Hello everyone! I haven't written in quite a while. I thought I'd talk about the year I've had in Melee (and even some things out of game), because there are a lot of things I'm very happy with.
I competed a lot this year. Very easily the most I ever have. Around 45 offline tournaments. There was a very clear spike in attendance from when I moved to San Diego and finally had a very close weekly that I could consistently enter. I think being able to compete more frequently has been a very apparent source of my improvement. Just being in the tournament environment more often has been huge to me. I feel like I've been able to close out sets a lot more and be less afraid. I no longer get in my head about events being limited opportunities and putting pressure on myself to "make them count", as I used to before. Don't get me wrong though I still have a long way to go, I am still choking a lot LOL. Anyways, I wanna recap my significant events from the year and it's easy for me to divide the year into two parts, pre and post move.
Pre-Move
The beginning of the year was definitely a struggle for me. SoCal Melee was definitely on the downswing losing Verdugo, MiP, and SoCal Star League, and these were tournaments I was frequenting very often last year. There were less tournaments I had the opportunity to enter, so the whole "make each event count" mindset was present. To an extent, the silly pressures of "having to perform" as a ranked player had caught up to me as well. In conjunction with the pressure to make the most out of my limited events, I was really making competing hard on myself unnecessarily.
My first notable tournament of the year was TITAN 2, a college regional that had a good bunch of SoCal top talent. I got 13th at this one and felt like I had underperformed. I think the fact of the matter is SoCal is just a hard region to play in and you may not understand until you experience it for yourself. It's easy to know the household names from SoCal, like Fiction, KoDoRiN, Kurv, etc., but underneath them lies a plethora of talent that goes under the radar. I think the Random SoCal Player phenomenon isn't really experienced much these days since most of us aren't really traveling and we don't have many tournaments that other regions travel to. But I swear on my life most people would get caught off guard at the skill level of some of the Arcadians here. In winners, I lost to a Samus player named jams that is extremely fast and technical and has beaten some other SoCal ranked players. In losers, I lost to Alberto who had recently first got SoCal power ranked in 2024 and is a very fast Falcon player that I hope people get to see more of in the future. I don't really remember much of my thoughts about this tournament, besides feeling shaky and just not being able to handle the very high floor here in SoCal that day.
The next big tournament for me was GENESIS X2. My Genesis weekend started off not so great, as I went to the pre-local and lost to an unseeded DK Kid in my Round 1. I then proceeded to leave the venue with some friends and crash out about it over pizza. I won't lie, it's a bit silly but having this happen did get in my head a little bit for the main bracket. I made it out of my Round 1 pool and had to play SaltInYourEye, who had just upset Krudo, the next day. Luckily, my friend Jiffy play friendlies with me that night so I could prepare for the matchup. Without that, I might have lost to 2 different 13 year olds in the same weekend. My next 2 matches were against top 50 players that just shut me out hard, both in 3-0 sets. In winners, I lost to mvlvchi, mostly due to not really contesting his aggression and just getting hit really hard for it. And in losers I had to play Krudo, who was just clearly on another level as he clawed his way to 13th after losing in pools. I ended 65th, just feeling greatly outclassed. I think ultimately these players were hard draws, but I was disappointed in not being able to at least put up a fight against them.
- cliché