Day 2:

I actually didn’t sleep much (like any other majors) because I was really really excited and surprisingly I wasn’t tired at all. First thing I did was check out my pool for singles and right after that I went to look for food. Since I got the “VIP” badge, I can get free hotel food for the whole weekend (it’s basically like a buffet with few dishes) and the food was just like any “hotel” breakfasts; sausages, scramble egg, you can name it all, nothing amazing at all L.

Went in the so called “Vip” only room, all the Japanese players were there and first thing I said was “Ohayou (it means good morning)” and they looked back and Kindevu said “OH it’s Air, I thought it’s somebody Japanese, hahaha (lame…)”. I ate breakfast with my friend Wilson “meatonacone” and we hung around the room until single starts.

It was only a 16 man bracket pool, so all I need is to win 4 people to get out as a winner. My third match which was semi (I think…) was against Zzangmoo, and apparently he is Kor

ea’s best Zangief. I wasn’t too worried about that match up, and before I talk about the match, let me share my experience playing against him on the stream.

venue

Zzangmoo can’t play on lap from what I notice and he has to put his stick on the table and due to that reason, the table was really shaky and the CCG staffs had to hold on to the monitor in order for us to play under a fair condition. But it was actually quite hard to play under that condition because Zzangmoo had half of his head shifting towards left of the screen (I was player 1 and he was player 2) during the match and it started to block 15-20% of the screen on the right, so I had a lot of difficulties to see the right hand side of the screen! I was trying so hard to keep Ryu on the left hand side so I can view the screen properly -_-…I was going to complain but I made a comeback and won the whole thing so I was like, “GOOD GAME!”

So from what I remembered about the match, Zzangmoo always tries to reset his hits into a SPD, I read that after the first set when I lost and I didn’t have much difficulty winning the second set. After I took the second set I was really confident in beating him, however, I don’t know if it was me or it was my stick, I had a lot of input error after hitting my low forward. Every time I input a fireball after the low forward, SRK came out and I got punished hard. During the whole 3 sets, I had the same error probably over 5-6 times and luckily the last set of second round I read his back dash on my wake up (he did the same thing in the first set to beat me) and I was certain that he was going to do it again because he had a life lead, he had no reason to take more risks and I had 3 meters, he had to respect my wake up SRK so he didn’t want to block and decided to back dash thinking it was the safest option. But I was too god like to read him and I did a wake up forward dash SRK > fadc > Ultra to win the second round and then down to the last round I played the match perfectly and got my victory.

After beating him it came down to winners final it was also against a Zangief. Zangief is one of my best match up and since I just played a Zangief so I was pretty well warmed up and prepared for Zangief. I forgot the Zangief’s name and he did give me some difficulty but I still took the victory and made it out of my pool as a winner. Top 32 BABYY!!!

I gathered my team Canada members since few of their pools don’t start until few hours later, so we decided to head to their room and practice for the 5 v 5. Riceata and Jozhear don’t have much experience against Yang so I had them play against Chi-Rithy’s Yang in case we have to fight EG Floe’s Yang. Ryu basically gets destroyed by Yangs, but I still practice and I forgot what else we practice in the room…but we were talking about strategies and helping each about match ups and such. We were quite ready for the exhibiton.

Uh….don’t remember what happened really, I just remembered that the rest of the team Canada had to play in their pools and I left to either nap or sleep, hahaha. When I came back, it was already losers final Riceata vs Luffy and Riceata won with the sickest slide while Rose had U2 activated! Then I learned that Chi-Rithy made it out as winner beating EG Momochi and Snafoo made it out as losers by beating Marn! Congratz to all of them and I was so happy + confident about the 5 v 5! Unluckily Jozhear couldn’t make it out for singles but he will shine while you read more about this post.

Cross Counter did a team interview with us before the 5 v 5 started, and it was actually some really interesting questions. I was asked why we had a qualifier instead of me picking my team mates, I answered that since we have various decent players it was hard for me to determine who gets on the team especially I wasn’t familiar of the Canadian scene myself. However, (this is true) before Canada Cup, from the list of Canadians who were attending, I wanted the exact same players on the team and it ended up those players on the team.

We were also asked that out of all the teams, which is the weakest one in our opinion, and I don’t think we answered that or maybe we did? I forgot. But when Gootecks told us that, every team thinks that Canada is the weakest link and that’s when I defended my country and said that “we had 4 players making out of the pool, while some of the international players didn’t make it out at all, how are we the weakest link” and blah blah blah, forgot the rest of the questions. Forgive me, I am writing this event post after 2 weeks it happened, LOL.

To be honest, the characters in our team are actually pretty weak except Yang. But since we only play 1 set against a player, having Vega and Blanka was a big advantage in my opinion especially Vega, he is a rare character and we were hoping that people weren’t familiar with the match up. Blanka is always a one set killer in my point of view.

The first team we had to play against was Europe1: Ryan Hart (Yun), Coungster (E.Honda), Luffy (Rose) Evan (Fei-Long) and Andreas (Rufus). Since I was the captain I was giving our strategies and deciding who goes first/counter pick and such. My first pick was either going to be Jozhear (Vega) or Riceata (Blanka) and both of them were really confident and wanted to go first. I chose Jozhear just because I think the Europeans lack the match up which I was hoping Jozhear can beat their first player to get the momentum on our side. Jozhear went and Ryan Hart was their first pick and as I thought Jozhear beat their first guy and not only that, Jozhear killed everybody all the way to their last person, Coungster.  I then use the home court advantage to make the crowd chanting “OCV, OCV, OCV…!” Down to last round, Jozhear failed to beat Coungster even though it was really close.

Riceata wanted to go after Jozhear with confident saying that he knows the match up really well. However, from my knowledge E.Honda vs Blanka is not an easy match up for either player and if team Europe decided to put Coungster as anchor I am pretty sure Coungster is very good at handling pressure and not choke. On the other hand if I have Riceata going up with confident and a huge advantage since he is only the second guy, I was afraid he might underestimate Coungster. Snafoo and I were also very confident with ourselves in the E.Honda match up, but those are just very standard waiting and zoning match ups that allows Coungster to think as an anchor which was something I didn’t want. As a result I told Chi-Rithy to go with his mix up based character, Yang and I told him to mix the fuck out of him to make Coungster hesitate with his decision every moment. OHHH YES, Chi-Rithy won and the whole crowd was chanting “Canada, Canada, Canada………!” we were all very happy and we watched the rest of the exhibition of the day.

This is basically the end of day 2 and to be continued…..

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