Two nights ago the very popular Street Fighter V invitational series Eleague ended with an amazing top 8 showing that many viewers could not stop tweeting about full of upsets, hype moments, and huge highlights. Eleague is an invitational tournament that is aired on TBS and hosts 32 players from around the globe in 1 venue in Atlanta with the goal to win and take home $110, 000. On July 13th top 8 aired on television via TBS and on Twitch.tv featuring the final challengers in the competition.
Many took center stage but none other than somewhat underdog Smug had the spotlight on him during the whole showing.
Smug started off the occasion located in the losers bracket faced off against Street Fighter V all-star Fujimura who is hailed as one of the best players on the planet. In what many would label as an upset Smug swiftly 3-0’d him with what he would call, “The greatest of ease”. The ball definitely didn’t drop there with Smug continuing this amazing performance throughout the night climbing his way past every opponent decisively and gaining a spot in grand finals against the final boss of the tournament, Tokido.
This grand final was an amazing sight as Smug wasn’t looked at as a player to make it this far in the top 8 but here he was and he reset the bracket against Tokido with 3 more games in front of him needed to win the entire event. One thing stood in the way of these games, once Smug reset the bracket against Tokido the event was brought to a halt with a sudden commercial break right in the middle of the set. Why is this a big deal? Well during most fighting game events there is no break after bracket resets of grand finals making this a huge outrage to many eyes in the fighting game community.
Momentum is a huge deal in high-level fighting games and things like this aren’t of usual practice. To add more insult to this injury after this commercial break Tokido came back and in decisive fashion took the set and won Eleague. Would this change if there wasn’t a commercial break for him to get his mind back together? Would he have been able to do the same thing with a small trip to the character select screen to collect his thoughts? We may never know but what we do know is that the FGC will be looking at events such as this a different way after this occurrence.
https://youtu.be/AvwtnBQ-pqM
If you have any thoughts on this feel free to share them down below and follow The Outerhaven for more fighting game and other gaming related news and coverage!
