My summary of the 2017 pro Street Fighter circuit

I’ll put it out there, I have been playing the Street Fighter series since Street Fighter II: World Warrior came out in 1991. I regularly picked Ryu and couldn’t get past Blanka on the first stage, slowly I got better but never advanced past the intermediate skill level, even now in Street Fighter V I can often get beaten by rookies. But enough about me, I have since the midway through this year been enjoying watching the very elite play Street Fighter, it’s the same as being an amateur sportsman who watches international level sports such as test rugby, cricket or World Cup football.

Also even though I said 2017 summary, I only really started following it from midway through the year so it should say half of 2017 summary but that’s how I roll baby.

The tournament that got me into watching pro level Street Fighter this year was the E-League invitational, which was made up of 16 of the players who made the 2016 Capcom Cup (which is the year ending grand finals tournament) and 16 wildcards who were invited by the organisers. This was televised in NZ by TVNZ’s Duke, and for me, a scintillating watch as it took place on consecutive weekends. The grand final was contested between Punk, who is an 18 year old wunderkid from the US and Phenom from Norway. Punk won that competition with his character Karin and he had been the form Street Fighter player for the year. This tournament piqued my interest in future tournaments. Most if not all of these were lived streamed for free on Capcom Fighters Twitch channel.

E-League isn’t part of the Capcom Pro Tour, the CPT is a tour where players get ranking points depending on where they place in a CPT tournament and then the top 30 (give or take) get invited to play in the year ending Capcom Cup. It’s a 32 player tournament so the other 2 spots are taken by the winner of the previous Capcom Cup (that was another young American named NuckleDu) and also the winner of a last chance qualifier that takes place a day before the main 32 player tournament. More on this later.

All the Street Fighter tournament were double elimination tournaments, meaning if you lost to someone in winners’ bracket you dropped down to losers’ bracket and then you played for survival. There have been many stories of people dropping down to losers’ bracket early on but then making a massive run through the losers’ bracket and winning the whole tournament in the end.

There are 3 types of tournament where you can gain points in the Capcom Pro Tour. The first of which are Ranking tournaments, which are made up of around 80-100 tournaments around the world both online and offline; Premier tournaments which there are around 20 of, they’re a tier above the Ranking tournaments and the last is Evolution which there is one of per year.

Evolution Championship Series or Evo as it’s commonly known, is effectively the Olympics of the gaming world whereas the Capcom Cup is like the World Cup for Street Fighter. So to win either or both is an amazing feat especially seeing the number of entrants participating for it. Evo was the 2nd tournament that got my attention in the year, As well as offering the prestige of becoming the Evo Street Fighter champion it offered the most CPT points, 1000 points to the winner as opposed to 400 points for winning a Premier tournament or 160 for winning a Ranking tournament. The points on offer for the other placings in Evo were far greater than for other tournaments too.

Ultimately the grand final of Evo was contested by Punk, who was on the winners’ side and Tokido who was dominating mostly everyone with his Akuma. Punk had earlier beat him in the tournament, which meant Tokido dropped down to losers’ bracket but he made his way to get a rematch with Punk in the final. Tokido last won a Street Fighter tournament at Evo in 2002 so he had a tonne of experience and this came into play in the grand finals as he took out the first set (first to three) to reset the final and then the next first to to three set to win Evo.

From there the Japanese competitors took out a lot of the Premier events, Daigo “The Beast” Umehara took 2 with his new main Guile, he has ditched his previous main Ryu for the year. Yukadon won a couple Premiers with Ibuki, and Dogura won 2 Premier events with Urien.

As well as qualifying for Capcom Cup through points accumulated throughout the year, automatic qualification occurred if one won their regional final. For 3 of the regions, these finals were won by players who qualified by points attained anyway and this was Tokido for the Asia/Oceania region, Problem X from the UK who won the Europe regionals with his M.Bison and Punk won the North American regional final. The Latin American regional finals was a different story, their top 2 ranked players had qualified for Capcom Cup due to being in the top 30 global points gatherers so they decided not to enter the Latin America regional finals. This regional final was won by Brazil’s Didimokof who saw off all challengers with his Dhalsim, India represent.

Now with a week to go all 31 spots were taken with the last remaining spot to be taken by the winner of the Last Chance Qualifier. A bit of a shock occurred though as Nuckledu, who was the reigning Capcom Cup champion and also amassed enough points to be 3rd place on the global leaderboard, pulled out of the competition due to personal reasons. His spot due to succession rules was taken up by Ricki Ortiz, who finished runner up at Capcom Cup 2016. She was ranked in the 80s in this year’s leaderboard as she hadn’t had the same amount of success as last year.

Now the day before Capcom Cup was the Last Chance Qualifiers, this was for people who hadn’t earned enough points to qualify for Capcom Cup directly or won their regional final (or indeed won Capcom Cup last year). It was 164 entrants fighting each other for only one spot and since the winner of the LCQ was going to be seeded last in the main Capcom Cup competition, they would face Punk first up. The grand final of the Last Chance Qualifier was contested on the winners side by Nemo, who had won a lot of non Capcom Pro Tour events and is generally considered the greatest exponent of the Urien character, although his countryman from Japan Dogura had won 2 Premier events using that character. On the losers side was Infiltration from South Korea, he had won Evo 2016 with Nash. The character of Nash was weakened this year and also Infiltration had other things to attend to so he was not as active this year in tournaments. The character that got Infiltration through most of the tournament was Menat but when he fought in the grand finals we switched to Juri, who he’d probably consider to be better than Menat in a matchup against Nemo’s Urien. It went well initially for Infiltration, he managed to reset the grand finals after winning the first set but then Nemo took out the second set to gain himself a spot in Capcom Cup.

Before I discuss the Capcom Cup I think I need to make people who are not familiar with Street Fighter V aware of the notion of the V gauge and EX meter, which are two meters that are present along with the health bar, the health bar being reduced to nothing is what loses you the round. The EX meter is 3 bars, each bar can be used to do an EX move, which is a souped up version of a special move or if all 3 EX bars are filled up they can be used to perform the character’s Critical Art, which is their most damaging move. The V gauge is either 2 or 3 bars depending on the character, one bar can be used for a V reversal, that can relieve pressure if the opponent is constantly attacking you and getting you to block constantly. If the V gauge is filled, that the V-Trigger can be activated, this for most characters means their moves are faster and stronger until the V Trigger activation time runs out,or some characters’ V Triggers are just a single move that hopefully for their sake helps them shift momentum of the match.

So onto the Capcom Cup, Punk had amassed over 3000 Capcom Pro Tour points, this was nearly 1000 points over the 2nd placed Tokido. Both of these players were considered favourites to win, maybe they would play each other in the grand finals as they did at Evo. However Punk got dropped down to losers bracket straight away by Nemo. This was one of the “upsets” but having the 32 best Street Fighter players in the world, results like this were always going to happen. One player who was doing really well in the winners’ bracket was MenaRD from the Dominican Republic, another 18 year old competitor. His choice of character is Birdie, a big built British punk who loves food. The Japanese players coming up against MenaRD had trouble with his Birdie because generally speaking, in the top levels of Street Fighter V, if you’re blocking you’d rather take the throw (which is unblockable) then fail to counter the throw and get a punishing combo that takes away a lot of your health bar. However with Birdie, his command throws, especially when using the EX version or when Birdie has his V-Trigger activated, delivers as much damage as a combo. So while they were willing to take the throw as they normally do, Birdie’s throws did a lot more damage than normal throws and MenaRD took advantage of that.

The first day was to whittle down the 32 competitors to a top 8, which would be contested the following day. Again the big surprise was that Punk, who was top seed, failed to make the top 8, he was eliminated by Moke’s Rashid.

So the top 8 on winners side was Dominican Republic’s MenaRD with his Birdie, Japan’s Itabashi Zangief with his Zangief (funnily enough), Japan’s Tokido with his Akuma and Japan’s Yukadon with his Ibuki.

On the losers side for the top 8 was Japan’s Moke with his Rashid, Japan’s Daigo with his Guile, UK’s Problem X with his M Bison and Japan’s Nemo with his Urien. The top 8 was well represented by the Japanese.

After a highly competitive top 8 the grand finals ultimately came to be Tokido vs MenaRD. MenaRD had earlier been dropped to losers’ bracket by Tokido in Winners Final but bounced back by beating Nemo in the Losers final. That ended Nemo’s incredible run, he only got into Capcom Cup by winning the Last Chance qualifier a couple of days before and made it all the way to finishing up 3rd overall.

Initially it looked like Tokido was on his way to winning the grand final, he was 2-0 up, MenaRD took it to 2-1. This was when Tokido took the 1st round and was on tournament point. He had taken away 70-80% of MenaRD’s health bar while still having lost any of his life. This didn’t deter MenaRD however as he made a great comeback to avoid losing that round and then proceed to not just tie it up 2-2 but then win 3-2 to reset the grand final. After the reset Tokido took the first game to make it 1-0 but from then on it was all MenaRD who won it 3-1 and with that the Capcom Cup title and a cool US$250,000.

There you have it, that was a brief rundown on what happened in the world of competitive Street Fighter for (the latter half of) 2017

One can only wonder what will happen in 2018. Street Fighter V will have an upgrade in January as it switches to Street Fighter V:Arcade Edition which means more characters, new selectable V-Triggers for each character, some combo extenders for characters and other balance adjustments for the game.

The biggest achievement in the entire Street Fighter year was getting my girlfriend actually interested in watching these pro Street Fighter tournaments and getting herself to be familiar with the names of these competitors, well it did make a welcome change from her from seeing my inept ability at the game.