Brendan's Blog: Tournament Time

Two weeks ago, I attended my first Melee tournament at a local teahouse with my friends Justin "Eminent" Young, Joey "Ekans" Miyamoto, and Daniel "dgameman1" Mossaband. A bunch of my other friends came to watch as well. When my friend Justin first showed me a link to this touranment's picture on Facebook, seeing the "5 minute rounds" on the image and a "Get ready for c-stick spam" comment made me think that entering this tournament would be an easy win, which was actually mostly true.

I had contacted one of the TO's of the tournament to ask him questions and suggest using the Apex ruleset rather than the weird 5 minute, 5 stock format they had chosen. I guess communication didn't go through much, but they changed it to 4 stock, 8 minutes and choices of Final Destination, Yoshi's Island, Fountain of Dreams, and Battlefield, just missing out on Pokemon Stadium and Dreamland, which was fine. Another interesting rule of the tournament was that we weren't able to Jigglypuff's Side-B to recover and Peach's Side-B to recover up stage walls. Those rules didn't really matter to me though, since I stuck with Marth throughout the tournament as a safe pick.

So here I am, arriving at Yami Teahouse, I was a bit later because of a family dinner, so Daniel was able to retrieve my call number. I was number 3, so I was one of the first to play. While waiting for my game, I noticed the use of HDTVs, which kinda made me nervous of the lag, but it wasn't too big of a factor. Then I hear that the beginning bracket matches are Best Out of 1 matches, which freaked me out and forced me to use Marth. When they finally called up my opponent and I, I had also learned that we had to use the GameCube controllers they had, which I didn't mind too much, except I was more adjusted to my stiffer control stick rather than the old school controller. My match is Marth vs my opponents Roy, which was an easy 3 stock (I only lost a stock because I tried styling with a Dair).

My next matches were against a Zelda (4 stocked), Falco (3 stocked), and finally the guy who ended up winning first, who played Sheik, the character I despise the most as a counter to Marth, and Peach. I ended up losing to him 2-0 as the top 4 matches were Best of 3 and the Finals as Best of 5. First match he chose Sheik against my Marth and second match I chose Fox to go against his Peach, but I wasn't able to perform tech correctly because of the HDTV lag. So, I end up playing a Falco, who Daniel beat, for third place. First match was very close with me winning in the last stock. Second match was Yoshi's Story (which is the best stage for Marth according to most people, but I like Final Destination the best against Spacies) and I end up messing up too much, which resulted me losing in both of our final stocks. Third match was finally on Final Destination and I was up 3 stocks, but at the end, I end up winning by my opponent SDing off the stage. I ended up placing 3rd, winning $10 to the Teahouse.

Daniel ended up in the Grand Finals against the Sheik/Peach guy and didn't do too bad. He ended up losing 1-3 with Falco vs Sheik, Marth vs Marth, Sheik vs Sheik, and Game and Watch vs Captain Falcon. He won the Marth ditto because I taught him some secret Marth tech along the way.

To be honest, I only thought the Top 5 players were the actual players with skill at the tournament. I wish that the skill range of the tournament was quite higher, so I would be able to remember this as a more serious tournament experience, but nevertheless, good experience for my first one. There wasn't much nerves other than the Bo1 matches because of the single elimination bracket. Hopefully next blog will be my experience from a bigger tournament like Mayhem or Super Smash Sundays!