What an electric start to 2017 this tournament was! I usually organize these posts in loose chronological order, and sprinkle the content with digressions. This post won’t be any different. I’m always open to criticism on the format of these posts, but for the most part, it seems that people are happy to read from beginning to end, so they don’t miss any of the content I throw in.

The Weeks Leading Up to Genesis

When you reach a certain level in smash, it’s easy to fall into the habit of not practicing outside of tournaments, or maybe outside of fests. You kind of assume that after 10 years, you’ll be able to execute most of your actions properly, and so daily practice isn’t really necessary. When reviewing my own matches, I started noticing simple mistakes that would cost me in matches. For example, while dash-dancing and wavedashing with Marth, I would occasionally do a horizontal airdodge instead of the intended wavedash. This halts my momentum in movement, and gives the opponent a brief opening. In a matchup like Marth versus Sheik, that brief opening is all it takes to get hit by an Ftilt. That one missed wavedash at 80% gets Marth hit by an Ftilt, which leads into Fair. Then, from a strong position (dash-dancing versus Sheik), I end up in an awful position (getting edgeguarded versus Sheik).

Looking more carefully at this sort of mistake helped me more fully understand why I wasn’t seeing success despite feeling like I had a strong theoretical grasp of certain matchups. Let me emphasize that this isn’t the same thing as having a problem executing a punish game or knowing the best way to recover in a matchup – this is as simple as landing a wavedash when I want to wavedash. Other similar mistakes include missed wavelands on platforms (accidental airdodges), tournament-winners (ledge-jump, which is extremely unsafe and always accidental), and so forth.

What’s the solution? Practice everyday. Or almost everyday. I figured it couldn’t hurt, so I began regular practice once the new year began – either by going to a tournament, inviting people over and streaming a fest, or practicing by myself for 1-2 hours. If I practiced myself, I would tell myself I’d only play for 30 minutes, but I always found something I wanted to practice more, or discovered something new to start practicing.

Let me contextualize the narrative a bit. My first tournament of the year was at the Fantastic Store weekly in Virginia. This tournament included local talent such as Zain, Junebug, Cool Lime, and so forth. Zain beat Junebug on the opposing side of bracket, and so I played Zain in Winners Finals. Zain beat me for the first time last June, and we went back and forth for a few weeks, but he hasn’t beaten me since then. Our sets are usually pretty close, though. I beat him in Winners, then I try Fox in set 1 of grands and lose, but I 3-0 him in the next set with Marth. It looked like his punish game off throws was a bit weaker than mine, and in classic Zain fashion, he very quickly started compensating for an identified weakness (which made for great practice in the coming weeks).

The next day, I went to Xanadu, where I got 2nd place to Plank (losing 2 sets to him). This was unfortunate considering, just the week before, I made a troll post on the MD/VA Melee Facebook page calling out Maryland for being bad after VA had seven players listed on the SSBMRank Top 100 (if you don’t know me very well, you might be surprised to learn I have a bit of a trolling streak… but now you know). Plank has been one of my demons in MD/VA, and we go back and forth all the time. He’s extremely good at the Marth matchup, and our sets have frustrated me time and time again. Part of the frustration was the fact that I would win anytime I decided to commit to Fox for the set. This led me to question whether I should be bothering with Marth versus Sheik at all, and whether I should just stick with Fox. The downside to that is I would have to worry about ensuring my Fox was warm anytime I had to play against a Sheik.

That weekend, I hosted a big fest at my place and continued my daily practice. The next week at Xanadu, I was looking very, very clean. The practice clearly paid off. The night before, I also did a Marth versus Sheik analysis on my stream, and mixed it in with actual practice. It felt good to be immersed in the game, and have my daily practice show through in cleaner gameplay. Unfortunately, Plank was not in attendance at this Xanadu so I couldn’t get the runback. I lost to HAT in winner semis, but committed to a losers run, where I 3-0’d him in the runback, and took two sets against Zain to get 1st.

The next day, Chillin came over and we played for a few hours. That was some much-needed Fox practice. Living in Maryland lets me enter more tournaments, but I lose access to our good Fox players who all live in VA (except for Obi, who is on the rise but not quite yet as good as Chillin, Redd, and Milkman). The day after that, I played with Junebug to practice for AEX, a regional event in Philadelphia the next day (exactly one week prior to Genesis 4). This was going to be my last time competing before Genesis – I wanted to relax a bit the week of Genesis and let my prior weeks of practice sink in. So after two weeks, I struggled with and worked at the Sheik matchup, and wanted to see if I could take AEX home. Here, I got my rematch against Plank in winner semis. And I lost. It was literally a last hit scenario on game 5, but I lost. Those scenarios are really tough versus Sheik due to the fact that all of her moves lead to a kill, and Marth completely loses kill setups when Sheik is at high % – he needs a stray hit. And then in losers, I lost 0-3 to Junebug, who hasn’t beaten me in quite some time. Needless to say, I was discouraged. In fact, I tweeted out that it was time to stop being so stubborn about Marth versus Sheik. Why not just play Fox when that is clearly an easier matchup? My Fox is also very strong, in my opinion. So that was the tone for the day.

Three things happened that day that significantly affected how I would approach my G4 bracket..

1) I began thinking about my set with Plank relative to how I played against Sheik previously. I felt far, far better about my gameplan in the matchup. I deeply studied PPMD videos, and a couple other Marth versus Sheik videos, and felt my grasp of the “goals” Marth should aim for at each stage in the matchup was much more solid. The progress was clear, and despite the loss, I began to see a path to success.

2) Pools were released for Genesis 4. As a top 64 seed, I was floated past round 1, so it was easy to see my projected opponent: Swedish Delight (assuming I beat Nightmare). In my head, and in the minds of many others, Swedish is a top 10 player (despite what SSBMRank says). He is known for the “touch-of-death” on spacies. Did I really want to forsake my weeks of practice with Marth against my hardest foreseeable matchup at G4? If I switched to Fox at this point, I would, in a sense, be “cramming” for that match. My Fox is good, but can be hit-or-miss, and I had spent most of my daily practices playing Marth.

3) When I got home, I decided to message PPMD asking for advice on a few points for fighting Sheik. I played Overwatch for a couple hours, then came back and checked Smashboards again… only to discover that not only had PPMD responded, but he had written on my profile eight hours before I messaged him. Apparently he had been watching my set with Plank, and offered me a brief, one-sentence criticism (he’s an expert at this). Following our brief exchange, I felt more confident about what needed work in my gameplan.

Every once in a while, you have to ask for help. Asking for help makes a big difference. I’ve asked for help before (this wasn’t the first time PPMD and I talked about the matchup), but I was still only as good as I was. Maybe I would find a greater benefit from asking Sheik players for advice, rather than just Marth players.

Let me now give a shoutout to Captain Faceroll. The losses I’d suffered to Sheik over this period of time included a ton of getting “stairway-to-heaven” tech-chased on the platforms. I sort of assumed that Sheik could always get grabs, so I picked “optimal” tech-rolls and tried to take as little damage as possible… I decided to DM Faceroll and ask if he had any tips for getting out of this. He taught me that tech-in-place buffer-spotdodge beats waveland grab (but loses to aerial). This was huge for me. It’s not an end-all solution, but I now had a mix-up game on the platform. I had more options, and more ways to escape being combo’d or tech-chased by Sheik. If I’d never asked Faceroll for help on that specific scenario, I still would be tech-rolling every time.

I then asked Plank for help. Despite a fun rivalry over the past few weeks (Plank was fired up from my post calling out Maryland), he was, of course, very willing to help out. He came over to my place the Tuesday following AEX and we played for a few hours. I still wanted to take it easy on the days leading up to Genesis, but I thought training with a Sheik who really knew the matchup would be worth it. Prior to practicing with Plank, I reviewed my notes over the past year – I noticed that, after not playing a matchup for a while, it’s easy to fall back into poor habits and forget the notes you’ve taken. This is why it’s important to not only take notes, but to study your notes. But I digress. We played, and I felt like I was finally playing the matchup. It also didn’t hurt that Plank excels in the matchup relative to most Sheiks I’ve played.

That was essentially all of my practice leading up to the event, so let’s talk about the event itself!

Genesis 4: Day One

I flew to California at 7am EST on Thursday morning, landing at about 1pm PST. I took it easy most of the day – walked around a bit, explored local food options, picked up my badge, and made sure to sleep extra early.

The next morning, I headed over to the venue to enter the teams tournament with Nintendude. I found out about a week prior that Nintendude retired his Ice Climbers in teams, and now plays Puff. He’s got a solid grip on Puff’s gameplan in teams, but I think our chemistry was a bit lacking. It definitely showed when we got opened up by FatGoku’s Fox in winners finals of our round 1 pool, and ended up getting knocked into losers 0-2. A good litmus test for teams chemistry is the ability to handle a fast opponent who knows how to target-switch well, which FatGoku was. We weren’t prepared.

After Melee teams, I had my sm4sh pool. I didn’t prepare at all for sm4sh. I play no more than once a month since I retired last spring, but I still find it fun. I find Kirby to be especially fun, and he is one of the characters with whom I really feel I can be creative. Over the course of my sm4sh career, I have co-mained Kirby with one other character, and that other character changes from season to season. Most people know me for my Corrin play, when I almost took out Ranai last spring, but I’ve also co-mained Rosalina and Robin. I retired Corrin because I thought her meta became boring at high level (sideB!!!).

There was a brief period in October where I started playing sm4sh again. I played Kirby, and tried picking up Sheik. Sheik wasn’t working out too well, so I tried Lucario. Then Lucario didn’t work out so well. I lost to people I would normally never have lost to when I used those characters. At Olympus, I nearly beat Larry Lurr with Kirby. I 2 stocked his Fox, after which he switched to DK. I played well, but, unfortunately, DK kills Kirby off a grab at 50% on Town & City so I quickly lost my lead. Then, on game 3, he switched to Metaknight and swiftly killed me off top with Dthrow Uair Uair Uair UpB. I nearly came all the way back, but lost. I realized I was playing far better with Kirby than with any of my other characters while in retirement, and the meta evolved to the point where I simply couldn’t pull out pocket characters if I never practiced the game. So I decided to play only Kirby at Genesis.

And then, at Genesis, I was reminded of why I use co-mains. Kirby has a couple of awful matchups, and more often than not, opponents will see my Kirby on the character select screen, and auto-lock one of those awful matchups instead of playing their main. In any case, I lost in winners to 2GG’s very own BAM. He beat me with Sonic in a tight, and fun, set. That said, I don’t think I should have gotten as close as I did to taking game 3. I feel like Sonic should always be able to react to Kirby’s approaches, and pick safe options. Pretty much all of my openings were hard reads on movement or baits on approaches, but it wasn’t enough. In losers, I lost to a Rosalina player (I don’t recall his tag). I swear I was destined to lose this match. We were on game 3, both above 120%, and I hard-read a roll. Somehow, my Usmash connects with the week hit, and it doesn’t kill. Fine. That’s cool. I get him in a tech scenario, read the tech and go for Dair Dsmash. As it was happening, I see that the Dsmash it going to be a week hit, but Rosa should die at 130% anyways, right? If only. So she loved. I got her offstage, without a jump. I read the recovery initiation, and the angle, and come down on her with Kirby rock. That will DEFINITELY kill, right?! Well, Mr. Clutch-Master & Luma techs the hit off the wall and lives. At that point, I was laughing, and I think I got Usmashed out-of-shield for some stray aerial. I walked away from my bracket in good spirits, conceding victory to the true g0ds of Smash.

The rest of this day was really fun. This was a huge benefit to getting floated out of round 1 pools. I didn’t have to worry about reserving another 2-hour spot to play singles, and I could focus more on enjoying the event and the tournament. I tried to meet new people, I checked out all the booths, I played some Rivals of Aether, and so on. I was also on standby for Melee Crews (which turned out to be an unpopular event?) because I was the alternate for Nintendude’s crew. The whole team showed up, though, so I could just sit back.

The highlight of the day was actually the series of money matches I played on TukHouseSmash’s quad-stream. I played with a few guys I’d never met, but who were pretty good. Then, I saw Rudolph. I really admired Rudolph’s play at The Big House 6, so I had to see it firsthand. I sat down to play, and we decided on a best-of-5 set for $5. When I picked Marth, he picked Sheik. I knew he played all the high tiers, but I hadn’t seen his Sheik before. I wasn’t complaining, of course, because I needed Sheik practice for the next day. Even though I had a good grip on what to do in the matchup at this point, it’s important to let your body feel what it’s like to actually execute what needs to be executed.

I can’t remember the exact details of the set, but I believe it started off 1-1. He took game 2, and I counterpicked him to Yoshi’s Story. He switched to Marth, which got me pumped because I knew he was an awesome Marth player. I beat his Marth convincingly, after which he switched to Sheik and I won the set 3-1. Before the second set, he asked my name and I told him who I was. He got really excited then, which was cool – apparently he had heard of me and recognized my face but didn’t put two and two together. He also complimented me on my Marth versus Sheik play (I couldn’t help but laugh given my state of mind only six days prior). I told him that, if he wanted, we could play another best-of-5, and he agreed.

He took some time to think and take notes. Here and there he would take a couple minutes to think between games, as well. I reviewed my notes as well, while there was time. He beat me in the second set 1-3. Naturally, we had to do a tie-breaker! In the third set, I beat him 3-0. Now, I can’t remember if he played Marth again in the second or third set, but it was on FD and I beat him again. Overall, it was a really fun experience and I love playing against his playstyle. He’s not overly technical, rather he’s solid all-around. He will make conscious adjustments in his gameplay, and you have to be on your toes. His playstyle reminded me a bit of Cactuar, with whom I also love to play when I get the chance.

So that was most of day 1. Once again, I headed for bed early.

Genesis 4: Day Two

Teams was first thing in the morning. Nintendude and I played a little better, but we couldn’t really settle on a team between my Marth/Fox and his Puff/Peach. We beat Eikelmann and his partner, but got absolutely decimated by Professor Pro and Silent Wolf’s double Fox team.

The whole weekend, Remzi and I had been lightly trash-talking each other in anticipation of our ARMS money match. In case you didn’t know, Nintendo was sponsoring this event and they brought Nintendo Switch setups fully equipped with ARMS. The line was short, and we jumped in to play. Unfortunately, he beat me, but I will get my revenge!! Nintendo really wasn’t lying when they said the game finds its depth very quickly, but is also easy to pick up. You control both arms independently. At one point, I just alternated punches on Remzi’s defense, and it seemed like there was no response. Later, though, I realized that he could decide to clank punches on one side, or block with one arm, and then pick another option. Plus, every character has unique passive abilities, such as an invisible air-dash, or healing on block. I think it would take some time for me to get used to the motion controls for movement, but the Switch seems cool regardless.

A few MD/VA smashers, plus a couple others, went to get some amazing food at a ramen place down the street, after which I headed to my room to collect myself. I meditated a bit, and lay down, then slowly warmed up. I played for about 40 minutes before heading to the venue to start singles bracket for Melee. I tried to find a setup to play on until I’d get called, but every single friendly setup was taken up by the smashgg ladder. This was pretty frustrating for players who had to play in bracket and had nowhere to warm up. So instead, I just hung around. I was waiting on Nightmare’s match, which he won, and then played him off-stream. Prior to this, I was trying to get myself in tournament mode. This was one of the downsides of being floated through round 1 – my first actual bracket match was going to be difficult. I needed to make sure I started on point, because I couldn’t afford to work up to it in bracket. In doing so, I may have overshot a bit, and ended up feeling really nervous throughout my set with Nightmare. In the end, I sort of brute-forced my way to a 2-0 victory. He’s a solid Marth player, but my punish game was a bit more polished, and that was enough to net me the win.

My match against Swedish Delight was slated for stream. I couldn’t find a Sheik player to warm up against, at first, but I wandered over to the stream warm-up area. There were a lot of top players there, plus the TOs and streamers, and some other guys who seemed to be there to just hang out. I think the “warm-up” aspect of this area could have been executed better, because with extra bodies there who were not actually going to be playing on stream, it got a little cramped. That said, everyone was respectful if you said you had to warm up for a match, and they would move and let you play. Mew2King and Mang0 were playing and I sat down asking if I could get next. The match they were playing, Sheik versus Falco, ended with Mang0 walking off and killing Mew2King with a sideB spike, in classic Mang0 fashion. He left after that – this kind of worked out for me. What better Sheik to play against before Swedish than the #1 ranked Sheik player in the world?!

We actually only played three games. The first game, he beat me and I was reminded what a really, really good Sheik player’s punish game looks like. Game 2, I beat his Sheik. Then he switched to Marth and beat me (I knew I couldn’t convince M2K to play Sheik if I asked him to). In any case, that was all the time I had, and I was up against Swedish.

I haven’t mentioned this yet, but the week leading up to Genesis, I had been reading “Inner Game of Tennis.” I may delve deeper into my thoughts on IGOT, but my basic takeaways were the following:

1) Achieving “peak performance” consistently is a tangible goal. One must find the best ways to access the state of mind that allows a player to reach that state. IGOT proposes that this state is one of “relaxed concentration.”

2) Recognizing the difference between your conscious, thought-forming “Self 1” and your physical, action-executing “Self 2” is important. Then, one must recognize that it is Self 2 who actually plays the game, and who allows a competitor to access “peak performance.”

3) There is a relationship between Self 1 and Self 2 that must be developed. One’s ability to manage the relationship is a trainable skill.

In just the first couple of chapters, IGOT had been outlining ideas just like what I’ve talked about on this bl0g, but better articulated. It was amazing. This tool had been at my disposal all along, but I waited more than 10 years after starting competitive smash to pick it up. If you’re reading this, and haven’t read IGOT: don’t wait. Well, maybe wait until you finish this bl0g post. After that, go get the book and read it. Or at least skim it.

Put simply, the mental practice and pre-tournament preparation (I didn’t go into this too deeply, but if you read my post on Eden, you can get an idea of how I prepare for big tournaments) allowed me to access peak performance versus Swedish. Game 1, I barely lost after making a small comeback on Battlefield, after which I made a strong statement with a 3-stock on Yoshi’s Story. I banned Dreamland, of course, and Swedish took me to Fountain of Dreams, of course. I played well, stuck to the gameplan, got my punishes, and got my edgeguards. Full disclosure, when I was up a full stock, I started to lose touch with my “peak performance” side. At this point, actually, I came up with the idea to retweet the tweet I made seven days earlier saying I was going to drop Marth versus Sheik. And then Swedish killed me, and I thought to myself, “How many times have I been in this scenario where Sheik gets a grab and makes the comeback on me?” I knew it was possible. So I did what I had to do, and transitioned my mental state back into the game, and won the game.

It’s a good feeling to win a big set in front of a huge crowd, especially when pretty much the entire world expects you to lose. This was a big payoff for me, having worked my butt off for so long in the matchup that had plagued me, and still plagues me. I knew there would be time to celebrate later, though. I decided against reading through my Facebook and Twitter notifications, instead opting to make a plan for food and prepare for my top 64 match, Professor Pro. I got a hot dog, a banana, some water, and pulled up my set versus Prof from Eden, where I beat him 3-1. He actually came up to me while I was eating and watching, congratulated me on the win, and as we were talking he noticed the set playing in my lap… it was a smidge awkward, but mostly hilarious. “I was watching that set earlier too,” he said. We agreed to “give them a good match.” Prof is a cool guy.

We played on the TukHouseSmash stream, which was so cool by the way. I loved the feel of crowds packing in tight to get a good view for hype sets, of which there were multiple side-by-side. The set actually looked very similar to our set from Eden, but with different stages. He destroyed me game 1, then I won two close games, and won game 3 convincingly.

I had seen this bracket path before, and tried not to get too optimistic, but if I won my next match, I would be up against… Armada.

If you’ve kept up with my bl0g posts, you know I still think about my set with Armada all the time. I’ve gotten better at it over time, but it honestly still haunts me. I think about what it would have felt like to make the right move, to be a little more aggressive when he was asserting center control with his float, to have taken a more aggressive stance when I knocked him off-stage on his last stock. I’ve only been able to watch the whole set maybe two or three times since it happened. Unfortunately, to get to Armada, I would have to get past Westballz.

Falco also proves to be somewhat of a challenge for me. Unfortunately, I don’t have much access to good Falco practice in MD/VA, so I can’t practice the matchup on a regular basis. At one point, I decided to do a close match analysis and figure out a gameplan. I think the stream and analysis was successful, and I came away with a solid gameplan.

Words, however, do not necessarily translate to actions. In other words, Self 1 having a gameplan is not the same as Self 2 being able to execute those actions under pressure. I thought that I could mentally recite the steps to beating Falco in neutral, and then beat Westballz with my punish game. Taking this approach, however, inhibits the flow of Self 2’s actions. This approach did not allow me to access “peak performance,” and Westballz is an extremely good player. He outplayed me solidly. Walking away, I actually felt good. I had a decent ideas of where I made mistakes (outside and inside the game), and felt a fire to do better next time.

In losers bracket, I was waiting on the winner of dizzkidboogie and Ice. My good friend dizz took it, and we ended up playing. This is another matchup where I tried the “Self 1 takes the wheel” approach, because that has worked for me in the past. At Olympus, in October, I helped dizz out a lot in the Marth versus ICs matchup. I taught him some crucial things in the matchup, such as when certain things are safe in the neutral, and that Fthrow pivot Tipper is never guaranteed. In exchange, he gave me a few tips as well (dizz will always, always help you out if you ask for tips).

My gameplan was basically to camp platforms, look for openings, and punish hard. It was an okay gameplan. Dizzkidboogie is a fast learner, and utilized what we talked about really well. Plus, he showed me some wobble setups I’d never seen before. I tended to lose the lead, and then claw my way back to an even game, but he would clutch it out. A huge difference-maker was my inability to negate the effectiveness of his SoPo. I need to brush up on fighting slidy, floaty characters like SoPo and Luigi – he got far too much damage and I struggled to kill him. In the end, he beat me in three close games. It’s hard to be sad when you lose to a friend and you know he deserved the win.

And that was that. I got knocked out at 17th! This was the best performance I’d made at a national yet, and technically I was the highest placing Marth (PewPewU and I tied, but he played two games of Sheik versus Swedish in losers – we take those!). I’m always aiming for the top, but after a chat with Ice several months ago, I realized there is merit to setting multiple, reachable goals over a period of time (rather than just always living by “aim for #1”). You can track your progress better, and there is great benefit in simply feeling like you’ve achieved something. Of course I want to do better. Of course I wish I had gotten top 8, or top 3, or 1st place. But I told myself top 32 would be a good accomplishment for this event. I got top 32 at EVO, but I think this tournament was more stacked than EVO. So when I got 17th, I felt good. My goal for the near future is to maintain or improve this level of performance at big events.

Genesis 4: Day Three

My flight was at 7:30pm, so I had to pack this morning and be out of the hotel. I stored my luggage and headed to the venue. Played a couple money matches, and generally hung around. Eventually we got food and headed to the top 8 venue to watch the end of sm4sh. After sm4sh, I had to leave after one set of Melee doubles to get my luggage and head to the airport.

I’ve got to say, it took so much self-restraint to not argue with my Uber driver on the way to the airport. He asked why I was in town, so I told him about Genesis and Smash Bros., because somehow he’d never heard of Smash Bros. We danced around the sports versus esports argument. I really didn’t want to engage, but I did my minimum duty by asking “Why?” when he said “They are just different.” If you’re an esports fan, I encourage you to do the same. It’s hard to convince people away from closely-held beliefs, but you can at least start asking people to explain what really, truly makes esports different from sports. In my mind, it’s all about the competitive environment, the communal aspect, the culture surrounding the game, and so forth. On almost all counts, the esports industry looks like the sports industry. The basic differences is that the requirements to play the games are different, and esports games are owned by companies.

I won’t get political on my bl0g posts, but starting a sentence with, “I’m all for women’s equality, but…” is usually not headed in a good direction. Dear Uber driver, I understand why the girl you drove the day before got upset when you told her “women doing certain things that men do is just not ladylike.” That’s all I’ll say on the matter.

In the airport, I was streaming Melee doubles and singles on my phone. I had a brief flight to Phoenix, on which I got access to plane Wi-Fi. The connection was awful, and I switched quality to “Mobile.” You can check my Twitter media – the picture actually just looks like blobs. Without game audio, I probably wouldn’t have been able to keep up with the sets. But it was better than nothing, and I’m a die-hard fan. I spent almost all of my 2.5-hour layover in Phoenix watching singles finish up, and it was awesome. I was really bummed that I couldn’t be at the event in person, but thank goodness for Twitch. The ability to bring hype content to all the viewers at home is really amazing. And huge shoutouts to the production guys at VGBootCamp for maintaining their high production standards.

I landed back in D.C at 7am EST. Took a 3-hour nap at home, then started my first day of classes for the spring semester!! What a saga.

Thanks for reading this far. Since Genesis, I’ve taken a bit of a break, and still am on that break. I’ve entered a couple weeklies but haven’t really gotten into the swing of things yet. I’ll be entering the Xanadu monthly next Saturday, and Smash Valley V the weekend after, so be on the lookout for me!

I’ve got big things planned in the future, and Genesis 4 was just the start. Looking forward, and I’ll talk about this more, I really want to focus on how competing at the top level forces me to bring out the best in myself. It requires me to be healthy, focused, relaxed, confident, prepared, and the list goes on. Finding success in esports, or in anything, requires more than being a couch potato. You can’t play the game for 10 hours a day and just get good. You have to find the best parts of yourself and show it through your gameplay.

That’s all for now. Again, thanks so much for reading, as always. Happy smashing!