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Carrollfest 5 (103 Singles Entrants) – 8/16/2014, Pittsburgh, PA

An incredible venue with an amazing turnout definitely puts Carrollfest 5, at one of the best one-day tournaments of the summer. Almost doubling the attendance from the previous installment, Pittsburgh ran yet another 100+ entrant event smoothly and efficiently. PGH Carroll, the host, had enough time to run Melee doubles, singles, an amateur bracket, AND set aside enough time for TWO separate crew battles. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Cloud 9’s very own Mango won both the pro bracket and doubles with fairly minimal back-breaking effort with Juggleguy. After an incredible upset in round 2 of Melee singles, KJH took the win over VaNz. I’m sure you can tell that didn’t sit well with him as VaNz made a losers run through Nakamaru, Moose, Juggleguy, Vist, KJH, and Duck to secure a top 2 position. As for the crew battles, PGH Carroll designated time before Melee pools for “The PGH Mean Foxes,” consisting of himself, Taki, S1 the God, and Machiavelli vs. “Team Ben,” coming strong with Wife, Husband, Silence, and Oro. Despite a valiant effort “Team Ben” was able to clutch out the victory and win the crew battle. Happening later in the day, and likely the highlight of the tournament for most was the PGH vs. Michigan crew battle. Fighting for bragging rights on their own turf were Taki, Green Ranger, TheLake, PGH Carroll, and Nakamaru. Michigan brought many good players such as KZhu, KJH, Moose, Beach, and Duck. This crew battle had everyone on the edge of their seat, and I’m sure it will put you there too, so check it out here.

Singles Results
1. C9 Mango
2. VaNz
3. Duck
4. KJH

Full Results here
Videos here

[…]

By Matthew “MattDotZeb” Zaborowski

August 24th, 2013

Everyone was abuzz at Mass Madness: Championship Edition, the final event of the New England Smash Summer Circuit. (NESS Circuit) With 70 entrants this was the largest event New England had seen in a long time. With Pro and Amateur brackets following the round-robin pools, everyone had an opportunity to show their stuff. Players from NYC, Long Island, even up-state New York came out to show their stuff to the best players in New England. After a long summer of events leading up to it, MMCE didn’t disappoint.

Thursday September 12th, 2013

Eric “Nuro” Lima posts about Game Over in the New England Melee group. This was a weekly gaming night in Harvard Square, previously unheard of except to maybe a select few. Utilizing facebook and r/smashbros to advertise, players came out the following Tuesday with three or four setups into the bottom floor of Tommy Doyles Irish Pub & Restaurant’s defunct Harvard Square location and had a fun smashfest with some drinks. Boston had never had an event in a bar, so this was quite the treat.
[…]

by Susanna Yu
INTRO TO SLO (California Polytechnic State University, SLO) 

The SLO Smash Community Facebook group, established just 9 months ago, consists of 200 members, with new players being added each day. That doesn’t seem like much when you compare it to the Norcal or Socal Melee groups, but for a small city like San Luis Obispo that lies on the central coast of California, it isn’t too bad. Smashfests occur at least once or twice a week, and we even had our own “SloBroke Weeklies” with $1 entry fees happening every weekend before our official SLO Smash Club got established on the Cal Poly SLO campus just two months ago. Over the past year, we’ve hosted 3 large tournaments with about 50 participants each, and many smaller weeklies.

[…]

by Larry “DEHF” Holland
Thoughts on Smash 4

I want to start off by saying a lot of what I’m about to say comes from watching people and the small amount of time I had to play the game at SDCC. Although I was able to play some 1v1 no item matches during the SDCC tournament, most of the matches I played were 4 player ffa with items on.
Game Mechanics

The best description I can give on how I felt the game played is a mix between Smash 64 and Brawl. One of the things that made me feel like it had a Smash 64 feel was the movement. Dashing in this game is a step above Brawl, one of the obvious reasons being you no longer have a chance of tripping. You can also stop your dash animation by shielding like you can do in Smash 64 and Melee. I believe this will add a lot quick weaving in and out of characters ranges through dash.

[…]

by Fuel
About the Author

Fuel is a medical student at the Memorial University of Newfoundland by day, and a prominent commentator, tournament organizer, and community leader for the Smash scene in New Brunswick, Canada by night. You can contact him at smashnewbrunswick@gmail.com or join the Smash New Brunswick community online at http://www.facebook.com/groups/hubcitysmash. Smash New Brunswick streams weekly on Thursday/Friday/Saturday at http://www.twitch.tv/smashnb.

When eight people showed up for the first Smash tournament I ever organized and five people showed up the week after, I was ready to quit.

After spending a month planning and organizing, asking more experienced TOs for advice, preparing the venue, acquiring a stream setup, and working the social media angles, I figured I had it in the bag. I knew what would work and what wouldn’t. I had backup equipment prepared for every possible accident. The one thing I hadn’t prepared for was the possibility that no one would show up.

After handing the tournament champion his grand prize of $5 in psychedelic Canadian space money, I felt discouraged. It seemed like I had put so much effort into something that I wanted desperately to work, only to discover that it either didn’t work as well as I had hoped or others didn’t share my dream.

The dream, of course, was to “be eSports now.” In the past few months, there have been a fair number of posts on both Melee It On Me and r/smashbros about how to build up local communities, and being from a fairly small community in Atlantic Canada, these articles really resonated with me. In most matters, my home province of New Brunswick has always been the sleepy, boring cousin to its industrious neighbour, Nova Scotia, and to the merry northern island of Newfoundland, and Smash is no exception. Halifax, Nova Scotia is not only Atlantic Canada’s largest city, but it also has the largest Smash community in the region, drawing over fifty or sixty people to its monthlies. You would think that the b’ys up in St. John’s, Newfoundland, who are isolated from the rest of Atlantic Canada not only by distance but also by a prodigious amount of water, would be struggling to build up their community, but they’re currently attracting over forty people to their PM weeklies (even just for friendlies!) and over fifty players to their monthly tournaments. New Brunswick, by comparison, was struggling to reach half those numbers during the first half of 2014, and our events occurred far less frequently. […]