Tournament Prep - CEO 2022
I registered for CEO 2022 back in like March or something. I planned on setting up a routine to get back into top form., review vods, get stat breakdowns of my games using chartslp, talk to coaches, play in more online tournaments, the whole shebang. Obviously, I had a ton of time to do all this…so of course I chose to binge watch anime and eat gyros for three months instead of putting in actual work. As I’m writing this it is June 15th…Nine days before the first day of CEO, a few days before this I decided I should at least do something with this last week and change before the event.
The Plan
last week I decided I was going to enter a tournament every day this week to get my mindset shifted back to a competitive focus. The early points of next week I would review some vods with a few coaches on metafy to see if there is anything crucial that I’m missing, run through some basic drills, and then catch my flight on Wednesday evening. Obviously, due to my own stupidly self-imposed time crunch, I’m writing this down as I go, but this will be published all at once for your reading convenience.
The Breakdown
Monday 6/13 - Normal Tournament #2(1st place 11 Entrants)
Apparently there was a miscommunication on the start time which lead to a few people being DQ’d from bracket, which can be used to discredit bracket runs, but I’m of the mindset that time management and being aware of when your matches are is a skill for competing. If someone can’t make it to the match on time, they’ve lost the set. Simple as that.
My round one opponent laser camped me as Falco for four games and had 100 ping due to being west coast. It was one of the most infuriating matches I’ve played but I got the win and the TO sent him packing. Round two was a Peach which has been a match up I’ve struggled with since getting back into Melee, I ended up going 3-0 and got this message in the chat…
Nah, I’m just Random Samus Main Number 26
So that kind of ruled. Winners and Grand finals was the Sheik match up, which again, is just something I’ve had problems with, and will probably always have problems with. I managed to still get a win, and the games felt really good. This event was super small, and had people get DQ’d for poor time awareness, and the skill wasn’t the highest, but this is the first time since I started playing Melee in 2006 that I have ever won a tournament. It’s not the flashiest win, and the only thing I got out of it was a couple people subscribing to my stream afterwards, but I feel like it was an important tournament from a story telling stand point. Through out my career I’ve struggled with a lot of things:
Not a ton of tournaments in my local area
Overbearing parent that wouldn’t let me travel
College/work taking over all of my free time
Depression/adult life taking over my free time
Almost being homeless
Moving across the country
Grinding my wrist bones into a fine powder from overworking them
Match up inexperience
Being an old dog and trying to learn new trick
This tournament felt like the universe telling me “You can make it work.” Wouldn’t it be crazy if I did it again?
Tuesday 6/14 - TMT#81 Amateur/Redemption Bracket(2nd place 29 Entrants)
Could you imagine if I got back to back tournament wins out of nowhere? That would have been something else, huh? Unfortunately, I’m not that lucky.
Training Mode Tuesday is one of the more well know online tournaments, but it requires playing ladder matches to enter the main bracket. I work a 9-5, and spend 95% of my waking life looking at screens…Not really feeling like grinding an undetermined amount of games from the moment I finish work till 7:30pm, just to barely miss the main bracket which would leave me signing up for the secondary bracket. So I decided to just sign up for the amateur bracket and call it a day. This tournament is obviously a bit larger than the previous one, and the skill level of the players is a bit higher, but I still managed to piece together a second place finish.
It’s very hard to look at this bracket run sometimes because I almost completely ran away with the whole thing. All the way up till game three of winners finals I was undefeated in bracket which is something I have never done in any tournament. My opponent at the end made some final adjustments and that’s why they got the gold over me. Overall, not disappointed, I just know that I have a few more match up demons to figure out.
Wednesday 6/15 - Garbage Plates
Was planning on participating in Waddle Wednesdays, but forgot I had plans to eat garbage plates and swim in a pool with some friends. Additionally, with my previous two results I kind of wanted to take a mid week break to digest my thoughts on what I did right, and what I still need to work on…So that’s what I’m going to use this section for.
Across the board I think my gameplan, mechanics, and discipline were in good form. I recognized patterns in my opponent’s gameplay relatively easily and trusted my hands enough to carry my brain across the finish line in terms of capitalize on those patterns, and most importantly I was able to process everything just a bit quicker than usual. My main drawback was in Grand Finals of the TMT bracket. My opponent came in from losers with a really solid gameplay that utilized their character’s tools just enough to crush my autopilot. There are still some gaps in my knowledge base on how to get out of Marth juggling me with Utilts and Uairs, and getting back to the stage against him. Of the grand finals sets it would be safe to say about 60%-80% of the time in games was spent with me in the air getting juggled brutally, or me running my head into fsmashes, grabs, nairs, and dtilts trying to get back from the ledge.
At this point I think there is zero getting around it, I just have to get Aerial Interrupts up to 100% consistency so I can just do SOMETHING to get back on stage…Getting juggled I’ll have to tackle at another time.
Thursday 6/16 - Amy’s Angels (9th place 24 Entrants)
Of the tournaments I played in this week I think I was most upset with this performance. 9th out of 24 isn’t terrible, it just feels worse since there were back to back DQs in losers and then I feel as though I severely under performed in my last match. My round one opponent blew up in the discord after losing to me because there was a lag spike that “killed his momentum” which I would definitely understand…if I didn’t just take his stock and we were reset to neutral anyway…what really killed their momentum was them trying to catch my jump through platforms with down smash…but wouldn’t wait for me to jump to down smash so I would just punish them. Games with Freezus were close and I just got a little too impatient, same with my games against Advmultivitamin. In all honesty, I probably would have passed on this tournament due to me not getting home until 1 AM after eating garbage plates and swimming, but I felt like I needed to commit to finishing out the week and not being lazy.
Friday 6/17 - East Coast Fridays (17th place 106 Entrants)
East Coast Fridays is kind of Ol’ Reliable for online tournaments. Always a high entrant count, and a deep talent pool. I would like to say I could have gone further in this bracket, but if I could it would have been by maybe one more placement. Freezus getting DQ’d robbed me of a chance for payback, but did save me from an early entry to losers. My games against NoFluxes were close, remembered some vital information a bit too late in stage striking which cost me heavily in game one, and game two I just couldn’t hold my lead. Not too bent up about the loss there, just lessons for the future. My losers match in top 24 was against Woo and honestly, I don’t even remember the games, he just kinda waxed my ass and sent me packing.
Saturday 6/18 Conduit Gaming Sponsorship Invitational (25th place 32 Entrants)
Well, I was originally planning on ending these tournaments on Friday, but late afternoon on Wednesday I heard that I got approved to play in the Conduit Gaming Sponsorship Invitational. First prize is $250 to be spent towards travel for an event and a spot on the CG roster.
I had no delusion of winning this tournament. My lessons from earlier this week prepped me for the reality that I’m still losing to:
People with more consistent mechanics
Sheiks and Marths
So I went in with the mindset of just not getting completely dunked into the core of the Earth…How did that go?
Well well well…if it isn’t my old friend, the core of the Earth
Of course we got thoroughly dunked. The games were close-ish so I don’t feel too bent out of shape, plus they’re reinforcing the lessons that I’ve learned earlier in the week. Would have been nice to take a couple sets, or even just a couple games, but we’re not quite there.
Final Notes
This was a good exercise. Would I do it again? Sure, but I would have rather just not binged anime and pizza for three months and developed my thoughts and mechanics over the course of three months.
Honestly, my biggest take away from all this is that the way the community operates, it’s not completely free to just plan out a weeks worth of tournaments. There are definitely a couple tried and trues but for the weird days of the week I found myself having to do multiple searches on start.gg just to find something posted in my region. The community focuses around twitter and discords so if you’re not in the know you just kinda won’t know, so moving forward I’d really like to see organizers listing tournaments at least a day in advance, just so people looking to start out can find tournaments easier, and plan for them.
What Next?
This article is going up on the 21st. One day before I fly out down to Florida for CEO, I’m probably going to spend some time transferring some articles over from Dignitas so there is some content here for when people drop by and get packing. My next new write up will be on how I did at CEO and then I’ll probably do something on other tournaments I’m planning to travel to this year and training plans for said tournaments. Take it easy, everyone.