How does fatigue matter?
It doesn’t matter how strong they are. Everyone gets tired after a while. So for every section a fighter survives, one automatic ‘die’ vote is given to them at the beginning of the next section, making their survival that much harder. For example, Ryu has survived for four sections and Ken has survived for three. At the beginning of the next section, Ryu will have four automatic ‘die’ votes and Ken will have three.