I wanna start off by saying that, overall, Unranked was a great experience and I had a great weekend! I had a pleasant time meeting many Chicago and other Midwest players for the time. The tournament was ran well, major props for all the work put into recording so many sets. The format seemed great for the skill range it was intended for, it seemed like people had a great time watching so many sets with players close in skill. Thanks to the TOs and all others involved for making it happen!
Let's talk about my own tournament performance. I went in with very high hopes. I like to think that a tournament like Unranked (maybe this is just true for Arcadians in general) has a very strong appeal to a certain demographic of players that I'm a part of. I feel like these tournaments appeal to the players that have spent a majority of their time in the game getting beat down by higher level players to the point that, when these tournaments pop up, they're so drawn to the idea of like, "Hold on, I can actually win this one."I definitely was having these kinds of thoughts, which is honestly a good thing knowing how unconfident past me had been. So I decided to put in a decent amount of effort into studying most of the other top seeded players, working with other top Falcos to watch all these players' sets and do analysis of habits and formulate specific game plans. It was very engaging and it ended up giving me a strong amount of confidence going into the event. I felt very prepared to do well against everyone.
Fast forward and I ended up getting 17th, not even making it to the best of 5 stage in bracket. I was very disappointed and felt very dejected after bracket. I think this is the first time in a while that I had to cry after a tournament. I think I faltered quite a bit in my mentality this tournament. It is a very difficult thing to adjust mentally to playing out a big bracket that you can make a deep run in and even win. When I lost early in winners, for a brief amount of time, I thought I was just fucked. Having to make a deep losers run at a tournament like this, playing so many close in skill sets sounded daunting. I did manage to compose myself and I started playing well in losers for a few sets. I was playing quite well in the losers set where I was eliminated for a large majority of the set. But I ended up making some unforced errors on edgeguards that caused a mental shift where I was beginning to think I was playing bad the WHOLE time. And then I just crumbled. I think it is a good thing that I was able to process and become aware of this after the set. I want to work on this and be able to recognize in the moment that most of the time when we think we're playing bad, it's more likely the case that we were only playing bad for a much briefer period of time, rather than the entire time. I hope being able to reconcile with this mid-game will help me to stay composed during sets. If anything, I'm glad I was able to have this kind of a takeaway from an otherwise devastating experience for me.
Talking with other participants made me realize that, while it was ultimately a good and productive thing to do so much preparation, being better fundamentally in matchups and game knowledge is gonna be thing that helps you succeed in this tournament, and frankly all tournaments. So I will just continue to grow and improve in general and not let this one bad performance discourage me. I may have shit the bed, but I'm happy I made the bed to even shit in I guess.
- cliché