up entirely which  is why I recommend keeping up to date on all the latest strategies! Alright lets go into it.

My opinion and advice on having a main character and a sub character(s).
I feel that unless your main character loses a matchup more than 4-6 that you should invest in a counter pick/sub character for that match up.

Now the tricky part is choosing the best character for the situation. You may not even need to make sure the match up is a winning match up instead of the 7-3 in their favor. Instead I would focus on making it closer to 5-5 as much as possible. Yes I am saying 4-6 is fine.
For example my character may go 5-5/4-6 with the most of the cast and has a lot of 6-4’s as well as some 7-3’s but has one 3-7 match up. I would have a sub character for that one 3-7 match up and make sure that character also fits my style and won’t be a total playstyle contrast so I can switch and feel just as comfortable.

If you are a player who is using a highly footsies/rushdown type character. Stick to your realm and make sure your characters all fall in line with one another so you are comfortable. Same goes for the Runaway/Zoning/Setup type characters. Make sure you stay within your comfort zone.

Of course there are characters and players who are very much balanced inbetween those styles and can adapt on the fly but everyone is naturally comfortable with playing a certain way. I recommend staying in your comfort zone.