Pound 2016 Discussion

This past weekend we had a large national tournament that had all the forms of smash represented. Pound 2016 was an awesome tournament to watch, with tons of variety among Smash 4 and Melee. Most of you who follow smash 4 have heard about what happened at pound. We had our fourth unique character win a major here in the US. Previously, only Sheik, Zero Suit Samus, and Diddy Kong have won a major national event. Now, Mewtwo joins them. Abadango, an amazing Japanese player, won with Mewtwo, finishing 3-0 in Grand Finals. This was something that was very unexpected, but I will talk about that more in my next post. The more interesting thing that happened is with the rest of the placings. The best player, TSM Zero, wasn't able to come to pound, this gave a lot of other really good players a chance to compete. Ally ended up getting second for Wii U singles, beating Marss. Marss performed extremely well for himself, probably one of his best performances ever, and none the less it was just after his main character Zero Suit Samus was nerfed significantly. He played very well the entire day, making it all the way to losers finals, just a few games away from getting a chance to compete against Abadango a second time for grand finals. Something that wasn't so impressive for Zero Suit Samus was Nairo's placing in the tournament. Nairo performed very poorly for himself, largely being considered the second best in the game yet only getting 49th at pound. He used Zero Suit not very well, not nearly as well as he could before the nerf, and then sometimes he switched to Cloud, which he was fairly inexperienced with. One thing that I loved about the tournament was watching Abadango play. Never before have we been able to see such a high level player play Mewtwo so expertly. The character was largely believed to be one of the bottom 10 characters in the game upon his release, and through balancing of the game he has found himself to now be considered one of the top ten characters in the game. Abadango really brought this to our attention in a "in your face" sort of way. No one was prepared for the Mewtwo match up for their character, and no one really knew exactly what he wanted to do in any situation which made the games very hard for other people to quickly learn. Overall, this tournament wasn't run the best according to many of the players in the tournament, but it was a great one to watch with generally good commentator all around. Hopefully we will get the videos uploaded to Youtube soon because there are so many other games I want to watch still.