Riptide 2023
EVENT
Riptide 2023 was one of the best tournaments I have ever had the pleasure of entering. I legitimately cannot think of a single criticism that does not amount to basically a nitpick, and I mean that with no reservations. The scheduling, the streaming, the pools structure, the TOing, the organizing…it was basically perfect. For those that were unaware, the event was run in a “rolling waves” style, where R1 and R2 pools were played back to back for each group of players, I.E. if you had R1 pools at noon, you had R2 pools at 2 as a different group began their R1. I have been told that this style of pools is harder logistically to pull off, but from the smoothness with which things ran from my perspective as a competitor, I wouldn’t have guessed it. This eliminated one of my major criticisms from last year, which was that competitors on day 2 and 3 would sometimes have situations like Jmook had where he played me before 10am and then Hbox at almost 10pm. Additionally, last year I had complaints about the ruleset with things like stadium transformations, FD starter, and other Panda/Nintendo generated headaches. While I’m not sure it’s right to credit the staff here, those things were gone, and as a result the tournament was more pleasant. In terms of any specific people to highlight, I mostly dealt with Unsure whenever I had questions/issues and he was a joy to work with as always, but at this point I doubt that’s news to anyone that’s ever been to the Midwest.
Furthermore, I should highlight the big positive that wasn’t particularly relevant to me, but was a huge deal for other competitors: Riptide is held at a water park resort. The world’s largest indoor one in fact, a tidbit they will not let you forget. The rooms are barely at all more expensive than at most majors, and in return attendees get access to a massive water park. This year the TOs went above and beyond and even reserved the park for attendees for after hours on Saturday. As I don’t love swimming, I can’t comment on this in detail, but I know for some it is one of the main draws of the event.
For negatives, I will start the main one: Riptide is held in Sandusky Ohio. If you come to tournaments to do things other than play/watch Melee (weird) or in this case swim (weird, but in this case my weird), you will not like Riptide. Sandusky is one of the most bare bones tourist trap towns on the planet, and other than a few decent places to eat (shoutouts to The Sandusky Bay Pancake House and Danny Boy’s), there really isn’t much of anything there. Additionally, if you flew into the tournament and do not have friends that drove, getting to those places to eat will cost you a rideshare fee, as they are just a little too far to walk regularly (although they are a pretty short drive). That being said, the food in the Kalahari is passable but insanely expensive, so even with the rideshare cost factored in, most will want to leave the resort to eat. I also personally find the beds in the Kalahari weirdly uncomfortable, but that one is probably just me.
As for what other negatives I can think of: Some people don’t like that rolling waves structure of pools, preferring instead longer prep times for their second wave, but in all honesty that is a matter of taste (and for my personal tastes, I greatly prefer to play the sets out and maintain momentum), and I do think they ultimately lead to less arduous schedules for the players who go deep in bracket as I outlined above. Some people also might not have liked it that there was a 6pm/8pm wave instead of a 10am/noon wave, but I think that too is a matter of taste. Personally, I’m not a fan of being in either the 6pm or 10am wave, but if I had to choose, I’d pick 6pm, and the amount of complaints I have heard about 10am in the past make me think I’m not in the minority. Lastly, I suppose some people may have preferred a little more “bold” structuring or switching things up somehow, like incorporating swiss or having a quad as the main stream like at Shine this year. Honestly though, the fact that I’m scraping that far down the bottom of the barrel for critique should tell you everything you need to know about how good Riptide was this year, and the day that all we can bash every tournament for is not pushing the envelope hard enough is the day I quit writing these.
As for the bracket itself, the absence of most of our usual juggernauts made it interesting. I think most people expected things to come down to Moky vs Wizzrobe/Plup, but in the end it was the latter two in grands, playing an electrifying game 10 set that I think will go down in Melee history. Obviously, one of the biggest takeaways from this event is that Wizzy has still got it, which is actually pretty scary from where I’m watching because some of his signature “Wizzrobe” stuff (techchasing, certain edgeguards) actually looked notably worse than usual. . Another good run was Llod, who after losing early to gahtzu ran it all the way back to third place, taking out Moky, Axe, amsa, Polish, Flash, and myself in the process, only falling game five to Wizzy. Kind of an insane run now that I write it down. However, two of the biggest stars of the event have to be bbatts and Ben, who rampaged through bracket to finish 7th and 5th respectively, with bbatts scoring wins on Essy, Zamu, Magi, and Aklo (!!!), with Ben getting dubs on None, Flash, Zuppy, and Bbatts. The other breakout star was Michigan’s own Ossify, who defeated Michael, Panda, and Ginger to make top 16 before losing to None game 5 in one of the most thrilling sets I’ve ever seen off stream. When the slippi vods for that one come out, do yourself a favor and watch: It’s peak game 5 last stock Melee. Lastly for notable results, Acid beat JCAM in winner’s round two which was…wild. I feel bad emphasizing how crazy of an upset that is because Acid is a friend, but a player of JCAM’s caliber losing round two at a major is something that is simply not supposed to happen. He ran it back to a very respectable finish though, taking out Holiday and Spinda before falling to None who had been (mildly) upset by Ben in the round before.
PERSONAL
This event was weird for me in terms of performance. I technically underperformed, getting 25th while seeded to make 17th, but at the same time I only lost to Axe and Llod, two fantastic players who are rated 50+ spots higher than me. Out of game, I had a great weekend with my friends, but was plagued with sleep and equipment issues, with my headphone amp starting to go out and missing so much sleep that I’m still tired now three days later after I got home. A weekend of highs and lows, but I can’t shake the notion that if I somehow solve my sleep woes, majors will reach a whole new level of both productivity and fun.
I didn’t make it to the prelocal for this event, but I got to play tons of fun friendlies vs JCAM, Bbatts, Sirmeris, Acid, Seal, Lowercasehero, Reeve, JDMH, Palika (bro let’s just be cool and not like we are on unranked now okay?), and many more. The ones vs Bbatts were particularly entertaining; I don’t think I’ve ever been 3 and 4 stocked by a Peach player and then done it back to them so many times, and it was honestly super cool to see a vision of the MU that wasn’t a hard grind.
As for how my actual sets, the first was against a spacie player called Eddie who I did not know. He moved fairly well, but got 4 stocked/jv 4 stocked both games, which is an unfortunate reality of facing a t100 Marth for a lower mid level space animal at a major. It’s not always the most fun for them, but it’s how the Melee ecosystem works, for better or worse.
Next round I played Tr4shJ4ck, a box peach player from Minnesota. I harbor no ill will towards her whatsoever, but I will not hold back my feelings about set: I have never been more confident in my life that box controllers are not okay. Peach on the box is a completely different MU than Peach on GCC. The ground based, dash dancing neutral that GCC Peach is forced to play vs Marth does not have to exist with box Peach, and I was forced to do what felt like making up a new MU on the fly. My gameplan against Peach isn’t perfect, but it is quite good. It was all but useless here, and to make matters worse my headphones were rapidly cutting in and out throughout the set which was very distracting. I only barely won by getting lucky with stray aerials and good player-ing my way through some hard punishes game three. It is a travesty that we allow such landscape altering devices to exist essentially without regulation in our scene, and if I ever quit playing Melee, it will be either because I simply do not find it fun anymore or because I am so completely disgusted by what we have allowed the controller arms race to do. To everyone who thinks we cannot ban digital controllers because they have existed for too long and too many use them: Why? It becomes more obvious every day that they enable and encourage radically different gameplay than is performed on a GCC, and if I have to sit through one more twitter apologist explaining how um ackshually this box tech is totally doable on GCC if you remap all the buttons and use a double reverse unforbidden Setchi claw grip, I swear I will force feed them an unmodded OEM (not serious, but it’s sad that I have to write that disclaimer).
My next set was vs Holiday, an Ohio Sheik (formerly Fox) that I hadn’t had the opportunity to play in quite a while. It was a fun set, even though I continued to have the aforementioned issues with my headphones rig (I switched from headphones to IEMs here but it turned out the main issue was with my amp). His movement was as crispy as ever, but he struggled a little more getting the utmost out of his openings vs some of my DI/SDI and general counterplay, which I think opened things up enough for me that I was able to generally hit harder and win the set that way. For my part, my big issue with this set was edgeguards. I edgeguarded terribly, doing the thing where I stay on stage and threaten nothing because I am nervous in tournament, as well as not even executing my onstage edgeguards correctly. If I can shore that up, I feel good about my chances against high level Sheiks, but if not I will be taking Ls in the near future. It’s just that important of a factor.
Next I played Axe, AKA the hardest possible draw for a Marth player. I got 3-0d, which was pretty disappointing for me given that I have a pretty rich background playing vs Pikachu. However, when I consider that backgrounded ended >3 years ago, I find that I can be a little kinder in my self-assessment, especially given how rapidly I started to do better throughout the set. Game one was a three stock, and game three was pretty much even until I SD’d at low percent last stock. I didn’t really feel like there were major holes in my gameplan, just hesitation, imperfections, and of course, getting outplayed. In particular, I felt like I would recognize the need to fair just a hair too late, or recognize it on time and then flub. That was HUGE in neutral, and if you watch Zain, perhaps his single biggest tool. Axe played very airborne this set, so I wasn’t able to impose my will with dtilt as much as normal, and so fairing well was make or break. In terms of the outplays, I was really impressed with Axe’s use of down smash. I have sometimes made fun of Axe in the past for mashing dsmash like a low level Peach player to get pop ups/knockdowns at low percent (since Pikachu struggles so hard with CC and has a tiny grab), but in this set he used it masterfully as an overshoot and antiair. Overshooting with it in particular is a hard outplay that is difficult to execute because of the size/nature of the hitbox, which really goes to show you both how good Axe is and that he is continuing to develop even at this stage of his career. I also felt like I was mostly ready for/correct in how to deal with his crossup nair “spam”, but he is the known as the best at it for a reason, and had layers of counterplay to answer my counterplay. While I didn’t feel badly out of my depth dealing with it or anything like that, I did feel like the best option would have been to use fair much better and minimize it happening in the first place.
Next I played Faust in loser’s, a very good Ontario Puff I’ve known for a long time. This set felt a bit lose-lose for me, because I was the higher seeded player and knew that he had just gotten back from a camp and would not be at his sharpest. It was also, however, a chance to pressure test some of the stuff I had been working on vs Puff. After my loss to Panko at WHW, I did a lesson with Mai on fighting Puff, mainly focused on dealing with grounded Puff. My two main takeaways were mostly to do with how to look for grab in a way that ran less risk of fsmash/dash attack and how to use dtilt properly to force jumps. I think I did a really good job of the latter in this set, but I apparently need more work on the former, as I got hit with those a lot here and found minimal grabs. Still, I recognize the manner in which I played those situations was wrong, which is a start. In the end, I was strong enough vs aerial Puff and at recovering to edge it out in 4 games. I think the recoveries would have been the biggest difference if Faust were in better shape (so to speak), as he did drop a couple of edgeguards that surprised me.
My last set was against Llod. I whined on twitter that he pulled a lot of stitch faces, but now that I have the benefit of more sober hindsight and a rewatch I recognize…that I was absolutely right. God I hate root vegetables. Game one should have been closer than it was because the fsmash that killed him on stock three was meant to be a fall through fair (it would have hit but not killed relatively early, which is big vs Peach), but it was still a two stock in my favor. Game two was neck and neck until the stitches started to hit, which ended up in the game going solidly in Llod’s favor. I was still in it at that point, and thought to myself “hey now DL is out of the way”. Game three was where my mental fortitude broke after getting hit with yet another stitch for nearly a full stock. I should have taken him back to FD after that and continued running my gameplan, as it was mostly working, but instead I went to YS in a desperate attempt to force closer engagements and stop turnip pulls. Looking back, it was definitely the wrong choice. I wasn’t getting a ton off platforms in this set, and was earning my bread primarily on the strength of my dash dance options at middle distance and extended “punishes”born of juggling. FD was the right choice; I just needed to navigate the turnips and keep my composure a little better. In terms of what I learned from this set, the most positive takeaway is that I think my general gameplan vs Peach is mostly there. The only real fundamental flaw in my gameplay I noticed was that my anti-turnip play lacks nuance/layers of depth compared to players like Rishi (I basically only cc, powershield, and nair turnips in neutral, and I don’t think I do the nair very well/the powershield is only reliable in specific spots). I don’t navigate the situation well at higher percents without access to CC and CLEARLY I don’t navigate special turnips as well as I should. Otherwise, I think my approach to the neutral game is pretty close to being on the money, and I mostly only lose it when I get hard outplayed. In terms of punish game, I need to do a better job of distinguishing between dash attack DI and aerial DI (on fthrow). Most Peaches don’t mix them up as well as Llod, and while I did a good job of recognizing when he wouldn’t need to tech, I didn’t always cover it with aerial/regrab/dash attack appropriately. I also kept doing the thing where I try to repeatedly down air Peach in tech/missed tech situations. This is dumb and bad. She is not Puff. I should techchase her normally and toss her into the corner/set up throw mixups. I noted this in my writeup about playing Polish over a year ago and I’m still over here doing it like a moron.
Takeaways for myself for the event
- Research turnip counterplay more
- Do not dair techchase Peach
- Grind throw DI recognition vs Peach, and more thoroughly lab down throw traps
- Find quality (NOT unranked) Pikachu practice
- Force myself to edgeguard Sheik better in tourney.