I’ve been playing Smash for years. I’ve been playing in tournaments since 2015 in the early days of Smash 4 before the DLC ended and the updates stopped. Before the season of the witch… I’ve always loved the game outside of competition, but the competition was a good excuse to always play and keep up with it. When I first started in tourneys, I was doing alright for a newbie, but soon I learned I was stagnating. On the first PR in my city, Buffalo New York, I was an honorable mention (HM). I was basically just outside of the top 10. This continued for a year but eventually, I wasn’t even good enough to make HM. That was fine with me, I obviously didn’t deserve it, so not being on the list didn’t bother me. My results themselves were a bit of a bother to me though, and the money input with nearly no money being gained was rough. I eventually stopped entering and just played for fun with my friends. Eventually, I moved to my current city of residence, Fort Collins Colorado.
In Fort Collins, the only people I knew were my girlfriend and her family. In my old city, my main social circle was the people I met from smash. I figured even though I wasn’t competing when I left, I could start here just to meet people. It worked, and I was placing much better here. This was also in the early months of the newest entry in the Smash series, Smash Ultimate. In New York, I went to 3 Ultimate tournaments before I moved to Fort Collins. I placed very decently at 2 of them and horribly at 1. I was surprised that I did as well as I did at the first couple, but the last one made me think it was a fluke. My first big weekly in Fort Collins, I beat the number 2 player in the city. I was really happy. I started going to multiple tournaments a week. At my peak, I was 3rd in Fort Collins and 4th in all of northern Colorado. It was a lot different here in Nothern Colorado. Tournaments were cheaper and I would regularly make money placing in the top 3. Something was different about my run here in Colorado. I would go home after a tourney and contemplate how to beat whoever I lost to. I had the drive to get better. This lasted for about a year but then the stress of competition became too much and I stopped. People were getting much better and I couldn’t keep up and I just barely got 3rd in the final PR. I decided not to compete after that and then COVID happened.
COVID changed a lot in my life, and one thing it changed was my desire to compete. It also helped that my girlfriend’s brother wanted to compete. For the sake of this piece, we’ll call him by his tournament tag, Giden. We would always play serious matches and he would practice on his own, but he wanted to go to a tourney and I decided I would go with him so he could meet the people, a majority of which are my friends. Entering these tournaments was a wake-up call for me. I couldn’t keep up. I was so rusty. Giden was my only practice and while he was getting very good and was good practice, it wasn’t the same as fighting multiple people a week. I placed very badly at my first few tourneys. I had one good Fort Collins local since attending again where I got 4th, but the 2 of the top 3 weren’t there. So this leads me to this project.
Ideally, this will be a weekly wrap-up of my performance in tournaments. I plan to attend most of the weeklies here in Fort Collins and hopefully 1 in Denver every week. This will be really for me first. It will be my way of processing the information from tournaments. Secondly, it might be an entertaining look into the mind of an amateur competing in local esports competition. Hopefully, some people like it.
Bernard Lamar Rice 