Hello world!
So this past weekend one of the largest melee tournaments
off all time concluded. I’m referring to of course The Big House 5 (TBH5). This
tournament was quite a spectacle as many notable things would go down at this
tournament. Ok so before I get to talking about the event itself I just have to
point out that THB5 had 1500+ entrants making it the second largest melee
tournament of all time siting just behind Evo 2015. Quite an impressive
accomplishment for a community run event. Something else to note is that Nintendo
actually helped out and sponsored this event which is always nice to see, Nintendo
known in the past for being very reluctant to support competitive smash in any
way, shape, or form but in the past 2 years or so Nintendo has sponsored both
Apex and Evo so it’s great to see them helping out yet another tournament franchise!
So I think the biggest shock to everyone happened before the
event even started. Leffen, a player picked as a potential favorite if not the overall
favorite was not able to compete this past weekend. Leffen being a Swedish player
was denied access into the United States upon his arrival in Michigan. To the
best of my knowledge it had something to do with his work visa, whether or not
some paperwork wasn’t updated or if he even had a work visa or not isn’t all too
clear to me however. This was also strange as Leffen has been able to enter the
U.S. several times in the past with no problem. But with Leffen out of the
picture for this tournament it definitely raised some questions as to how
different this tourney may have been. Something else to note is that PPMD did
attend the big house, sadly though it wouldn’t be to play. He came to help out
on some commentary as well as to be a part of the analyst desk and while I personally
wish I could have gotten to see PPMD play it’s still nice to see him being an
active part of the community.
Moving on to the event itself there weren’t too many
surprises in top 8, it was a tournament for the gods as the top 4 places were
all taken up by them with Armada taking first, HungryBox taking second,
Mew2king taking third and Mango taking fourth. Bracket however was a different
story, we had Axe very far outside of top 8 as he lost to Abate, a Luigi main
from the Pittsburgh area in winners side round 1 which was a pretty big upset,
Axe then lost to Shroomed in losers side. Shroomed having a great tournament himself
making it into top 8 but getting double eliminated by Mew2king. I have to take
a quick second here to talk about Abate, the Luigi mentioned earlier, Abate had
quite the breakout performance this tournament not only beating Axe but beating
S2J, a Falcon from southern California as well, another big upset. During his
set with S2J it went to game 5 and in the final moments of the match it looked
like S2J was about to win as he had the perfect set up for a spike but as he
hitbox of the falcon spike connected with Luigi, a very rare glitch happened causing
Luigi to go absolutely nowhere and as a result Abate won the set. To top it all
off he made it into top 8 as well! Sadly though his run was ended by Shroomed
in the first round of top 8 after some unfortunate SD’s (Self-Destructs). Over all
though a great performance from Abate, it’s great to see characters outside of
the considered “viable” top 8 do so well. Another notable set was Nintendude,
and ice climber’s main vs Mango. Nintendude took Mango to game 5 on winner’s
side and almost caused a huge upset as it was still early in the bracket, and
although he didn’t win its fun to see the gods get challenged the way Mango
did.
All in all I think it was a great event, I’m aware there are
a couple events I’m leaving out such as the region crew battles but if I
mentioned them right now I would have to take the time to explain a crew battle
and how it works which I will talk about at some point but for right now it
would take too long and also it wasn’t too surprising as the considered
strongest melee region (SoCal) won the event pretty handily.
Here is a link to a video showing the final moments of the Abate vs S2J set
Credits to VGBootCamp for the clip
