It’s really been a whole month since Low Tide City. I intended to write a blogpost about it earlier than this, but I guess life happened.
Let me start by saying the venue was legit. The Kalahari Resort is a massive complex. I didn’t actually explore it all that much, but it’s one of those places that is just fun to walk around. It has an Africa theme, with fake animals strewn about the grounds and the inside.
I went on Friday, October 1st to pick up my badge and get as much practice in as I could before my pool on Saturday. This was my first ever major tournament, so I wanted to familiarize myself with the floor layout and such to be sure of where I needed to be when my bracket started. I met with a lot of people I see regularly at the local weeklies, and some from San Antonio I hadn’t seen in a while, which was pretty cool. I also watched Friday’s side events like Doubles and Squad Strike in the audience. I noticed I was on the Twitch stream’s camera, so I checked it on my phone and saw myself in the audience, which was pretty amusing.
I ate some overpriced concession stand food at some point and went home a bit after. Just being in the ballroom with the massive production value was really cool, but it was also pretty tiring. I think the massive spotlights on the stage that cast light on the whole ballroom was giving me a minor headache. I don’t usually have a problem with sensory stuff at conventions and such, but I do recall feeling a bit overwhelmed here.
I went to Kalahari early on Saturday. I didn’t actually practice as much as I wanted on Friday, because most or all of the Switch setups were being used either for friendlies or side event sets. For that reason, this time I brought my Switch to the BYOC (Bring Your Own Console) area, which had a bunch of monitors to use, and practiced there for a good couple hours. Mostly I got wrecked in friendlies – I recall a Mega Man player dominating the rotation for a while, and then the DKWill consistently three-stocking me on my own setup. That said, I do think I learned a bit from those games, so it didn’t bother me too much. Even though I was getting destroyed, I felt like I was getting close to achieving Flow State. I have been struggling with playing reactively, and when you come across a player that plays so reactively and in-the-moment that it’s so obvious, it’s almost inspiring.
My pool was at 2 PM. I packed up my Switch and thanked the people around me for games around 1:00, since I wanted to eat before playing in bracket. When the time came, I felt ready for bracket. I still fully expected to immediately lose twice and be eliminated, but I felt ready nonetheless. My first match was against a Mario player from College Station, Texas. I went Roy, my secondary, for this match – I have had slightly more success against local Mario players in the weekly tournaments with Roy.
I was extremely predictable. The Mario player dashed back and did f-smash multiple times when I tried to approach with Roy’s nair. I was not playing neutral correctly at all, and when I did get him offstage, I tried way too many times to f-smash Mario’s neutral ledge getup. That works more than it should against other people, but this Mario was smarter than that. I lost, but it was fun. Stressful, too – I could feel my heart and blood pumping.
Okay, one loss. I had looked up the Mario player beforehand and saw a win rate over 66% – so I didn’t expect much to come of that game. However, my next opponent was to be a Ness player, also from Austin, who had a similar win rate to my own. I don’t want to judge a player purely on what their stats page pulls up, but I did think I had a much better chance in my loser’s match.
I went back to my main Young Link for this set. My opponent was no wi-fi Ness – this was someone who knew the ins and outs of his character. I put up more of a fight than I did against the Mario, but I still lost the first game convincingly. I thought I knew what I was doing wrong – not SDI’ing PK Fire to escape, being way too predictable with boomerang – so I went into the second match with a plan. But the second match did not start off all that great for me. Before I knew it I was two stocks down and had taken only one stock from my opponent.
The Ness player threw me offstage, and I was at only around 30%, so it wasn’t a big deal, or so I thought. I pressed the Z button to tether recovery, but zair came out instead of the tether. I wasn’t close enough to the ledge, and must have panicked, trying to get back to the stage as soon as possible. Unactionable, my Young Link fell to his doom. I self-destructed. The monitor shouted “GAME!“. I could hear an “oooh…” from my opponent. This was a sympathetic noise, as I doubt he wanted for this set to end like that. I sure as hell didn’t. It felt embarrassing.
I said good games, fistbumped him, said it was fun, and unplugged my controller (even in situations like this, it’s important to show sportsmanship). That was it. I was eliminated. I expected to go 0 and 2, but I didn’t expect to embarrass myself like that. Competing is super fun, because of the stress and intensity, but for this particular instance it was too much. I’ve mentioned this before on my blog, but for whatever reason my response to extremely high stress is to essentially pass out. I don’t mean that I just dropped dead on the ballroom floor, but I felt extremely lethargic. I was almost certainly overstimulated too. I just had to go home and sleep.
Honestly I wasn’t sure if I was in a condition to drive, but maybe I was just being a little dramatic. I drove home fine, jumped on my bed, and slept for a good couple of hours. I think I watched a movie after that.
I won’t lie. I was a bit beat up by what happened. I was getting burned out of Smash in general even prior to the day of my bracket, as I detailed in another post. All of the time and effort I had put into training in September ended in embarrassment. I did a couple of classic “sad” things like listening to the same song on repeat and eating ice cream for breakfast the day after. This made me feel better, but my mood in general was suffering for at least a week. In the grand scheme of things, though, I was and am fine. The rest of my life (work and school) went about as normal. Trust me – I’ve seen the depths of Hell – I’m not going to let losing once at a children’s party game ruin my life.
I still feel burnt out of competing. The drive I had during September to improve has completely evaporated, and the idea of even going to a tournament just to see the community sounds like a chore. I still absolutely love the game and community to death, and I still want nothing more to get better at the game, but I just cannot bring myself to play it. This continues to hurt and sting. I keep telling myself I just need to figure out how to engage with it healthily, but I have no idea what steps I need to take to ensure that. For now I am just making it my goal to come back eventually.
LTC was super fun though. It was surreal seeing top players in person (I noted that I’m taller than a few of them). The sheer scale of the bracket was really impressive – it was the largest in-person tournament of 2021 after all. I’m really glad I went, although I am a little bummed that I payed $70 only to play two players from the same state in a national-level tournament.