Hey, guys. At last I went to my first offline tournament yesterday. It was held in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, so I had to take a 10 hour bus ride to get there. I gotta say, being at a tournament is awesome. There's been 43 entrants + some cheerers, which made more than 50 people. We played on 3 PS3's and a XBOX360. So I signed up and got randomed in the 6th pool (there were 8 pools of 5 players). So I had to win 4 times to get out. Of course I played Jade, by the way. First I fought a SZ which I beat, pretty good match, but I feel I could do better, and when I realized this, the guy (named zeee) counterpicked with Scorpion and raped me. At this moment I felt the first threat, but fortunately zeee got out of pools and got beaten by someone else and I didn't fight him again. Then I fought a Reptile, who was basically spamming a lot the dash, but he did play good. I beat this Reptile, then I beat a Noob player pretty easily, I guess the guy didn't have much experience with Jade because he kept throwing shadows, although whenever he had meter he used en-shadows, which took some life from me. And the last match I fought another Reptile, and this was the match to get out of the pool. We both had 2 wins each and we both had to win this to go further. The shit was crazy, the guy was a lot better than the other one, so we went to the last round and I don't remember clearly what was going on, definitely some random stuff, but I remember that we both had approx. 10% of life and were close to each other, so I did Glow, he slid at me and left me with almost no life and I shadow kicked him in the face. That was the hypest match I had so far. Ok, so I got out of the pools, went to top 16, beat a Sektor/Cyrax player, than a Mileena player (this guy took 3rd place later, named karfagen), so, I got in top 8. In between my matches I was watching others, you know, to see what I have to face. There was a really good Kabal player who was playing on a ps3 pad and doing iAGB's and dash-cancels extremely good, actually iAGB's were nearly perfect, then was when I saw the power of the goddam Kabal and feared of facing him, but he got beaten by a Kitana player, which didn't seem very threatening to me. I guess I was just biased towards Kabal. Anyway, here I am in top 8 in the winner's bracket, and, suprise, I get to fight the Kitana player that I talked about earlier. Well, he beat me real hard. The guy not only had zoning skills, but whenever he got close he pressured me. I have to say he played great, at some moments I was lost, didn't even know what to do, actually I knew I had to punish his cutter after a blocked d1, which I did 1 time out of 10 with an uppercut LoL, I even exclamated "At last!", and laughed. Anyway, the guy beat me, Gfc_AlekS was his name. So I went to losers' bracket. There I faced an Ermac player and got beaten hard, just because I kept jumping after he d4-ed me and forcelifted after. I got so angry at myself cause of falling time and time again for this shit, but the guy capitalized on my faults and deserved to win. So here's my story. Oh, yeah, 1st place was taken by a kid named nikitos_ua, he played a beastly Kung Lao. I think that if I had to face him I would have not reached top 8 LoL. I will put here links of videos later, there were some footage of my matches.
In conclusion: offline experience is the shit, gotta learn Ermac more, that guy is hard for me for some reason, but generally match-up experience is crucial. Having the perfect tools doesn't grant victory.
P.S. No Raiden, at least high level, also no rests with Cyrax nor Smoke seen in this tournament. Not 1 Jax player for some reason. I wish there were some of these for more match-up experience. I did play the winner and his KL in casuals after the tournament, I totally would've not got out of 16th if I faced him LoL
