Board Thread:Versus Debates/@comment-28329451-20160501071244/@comment-34194151-20180106012515

No one really thinks about strategy often on this forum. On Paper, Pain also destroys sage mode naruto except naruto actually used his head and created diversions to kill each Pain. Naruto at his best intellectually only scrapes the surface of what Itachi Uchiha can do. Intelligence Matters guys.

First of all, its been shown that Itachi has a good grasp on how the rinnegan works. For example, he knew how to disable the shared vision of Nagato's summons, near instantly grasped how to defeat chibaku tensi, etc. So tell me, how hard is it for him, based on what we have seen of his combat strategy, to pull off a similiar tactic that naruto did against the Pains.

Step 1: throw smoke bomb. Step 2: Itachi makes shadow clone behind the cover of the smoke. Proof he can do something like this is that in Part 1 versus kakashi, he made a shadow clone behind kakashi while the water barrier was up. Step 3: The shadow clone charges out of the smoke and starts a fire jutsu or runs towards the Pains and uses great clone explosion. Its in Pain's nature to use the Preta path to absorb techniques. Step 4: while nagato was focused on the events going on front, the real itachi flanked all the pains and takes out the Reviver PAin similiar to how naruto did. The Pain's like to use a T formation, meaning that when itachi appears behind the Reviver Pain, he can also run the totsuka blade through the two paths of pains standing in front of the Reviver PAin. Look at that, 3 pains down just like how naruto did in the manga... Step 5: Then in a quick sequence of events, itachi seeks to reak the benefits of his sucessful suprise attack from behind Pain: deflects shinra Tensi with the yata mirror, which bounces the deva path back. Itachi uses amaterasu on the Ashura PAin a few feet away with ease while using his superior speed to cut down the the Animal summoning Pain  as it tries to summon. Step 6: Itachi versus Tendo Pain. Pain 's last hope is to attempt a chibaku tensi as itachi runs to finish him. If he uses almighty push the yata mirror deflects it back and Pain is vulnerable for at least 5 seconds. Shouldn't be too hard to figure out how this one ends. Again, if naruto can come up with a strategy using smoke bombs to take out Pain, so can itachi. My proof is naruto's battle with Pain and Itachi's intelligence which has been corroborated multiple times in the manga.