Top SPRs at Riptide for Top 32 placers. Click to expand.
Yonni's performances over the last six months, from worst placement to best placement. Click to expand.
Not only did Yonni demolish his seed projection (129th), he did so with a difficult bracket, as he had to take out Colinies, Myran, ATATA and Dabuz to earn his ninth place finish. After falling 3-0 to Maister in Winners Quarters, he pushed Goblin to a Game 5, nearly earning Top 8 at his first ever offline major.
Given his rickety local results, it's hard to blame Riptide's seeders for putting Yonni so low. How could you expect him to turn the biggest tournament into 18 months into the equivalent of a Texas weekly? Regardless, one can assume he'll be a much higher seed at Low Tide City in his home state in a couple of weeks.
Goblin has been snapping up local wins left and right since quarantine ended, but his first two tournaments of 200 or more entrants since quarantine, Infinitycon and Level Up Arena 3, were both disappointments. At Infinitycon, Goblin fell to Jmafia and Jake for 17th as the second seed, a brutal -7 SPR. At Level Up Arena 3 in Kansas, Goblin was able to outplace the Midwestern competition, but fell to Scend and Epic_Gabriel to finish third as the top seed, a -2 SPR.
Goblin's 36th seed was a direct result of those rough performances, and his bracket was a challenging one: he'd need to beat Maister to get to Top 24 on Winners Side, and Maister was able shut him down with a clean 3-0. In order to make his way to fifth, Goblin took out four players who had been previously ranked on the PGRU, and two others in Yonni and Epic_Gabriel who have looked like PGRU-level players in recent times:
Goblin's losers run at Riptide. Click to expand.
Among players to make Top 8, Goblin's +6 SPR was unmatched.
Yoomoo may not have the name recognition of Mario players like Dark Wizzy or Kurama, but at 17th, he tied Kurama as the top placing Mario at Riptide. A force in Chicago, Yoomoo owned a 91% win rate (169-17) across 30 local tournaments in the six months leading up to Riptide, with Loaf, ApolloKage and Ned the only players able to score a winning record over Yoomoo in multiple sets.
After taking down Stroder Ame in winners, Yoomoo fell to Goblin in a stunning Game 3 SD that very well could have changed the shape of the entire tournament. Rather than letting that get the best of him, Yoomoo recovered and won four straight sets in losers to make Top 24, including a win on Michigan's best player, Zinoto before falling to yet another Florida player in Epic_Gabriel.
Yoomoo's losers run at Riptide. Click to expand.
naitosharp was one of the toughest players to place heading into quarantine. He was one of the best players in the world during online play, and regularly took wins from top players in online tournaments. The question was whether or not he would be able to break through at an in-person major in a way that he hadn't in his few chances pre-quarantine, as his tournament runs were characterized by him steamrolling through players in early pools but swiftly falling to top players in later rounds:
naitosharp at majors pre-quarantine. Click to expand.
And at the Comeback and Push The Limit 13, the closest thing naitosharp had to majors post-quarantine, we saw a similar pattern: he cut through lower seeds with ease, but was 0-4 against the PGRU-ranked players he faced (WaDi, Marss and Tweek—admittedly, a particularly tough trio of ranked players).
At Riptide, he made one of the first major upsets of Saturday's singles action, sending 7th-seed Kola to losers bracket extremely early. He would also go on to pick up another PGRU win over MuteAce before falling to MkLeo and Dabuz for ninth.
There were some fair questions about naitosharp's ability to elevate his game against top-level competition offline prior to Riptide. Consider those answered.
On the Riptide floor, I heard multiple people question the logic behind Elegant's 13th seed. Elegant, after all, was merely 32nd on the last PGRU, and other than a 4th place at Low Tier City 7, he hadn't finished better than 13th at 12 S- and A-Tier events.
So much for that. Elegant did benefit from Anathema's upset win over Marss, but he also picked up wins over SKITTLES!! (in a truly brutal matchup) and LingLing on his way to Winners Top 8. It was Top 8 where he truly proved he belonged at the top, as he was able to take out Goblin 3-2 in Losers Quarterfinals to guarantee 4th, and was even able to force Sparg0 off Cloud and onto Pyra/Mythra in a back-and-forth five-game set in Losers Semifinals.
Elegant in best-of-five sets at Riptide. Click to expand.
Prior to quarantine, LingLing was about as consistent as it gets, racking up 33rd place finish after 33rd place finish at S-Tier events. Seriously. He did it four times in a row.
LingLing at four consecutive majors from August 2019-January 2020. Click to expand.
What I'm saying is, you really can't blame the seeders for putting him on the 33rd line. LingLing was the beneficiary of one big upset, as TonyZTank took out Fatality just before losing to LingLing, and it's possible that was the key to LingLing's run: he was just 6-19 (24%) against PGRU-ranked players prior to quarantine. Still, TonyZTank has been one of the Midwest's best players since before quarantine, as has Wisdom, whom he defeated the round before.
LingLing lost to Elegant, the first PGRU-ranked player he faced, and Sparg0, who would almost certainly be PGRU-ranked had COVID-19 not forced the cancellation of PGRU Season 3.
Loaf has been dominating the Minnesota scene since the end of quarantine, and also placed second at two 128-plus player tournaments: Level Up Arena 2 in Kansas, where he only fell to SKITTLES!!, and Ignition 229, where he took down ApolloKage and lost only to Ned.
As seeded, Loaf fell to Toast in the first winners round of Round 2 Pools. From there, he went on a massive losers run, picking up wins over two previously PGRU-ranked players in ZD and Kurama.
The Minnesota scene is fairly isolated, receiving only the rare Wisconsin visitor, so it can be tough to figure players like Loaf who dominate these kinds of scenes deserve to rank on the national scale. With this performance, Loaf proved he's more than just a local killer.
Other than Kurama, whose local attendance is relatively sparse, Lui$ has zero competition in NorCal, often winning his local tournaments with Random. He was 115-11 (91%) in the past six months prior to Riptide, and two of the losses came at the stacked Summit qualifier at MSM 240, where he finished seventh losing to Cosmos and Scend. Lui$ had finished Top 8 at one prior S-Tier event, Super Smash Con 2019, but had failed to progress pass 17th in seven events since.
It looked like it might be more of the same for Lui$ after he was upset by Zomba in Round 1 Pools, falling 2-1 to the New Yorker. Instead, he embarked on one of the event's longest losers runs, winning seven straight sets before finally running into his nemesis, Aegis, at the hands of Sparg0, even pulling out a Pokemon Trainer to defeat Pandarian's Palutena.
Lui$'s losers run at Riptide. Click to expand.
This was just Myles's second major, and the first one, Let's Make Big Moves, did not live up to his typically high standards: one of Tristate's many Yoshis finished just 193rd, going 2-2 losing to RFang and LemonTea.
Despite losing in just his third set to Illinois's A Coward, Myles was able to redeem himself and more at Riptide. If you thought Lui$'s losers run was impressive, check out the gauntlet Myles ran:
It's OK if you lost count. That's nine sets, including the previously PGRU-ranked Ned, an absolutely massive run for Myles, who was one game away against MRW from finishing 129th. After laying an egg at his previous major, this Yoshi has to be over the moon after his Riptide run.
TonyZTank was just starting to get rolling at the end of quarantine; after a disappointing 193rd at The Big House 9, he was able to place 49th at Let's Make Big Moves with a win on RFang and 65th at Frostbite 2020 losing to ScAtt and Ned. But nothing prepared us for the absurd winners run he embarked upon at Riptide:
To make it out of pools, he took down one of North America's best Bayonetta players, Shadow_PR, before dispatching a pair of PGRU players in LeoN and Fatality, the latter of whom was coming off a second place finish at the French major Ultimate Wanted #3. Despite losing in his next two sets, TonyZTank established himself as a threat to top level players anywhere and everywhere.
in both cases. But he found himself eliminated before Top 8 at exactly half of his 22 events of at least 50 players in the past six months. To put it into perspective, Yonni's median performance at his locals was ninth place. At an event nearly 20 times bigger than his average local and featuring many of the best players in the world... he got ninth.
