HTC eSports and Showdown Smash put together an amazing one-day national SSBM tournament at the Folsom Street Foundry in San Francisco. To say this tournament was full of upsets would be an understatement.
Most of the top Melee players were flown out to the event, setting the stage for some high profile matches. Because Dreamhack was the same weekend, notable top players [A]rmada, and Tempo | Westballz decided to drop out of HTC Throwdown and attend Dreamhack. HTC eSports and Dreamhack partnered up to arrange an all-expense paid for trip for the top 2 players from each respective event.
Brackets: https://smash.gg/tournament/htc-throwdown/brackets
Twitch VODs:
http://www.twitch.tv/htc/v/16786219
http://www.twitch.tv/showdownsmash/v/16788720
Youtube VODs will be uploaded to the HTC eSports YouTube channel: http://youtube.com/HTCeSports
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http://twitter.com/HTCeSports
http://twitter.com/ShowdownGG

Georgia’s largest local tournament in Melee history, with 113 entrants! A mysterious challenger approached and almost ran away with the whole thing. With Georgia’s number 1 ranked player, Druggedfox, in California taking care of Mango, Koopa2King thought he could get an easy win. Luckily Georgia held strong!

NCSU: The Precursor was a part of the NCSU eSports Fall LAN, and is quite probably one of NC’s most successful secret tournaments of all time. At 102 entrants it is the biggest tournament held on NCSU’s campus. FSBR|$Mike took the tournament handily over NEG|Tah, despite the fact that Mike had injured his hands only a week earlier. Great way to start off the semester and hopefully show off NCSU’s capabilities.

Instead of its typical semesterly Gamefest tournament, Chapel Hill held a tournament designed to play host to The Melee Games Carolinas’ round robin matches. Despite only 35 players required to be there for TMG, and UNC Football limiting parking and entry to the event, a total of 72 players attended. Competition was fierce, and after being knocked into loser’s by ESAM, Kaeon made it to grand finals, reset the bracket, and took the match to the final stock of game 5 before final losing to the famed Samus.

Northern Ontario’s competitive gaming scene has been pushing lately to make an impact. Under a new brand name Next Level Gaming, Sudbury’s Smash scene hosted a Melee and Wii U event entitled Battle @ The Dome. Although expecting numbers closer to 100, there was only 60 unique entrants in attendance. Even so, everyone there was in for a huge surprise (TO’s included). Red Bull was contacted and confirmed to come support the event, presumably to provide free drinks for everyone… However, something almost fairy tale like took place shortly after. Representatives from Red Bull showed up and wanted to support our community in Northern Ontario. They offered up $10,000 prize money for this ($2,500 for each event), a trip to Florida valued at $7,000 that was raffled off, as well as a lifetime supply of Red Bull to local player Hex. How this came to be is still baffling everyone involved. However this must be a sign of things to come from Red Bull and their continued involvement in the E-sports community.
Video of the announcement – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbkmt6tBP20&feature=youtu.be