Combo Breaker 2024 was a massive fighting game tournament held in Schaumburg, IL from May 24-26th. Featuring over 3500 unique entrants, this Combo Breaker was (I believe) the largest tournament I have ever attended. It was, in virtually all aspects, worthy of such scale. Never once did I walk into the venue and find a sore thumb sticking out. Issues that were glaring at recent smash events were nowhere to be found: Security? I would have liked a metal detector, but bag check was so smooth and fast it would have moved Genesis staff to tears. Event running? Everything finished with time to spare. Setups? Some of the FGC games struggled, but Combo Breaker featured so much to do and so many different games that I never saw a soul bored for a moment. I even received less bizarre, unwarranted hostility for being a Melee player than I usually do at FGC focused events (although still some!). Indeed, many Melee people left the event talking about how they were interested in learning this game or that game, and it honestly warmed my heart. The name for Combo Breaker’s “community” tournaments is All In Together, and I loved to see that spirit shine through.
Something special/unique I want to highlight for the event is just how good the vendors/merch were for Combo Breaker. With no exaggeration, the Combo Breaker merch was the easily he best I’ve ever seen at a tournament. While it wasn’t cheap, it is all immaculately designed and well made, and just looks good. Furthermore, there was a greater variety of booths/types of vendors than at smash events. At smash events, virtually every vendor can be divided into either art or controllers, and truthfully at some point it begins to feel a little saturated, even with all the legitimate, hard working talent in the community. Combo Breaker having a few other things to mix it up (Rivals 2 demo booth, the great POPCORN BARON) was extremely appreciated. I hope smash events in the future elect to take a page out of their book on this, because it made the weekend feel more alive and fun throughout.
I will, however, take a moment from the glowing praise to highlight a couple of issues that I think could be improved upon. The first of which was the temperature. The venue at Combo Breaker was COLD. Probably the coldest major venue I’ve ever been in, and I spent more time cursing myself for not bringing a jacket than at any other public function I’ve ever attended. I heard through the grapevine that there was an odor issue (not from attendees but from some spill etc), and they were presented with the catch-22 of either cranking the AC or dealing with the odor. I will say that their decision was probably the right one, but it did suck dealing with the temperature and I believe it did impact my performance in a couple of sets, and I’m sure it did the same to many others as well.
The other, more complex issue I had was with the scheduling. The event ran supremely smoothly, and both staff and volunteers were helpful, professional, and kind. However, the pools were ran in such a manner that people with 10am or 12pm pools would both play round 2 pools at 2pm, meaning the first group would take a break and the second group would essentially play straight through. More than just personal taste, I don’t believe that this is a good way to structure pools. Parity between competitors should be sought as much as possible, and having a break vs not having one can be a very significant factor, especially in sets between players of very close skill levels. Tenacity (head Melee TO) actually brought this up with me during the event, but I expressed that I had no problems with the schedule because it didn’t impact me and I hadn’t yet realized exactly how it worked. I was wrong, and if he reads this that was my bad. I also understand that this schedule was probably mandated by the larger Combo Breaker event itself, but I think that in the future TOs should seek to avoid this whenever possible.
Lastly, and I cannot say that this was bad since it’s ultimately a matter of personal opinion, but I do believe the event misstepped by putting to a poll what patch Street Fighter would be run on. CB 2024 was the largest non-Evo Street Fighter of all time, and to place it on essentially clown rules with only a few days notice sits very poorly with me. People further justified this by saying that it was okay since it wasn’t a Capcom Pro Tour event, but that honestly just feels even worse. I understand that the attitudes towards Capcom aren’t as overwhelmingly negative in the SF community as the ones towards Nintendo in Melee, but I wish people would ask themselves: Does Capcom own Street Fighter, or does the FGC? The event should not be disregarded because it did not successfully curry the favor of a corporation.
WIth regards to the tournament itself and the brackets, I won’t even attempt to talk about any brackets other than Melee. SFVI’s was a mess due to being run on a 3 day old patch, and that was the only game I was following at all going into the event besides Melee. That isn’t to say other games weren’t fun to watch; on the contrary, I had a great time viewing Tekken top 8 and various bits of other games in the venue. I just don’t have intelligent enough insights to offer about the goings on in those brackets to write about it here. As for the Melee bracket, the two standouts by seeding were undoubtedly Essy and Zealot. Zealot’s “overperformance” shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. His attendance has been very low, but his peak skill was/is very high and I pity anyone that had to seed him for Combo Breaker or anything in the near future. Essy is one that may surprise those unfamiliar with her, but will never surprise me. I expressed frustration once to a friend about how Essy was such a tough opponent to face because beating her is so incredibly hard and doesn’t look as good on you as it feels like it should because sometimes she will just randomly lose sets you would not expect. His response was something along the lines of “yeah it’s weird sometimes she just gets double eliminated by Coffee (my GOAT) and then a few weeks later she’ll go laser eyes and top 8 a major”. At Combo Breaker we got laser eyes Essy making a run all the way to third beating KoopaTroopa, Preeminent, Wevans, and Blue, which is always a treat to see. Other standout performances included Preeminent making it to winner’s side top 8 with a win on Bbatts, and Wevans making it to top 8 through JSalt and myself. Further down the bracket were also some notable performances, with Grab2Win scoring upsets on both Den and Chango, and 2ToesToto making it to top 32 as a completely unseeded player.
Personal Performance
Sometimes, you come up short while coming so close that you almost want to pretend that things were different. To live in another, very similar parallel universe in which you accomplished your goals rather than missing the mark. I felt that temptation in a big way after Combo Breaker, losing both my Melee singles sets in heartbreaking game 5 last stock fashion and falling to perform to seed. Still, it is my belief that this temptation is ultimately just another form of escapist ego defense, no different than drowning your sorrow in booze or drugs. I live in the world in which I lost, and what is left to me is to learn from it what I can. This event, like Santa Paws and DHATL at the end of last year, shined a harsh light on my inability to perform in my first sets of the day, with me finally hitting my groove vs Chango (4th set) Saturday only to go back to jittering and flailing on Sunday. This problem has gotten to the point that I am considering seeing a sports psychologist over it. It seems a pretty overblown solution to the problem for a comparatively middle of the pack competitor like myself, but at this point I’m halfway convinced I could have recovered the money for it in payouts by now if I could perform at my 4th-5th set level as the day begins.
As an important aside, my number one concern going into this event was actually not my performance, but the health of my thumbs. I have been having pain and weakness in the large basal joint of my thumbs, and it has been greatly amplified recently, to the point that I didn’t play Melee for about a week before Combo Breaker. I think that the most likely causes are either De Quervain’s syndrome or early osteoarthritis, both of which scare me. I will be visiting a doctor about the issue ASAP, but for the time being I was just glad I was able to play without major pain during Saturday and Sunday.
For my round one pool, my first two opponents were Fox players that were simply not up to the task of beating me. They had reasonable technical proficiency, but struggled to find openings or convert in a meaningful way when they did. I say this without the intention of any disrespect towards either of them, and mean only that I won’t/can’t go into any real depth about those sets.
My opponent to get out of R1 pools was Eggy, a strong Peach from Chicago who I had last played at a Kill Roy event early last year. I am not going to sugarcoat my feelings about this set: I played terribly, probably my worst set of the entire event, and that frustrates me greatly because I also played very poorly in my last bout with Eggy. Luckily for me, Eggy also played very poorly in this set, and we had multiple downright cringeworthy moments where we would do things like grab/aerial in the completely wrong direction or stand facing each other frozen because we couldn’t move our characters, not because we were playing some high level mixup. Still I simply think that Eggy is not nearly as strong in the Marth MU as he is in some others and as a result I was able to win despite the slop. I was angry and annoyed the entire set about my inability to execute, and this is the one set that I will John a little bit about the cold in the venue. I could not feel all of my fingertips during this set, and it made playing clean Melee very difficult. I managed to borrow a jacket from a friend during my other sets, which turned out to be a good call and a valuable lesson for this and future events.
My next set was against Chango, and was honestly the only set I felt proud of in any way at Combo Breaker. I will say that despite looking pretty dominant by me, there was a bit of an elephant in the room with regards to this set, which was Chango’s inability to rest. He probably missed/forwent 3-4 rests in this set, which of course can be huge. Otherwise, I felt like I played neutral pretty well in this set, and actually only took a lot of damage in situations where I would miss a waveland/edgecancel or get an accidental roll. I also did a very good job of visualizing where the arc of Puff’s jumps would take her, leading to a number of callout tippers that kept most of my kill percents reasonable. In terms of things I could do better in the set, I still didn’t find very many grabs, but at the same time I was so dominant on both the ground and air when I wasn’t flubbing execution I’m not sure that was even a bad thing. Chango did start to adapt well in the third game of this set, so I would expect future contests to be challenging, but overall I’m always glad to have sets vs Puff in tournament where I don’t just get lose to nerves/tilt before the set actually ends.
My next set was against Magi, and while it wasn’t as bad as the Eggy set, I think it was pretty subpar from both of us. The FD game in particular was extremely poorly played, with me dropping more than half my major conversions and Magi throwing the game egregiously at the end. The rest of the games weren’t nearly as bad as that one, but they still could have been a lot better. In particular on my end I struggled mightily to move out of lasers, getting a disastrous number of accidental rolls/spotdodges when attempting to wavedash out of shield. The rolls in were particularly harmful, and a couple of crucial ones game five probably cost me the set. This is something that I partially blame controller issues on (I received my controller with digital triggers back from a modder a few days before the event after using analog triggers for a month), but ultimately I knew I was likely to play Magi and could have grinded this out in 20XX or similar. For her part, I felt that she played neutral pretty characteristically but definitely dropped a number of followups that I don’t normally see from her, and it was due to playing off and not any excellent defense from me. Still, I did learn a few things in this set, most notably not to do lazy side b edgeguards vs Falco and to be more ready to shield grab double shine after shield DIing out. In terms of the things I was just sloppy on, I missed a ton of uthrow followups, which was the opposite of my normal issue being bad at techchasing. I think I was so focused on not screwing up the latter I ended up missing the former.
After that I played Wevans, which I also lost. Simply put, I don’t think I’ve ever been more jealous of another competitor than I was during this set. Wevans played incredibly well, probably the best a Samus has ever played vs me in tournament, definitely eclipsing our DHATL 2022 seat which would have been the set I previously would have said was the best a Samus had performed against me. He just fired on all cylinders from bell to bell, and even with a couple of nervy moments in game five I feel that I could count the unforced errors from him on one hand. By contrast, I felt like I was drowning in my own adrenaline and anxiety, repeating predictable habits off of platforms (that he did a great job of punishing) and flubbing basic movement. I don’t think other people saw it this way because the set was so close, but I’m honestly not sure if I’ve ever been more embarrassed about my composure. If someone made a soyjack vs handsome face of me vs Wevans for that set, I would be a little mad at them, but it would be justified. That said, the set wasn’t without some good stuff from me: I did a great job of calling out backwards movement with dash attack, and I also did well at dealing with Samus recovery when she lacked either grapple or double jump. The set also reinforced to me that I need to learn more aggressive options when she does have all her resources though, as I more or less let him back completely for free under those conditions. I’ve labbed and I’m quite sure there are no guaranteed options for Marth to pursue in that situation, but there has to be something(s) I’m missing with acceptable risk reward.
Painting with broader strokes, there was also my ever-present issue with struggling vs my opponents’ respawn invincibility, which was a major pain point in basically every set. I’m going to have to sit down and do a lot of hardcore analysis on this topic, because I watch Zain play against even stronger players and he doesn’t get blown up in this position half as much.