For me March 4th, 2023 was Kill Roy Volume 6, which was a tournament in Bloomington IN. The tournament was very well run, and pretty flawlessly executed the supposedly “experimental” flex Bo5 format for pools, and did not run meaningfully over even when I observed multiple Samus main game 5s. TOs were punctual, clear, and generally helpful, and the whole thing ran pretty smoothly, especially given the high entrant number and relatively limited space. Some people (myself included) expressed a little frustration at the presence of a longer dinner break, but that is a matter of taste and not an objective good or bad, and it would be unfair to allow my personal preferences to color my assessment of the event.

One major asterisk in terms of the quality of organizing though was the organizers’ failure to notify people of last minute pool changes, which led to a very high seed in Skerzo being disqualified as he did not make it in time for his pool, which was moved late the night before from 3:30 to 2 o clock. While ultimately competitors should be checking their pools the morning of, it would have been prudent for the organizers to notify people of such potentially travel arrangement altering decisions, especially since the storm winds the day before prevented many people from coming up the night before. This did undoubtedly affect the flow of the tournament as Skerzo is more than good enough to ensure that he would have made a splash.

Personal Experience

The Kill Roy series holds a special place in my heart because Kill Roy Vol. 2 was my very first tournament outside my local. Unfortunately, this was not the triumphant return to it that I was hoping for, and instead was arguably the worst I’ve ever performed in tournament relative to my current skill level. I would love to be cool and take radical ownership of my play and say that it was uncontrolled nerves, just a bad day, or that I hadn’t been practicing, but in truth my phob broke the week before the event and I had to switch to random OEM out of my backpack the Thursday before the tournament. This was affecting me HEAVILY, even in sets that I dominantly won. The controller is both frankly not very good and I am/was also very unaccustomed to it. I was unable to move with confidence in any of my sets, and it showed. Ultimately, this still was on me, because the right thing to do would be to have a much better backup, but it was very frustrating nonetheless.

For doubles, I’m really not sure what happened. I teamed with the aforementioned Preeminent, who seemed to be doing very well every time I observed him on the screen, and for my part I felt like I was kind of owning 90% of the time in one v ones. We didn’t team combo well, but we did a decent job of hitting each other and saving one another, which is about as well as you can expect for a first time teaming together, especially since he said that it was his first time teaming with Marth. Still, we underperformed and got 5th, although both sets we lost were last game and extremely winnable. Game two against Eggy/Mekk in particular we both kind of threw at the end, which sucked, but it happened and we have to hold that.. We also lost to Rik/Lance, which was the only set where I felt that we were outplayed in terms of specific doubles play, which honestly makes sense given their experience level. The biggest thing I learned was that I’m not really sure what to do about Ganon in teams, as Mekk showed me that he can hold down/shield and Marth gets virtually no reward without immense risk on everything. I think that in the future I will simply either not play Marth or ask my teammate to help me not have to fight him. It’s a bit like Falcon in teams in this regard but you can’t blow him up nearly as easily/quickly when he does exit the defensive shell. I guess the other big thing that I learned too was that being on a bad backup controller doesn’t matter nearly as much in teams, as Marth’s role is much more centered around walling aerials and setting up zones, which can be done on virtually anything, which was nice for this event in particular

For pools, I played a Falcon/Falco player who was new enough to the scene he did not know who I was, and Kanye Midwest, who had just upset Suidt. Luckily for me, they both gave enough freebies that my inability to move didn’t really matter, and I was able to punish monkey my way to very lopsided victories. I did get to help Kanye Midwest with some DI tips after the set though, which I’m always happy to do, and welcome anyone to ask me for at any tournament.

In bracket, my first two sets were against Coffee and Eggy, and both were 3-0s in my favor. Many people commented on how dominant these were/how good I looked vs Peach, but I want to make something clear: These were not very good demonstrations of Marth/Peach. I hate to say this, because I have the utmost respect for the skills of both of these players, but me putting on a banner performance in Marth/Peach was not what was going on here. I just gapped both of them really hard in the MU, and in particular got 4000 soul reads game 2 on Coffee and noticed some pretty exploitable neutral habits from Eggy (notably jumping into me when he was at 0 almost without fail). if I had played at this level vs Polish, Llod, Wally, or presumably Trif, I would have been summarily 3-0’d. Furthermore, the slower nature of the Peach MU made my inability to move well less consequential, but if you revisit the sets with comms off I think even a cursory watch will reveal how much trouble I had moving even with full confidence and a big lead.

My next two sets were 1-3 losses against Fox mains, which was an immensely faster matchup where my movement failures bit me more times than I could count. The first of these was vs Zamu, who I would have been very excited to face under different circumstances, as I think he is quite good at the MU, and is in general just a very cool/fun player to play against. I got up to a solid lead game one, but in all honesty it was largely built on Zamu running into my fairs in place repeatedly and me being able to execute punish decently. However, on an easy edgeguard that would have put me up more than a full stock, I SD’d in a bizarre way that pretty instantly decided the game. One of my friends described the sight as watching my soul leave my body, and it is difficult to argue with him given how it felt. I did win the next game, but it was a very “FD” FD counterpick game with big punishes carrying me. By game 3, Zamu had wised up to my overly leaning on defensive fair, and was in control the rest of that set. In particular on Yoshi’s he played the top platform with a stock lead very very well. I felt very powerless to do anything about it because the precision needed to challenge that position is extreme in the best of times, and every good Marth main I’ve ever talked to has either agreed that it is a fundamentally difficult/bad position for Marth, or failed to make a good argument otherwise. I’m very unsure if I could have been effective in that spot even on a good day with the world’s best controller, and I need to up both my general skill and bag of tricks for it.

As an aside, Zamu popped off for that SD, and I have to say: Bro what the hell? Serious coward behavior.

Against Preeminent, the whole venue got to see my skill floor. I had all the movement issues I’ve whined about for hundreds of words now, but now I was also dropping my punishes! I know I started this piece off by spotlighting Preeminent’s performance, but I have to be honest in this section: in our set, I think his approach to the MU was largely wrong. He mostly laser camped, and I just wasn’t moving well enough to catch him out. I do not think that it is a long term effective style against Marth, and it’s a shame that due to success he will no doubt be galvanized towards replicating it in the future. The cost for Fox repeatedly cornering himself should be immensely greater than the 8 percent or however much the lasers get. My lack of confidence led to me hesitating to pull the trigger in these important spots, and repeatedly cost me greatly. This wasn’t a set that really taught me anything about the game, but I did learn just a little bit more about suffering, so that’s something…I guess. I know this assessment doesn’t make it sound like it, but I really do respect Preeminent, and appreciate him teaming with me. But this was a very bad set, and I’m not into sugarcoating things for the sake of diplomacy in personal reflection pieces like this.

The Good

  • Smash at IUB. Full Bloom 6!
  • Grinding punish is bearing fruits even under really poor conditions
  • Reinforced my fears/need to look for solutions to YS top platform

The Bad

  • Controller broke
  • CONTROLLER BROKE, Dillon STUPID and did not get 2 good ones