Smash tournament at FAD 3/3

     Today was a great time at Fire and Dice's weekly smash tournament. There wasn't too many people at first but later more people came. I can say that I played great compared to last week although I still have a lot of work to do to prepare for the next tournament. I did amazingly well in friendlies, defeating people endlessly multiple times in a row, even with some of my off characters. But when it came to my actual tournament matches I ended up sding (suicide deaths) twice in two different matches. Sd's are unacceptable in competitive smash and I really need to work on that for the future. Part of it is that I'm still not completely sure about everything Bayonetta can do with her recovery. I still have to work that out in the lab, aka training mode. Let's talk about my sets.
     My first set was on stream (a first for me) against Pluto, my first ever opponent that I played at my first tournament. Back then he was a Captain Falcon main but these days he's rocking Meta Knight, a pretty solid switch. I started off the set with a bang, playing pretty well against him even though he's a much better and more technical player. He won game one but I like to think it was pretty close. I got the first stock with a clutch witch time but once he started getting his up-air strings everything just started going his way. Game two was more good spacing from him and me trying to get in and out with some attacks. Again, once his up-air strings started working out the game just went in his favor. To put salt in the wound I ended up killing myself on my last stock. Not that it was close that game anyways but it was a bad way to go on stream. He ended up sding himself too so its all good. I'll try to find the video of me on stream because that first game wasn't bad at all for me. I was going toe to toe with him! Lol, it was awesome. I've definitely come a long way from my first tournament days. You can watch the set here http://www.twitch.tv/fadgames/v/52214336, set the time to around 6 minutes and that's when the match starts. It looks like I have complete control of the situation but then he just comes back with the up-airs. I feel like a couple more clutch witch times would've helped a lot because he's a very aggressive heavy type of player. But it was a good set and he's a good player. I hope I can face him again on stream sometime.
      My second set was against Captain Andrew, this Sonic main. He was pretty good but I felt like I lost because I don't know the match up. Plus I never get the chance to play good Sonic players. He pretty much just ran around at the speed of sound and grabbed me a lot. Once I was in the air he kept doing a lot of up-airs and there wasn't too much I could do to get out of it. He never approached or fought me straight up he just kept running around, which I guess is what Sonic is suppose to do. It was a little disappointing losing 2-0 super quick to a Sonic main but I should've known the match up more. I shouldn't have just been playing on autopilot during that set because you really have to change your play style and go for the punishes when fighting Sonic otherwise he'll just run circles around you. He ended up losing in a close set later against my friend FuzzBallJones, who was playing Roy.
     All in all it was a good time. I ended up going home early because a lot of my friends weren't there. Its just not the same without them ya know? I'm a little ashamed of going out like that on stream with the commentators even saying "Pluto won" before the game was over and crap like that but its just a game and I can improve. Even though it looked like Pluto was all over me I would still say that I was holding my own. I've been improving every tournament I go to. My neutral game has improved a lot over the last couple weeks. I'm still figuring out a lot about the game. For example, I'm not sure if I want to keep using Bayonetta. I might go back to using Zero Suit sometime soon. There were a couple great players that I haven't seen there before. There was this kid who played Villager that took out Rich Brown convincingly. I didn't really watch too much of the matches on stream today though because I was more into playing friendlies this week. Gotta keep playing and keep improving!