My EVO 2014 Performance

This year was my fifth time competing at Evolution in the Street Fighter IV series and my first time competing at the event as a sponsored player under Macro Micro Gaming.

I've done fairly well at EVO usually making it out of my pools and winning matches against competent, unknown and well-known players. However, I always come up short just outside of top 32 every time. I made it a point to end that curse this time around, but with close to 2,000 players competing in Ultra Street Fighter IV this year, this was easier said than done.

The first opponent in my pool was none other than Carl White a.k.a. FNATIC l Perfect Legend, a well-known top player in Mortal Kombat and Injustice: Gods Among Us. He is also an accomplished Street Fighter IV player since the original entry came out back in 2009 as one of the first recognizable Akuma players for the first couple of years in the series. He has since then switched to Yun which I was more than ready for since my teammate, Julio Fuentes, is one of the best Yun players in the states whom I play against on a weekly basis.

With my matchup experience against Yun embedded into my head, I took down Perfect Legend 2-0 to advance in my pool. He did get some rounds off of me in each match, but I stuck to my game plan of punishing his air-airs, lack of proper defense and his overall reckless play-style to win the set.

My second match was against someone named Edo.  I don’t remember who he played as or how the match went other than I quickly beat him 2-0. 

What I do vividly remember is my third match against Sanford Kelly, one of the top east coast players from the state of New York with one of the best Sagats in the world.

Our bout was intense and down to the wire from beginning to end.  I was on match point in the second and third match, but I couldn’t close it out due mostly to execution errors and not teching a few key throws. I barely lost 2-1 and was sent to losers in the third round of my pool. I wasn’t too upset about it since it was such a close set against one of the best players in the states who regularly plays against PIE l Zeus, one of the top east coast Vega players.

The tournament nerves got the best of me in that match, but my narrow loss strangely gave me some more confidence against the rest of the players in my pool. The last three players in my pool were Sang Le (C. Viper), Ed l Justinxavier (Juri) and Sean Seal (Balrog). I defeated all three players 2-0 in succession to make it out of my pool in the losers bracket. I made it to the quarter finals.

Sadly, my first match in quarter finals was my last as I fell to Kentaro Nakamura a.k.a. “Misse,” one of the best Makoto players from Japan. I had played against him in casuals the day before, but I didn’t have a concrete grasp of his play-style with Makoto. When I played him in the tournament, he quickly defeated me 2-0 with his surprisingly conservative strategy of building meter in the corner and carefully picking his spots to rush in to dizzy me with two combos quickly draining my life bar.

I was eliminated from EVO 2014 tying for top 256 out of nearly 2,000 competitors.

The rest of the weekend I played casuals and money matches against many players such as Rom, Ranmasama, Alex Valle, Joe Shyne, SRKUW l Fawwaz, Tinshi, NGL l Brentt, Misse, Acqua, Velociraptor, UTJ, RPD l Alex Smith, Thrillhouse and many others. I wish I could have done better at EVO 2014, but I don’t feel like I played terrible in retrospect. This was arguably the toughest EVO to date with the most entrants in its history and there were many great players who placed the same as I did or lower.

In any case, I had an amazing time at EVO once again. It was a great learning experience and I am determined to train harder again for next year.