Texas Showdown 2012

There was a lot of negativity surrounding the events of Texas Showdown this past April. This article will hopefully explain what happened at the event in a little more detail than a twitter post or a stream-monster Photoshop masterpiece could portray.

This will be my opinion on the event, as well as an objective view on the many problems that plagued it. I will not bash anyone, but I will offer some advice so that in the future tournament organizers can learn from its mistakes.

The article will also contain my personal experience in the BB tournament, including my thoughts and performance.

If you're interested in any of this, hit the jump and get reading!
As I stated in my last post, I've made the commitment to try and travel to as many tournaments as possible this year to try and get people hype about BlazBlue, Guilty Gear, and the soon to come P4U (I'm not that hype about Aquapazza... sorry Tonberry). One of my trips this year brought me to Walnut California, where the BlazBlue Revolution Qualifier was being held at Super Arcade. While I was there I got to meet Kensou and KidViper for the first time. I wanted to meet them both because I consider them both really strong players, and I always enjoy talking to new people to find out where they come from and why they play. I had known about Kensou from the notorious Final Round video where he beat Liston to get into top 16 at the first 256 man bracket for SF4, and he was also a strong BB player in the past. I had known about KidViper because he was one of the best Hazama players in the US and LK would talk about him a lot from the Tougeki Qualifier held at Anime Matsuri in 2010. I won't talk about the BB Revo Qualifier in this post, but just know that by meeting them at this qualifier, it had somewhat motivated me to go to their tournament: Texas Showdown (TXSD) held at Anime Matsuri in Houston. I knew the tournament was being run by Planet Zero and that was it. I didn't know anything about Anime Matsuri, who runs it, or it's history, but I did know about Planet Zero because of it's negative reputation in the FGC (primarily the GG community).

Note: The night before Texas Showdown I first learned that Arcade UFO (run by Fubarduck) and Planet Zero (run by John/Emogear) don't associate with each other at all. Austin hates Houston for the most part, and this is mostly because of Planet Zero's past. Coming down to Texas to a tournament run by PZ I knew I was going to hear some negative stuff, but I had no clue that some of the stronger players in Texas won't even travel to PZ events for anything because of it's past. Now let me just get another thing across before I continue... I started playing GGAC in late 2007 when it was released on console. I was still very new to the scene when the whole PZ vs Zinac thing went down and I'm still not very familiar with the whole BananaKen issue, but: because I wasn't directly involved with either of these events, I tried not to let PZ's past reputation already dictate my opinions of the tournament before the weekend even started. They hadn't "screwed" me over directly, so how can I hate on their event before it started? So let it be known that I was going into this tournament with only the handful of names/faces that I knew and my arcade stick.

Friday (Day 1)

The morning of day one there was a line of anime/Japan/fashion fanatics in line to get their badges and goodie bags, but since I had gotten my pass the night before from KidViper, I just walked right in. The badges were $50, which is a bit outrageous, but it was part of a convention so you were getting access too everything: concerts, events, panels, the free-play arcade, and of course TXSD. I couldn't complain since I have a good paying job, so shelling out $50 for a badge wasn't asking a whole lot for a three day convention. For some people though, they could care less about some lame weeaboo-convention and were just there to mash buttons. Maybe in the future there could be a discounted badge for people competing, but at the same time doesn't let them get access to panels or concerts. Just an idea. Well then... moving along...

The area with TXSD in it was at the end of a wide hallway that ran alongside the main room and market. Everything in the arcade section of the venue wasn't hooked up yet (except for the IIDX cab), so some of us got our hands on KidViper's console, a monitor, and decided to play some casuals before sign-ups ended and pools started.

I signed up online a couple weeks prior, so I was already seeded in my pool against a couple players that no one was familiar with. All that was left was for me to wait for my pool and hopefully make it out to top 16,  which would be played down to top 2 the next day (Saturday).

The TO's did a pretty good job running BB pools: they started on time and didn't take very long. This was primarily because there weren't a lot of entrants for BB. When my pool was called, the two other players in my pool never showed up. The person running the brackets walked up to me about 20 minutes after my pool had started and congratulated me on making top 16, handed me a cool "Top 16" dog tag as a prize, and said that he'd see me tomorrow. I posted this event on twitter and it had a much bigger impact later than I had originally anticipated. I had no clue at that point that Texas Showdown was having a lot of problems. A short time later I had found out:

1). That the power from the arcade area was being used to power the Texas Showdown equipment. This is why the arcade area was being brought up very slowly.
2). Other tournaments with more entrants had a big problem with # of setups.
3). The stream quality was abysmal because of the hotel internet, and quite possibly inexperience.
4). Pools in other games were also very unbalanced.

I was pretty oblivious to all of this until after I was done "winning" my pool because I was too busy watching the matches and talking to the other BB players.

Now, I've been to a lot of tournaments, and some of the biggest issues that they have are: starting on time and distributing power. From my experience, Texas Showdown did a good job with starting on time, but they did a pretty terrible job with planning on how to distribute the power. It turns out that either there weren't enough outlets in the tournament area or there was a bad power-outage at our end of the hallway. I never 100% confirmed which one it was, but it was leaning heavily toward our end of the hallway not being properly equipped for a tournament. There just weren't enough power outlets and setups for everything to run smooth. This is due to terrible logistics and bad planning. The TO's should have set everything up the night before and people should have brought more setups. But hey, hindsight is always 20/20 right? As with any tournament you deal with it as best as you can and move on.

Since I was done playing I decided to walk around Anime Matsuri and check out the booths and cosplayers. If you're interested about my adventures (which include blacking out and possibly a speed dating tournament), you can read about them here.

 Saturday (Day 2)

I woke-up back in our hotel room with a headache and I didn't remember anything from the night before. Advice: don't get blackout drunk at a tournament if you plan on entering anything because it makes your life miserable.

We went to the venue at around noon and top 16 started without a hitch. The plan was to play up until about top 6, stream a few matches, and then stop at grand finals (which was to be played on the big stage the next day).

I won my first two matches pretty convincingly. I took advantage of people not knowing the Relius match-up and just ran whatever I felt like. I then lost to both Sky King and Mihe on stream, who were both much better than me.

Nothing went wrong with BB that day, but I had heard that there were more power and setup issues. This was the day that MK setup a console in the bathroom if I remember correctly... let me explain: because of the tournament area layout, a couple setups were right next to the entrance of the Mens restroom. If you were playing on one of those setups and you leaned back in your chair, you were pretty much IN the restroom. You could smell it by the setups as well. This sucked for anyone playing in that area, and it ended up being some of the MK guys. The power was being stupid again and the MK players got fed up and hooked up a console and monitor up in the bathroom and snapped a picture. I can understand their frustration since tournaments have completely sucked for me too, but the internet blew this way out of proportion. No one told them to do this, and it only made things look worse than they already were. The power started working again shortly after and they moved it back out.

Since we played out the tournament up to BB grand finals and I was eliminated, this day of the tournament was over for me. I didn't really check up on the tournament for the rest of the day, so any events that happened after 4PM I was unaware of until the next day. I mainly wasted my time in the arcade area getting hype on the "netplay" cabinets.

Sunday (Day 3)

After packing up all of our stuff and checking out we headed back to the venue for one last time. When we got there we headed into the main stage area and talked for a bit while PZ John was hooking everything up for grand finals.

The main stage was sick: the system was cranked up and there was a big screen in the back so that everyone in the crowd had no problem seeing what was happening. This main stage could make any game hype (even SFxT... just kidding). You could feel each hit in your gut because of the bass. They also had mist machines!! I was fucking hype. E-fucking-sports.

MK was finished first and the grand finals were pretty entertaining. I don't watch MK a whole lot and they always rebalanced the game, so I never know who the stronger characters are. The Johnny Cage that was playing was awesome, and the whole crowd was chanting to the beat of the combos. Everyone cheered for ball breakers.

BB was up next. Kid Viper was knocked into loser by Huey pretty convincingly the day before so I wasn't expecting an outcome that was too different. Since they were both my friends I didn't really want one of them to win over the other, but I ended up cheering for Huey since the crowd was bias toward Kid Viper. It would be really nice to go into great detail on their matches, but just know this: that play was fucking great. Lots of feel yourself moments that got the crowd (and myself) really hype. There were a few things that happened that stuck out in my mind:

1). Early during the first game Kid Viper IB Huey's 5A > 5A stagger and 5A'd him between them. This made me lean back in my chair.
2). Kid Viper did a hail Mary Houtenjin on wake-up without the meter to RC. The next hit would win and Kid Viper guessed right: Huey didn't bait the reversal.
3). Huey RC'd a Daifunka for some reason and ended up losing the round that I think would've won him the tournament. Later I found out he did it by accident.

Kid Viper ended up winning after resetting the bracket. I think the final scores were 3-2, 3-2 (or 3-1).

After this was done, Kid Viper drove me back to the airport where I got on my plane without any hassle and flew back to Philly. I'm kind of sad they didn't have at least top 4 up on the big screen. One match per game on the main stage was pretty lame.

Final Thoughts

After I had gotten back I learned that Texas Showdown was now the laughingstock tournament of the FGC. Some reasons good, while other reasons were just troll. I'll try and talk about everything objectively while not showing any bias. I want everyone to learn from this event, not just the people who ran it. It's important that in order to run better events in the future, everyone in the FGC should learn from each tournaments mistakes and problems so that they can plan better in the future.

1). Pools. There was no need to run pools for BB. This, combined with the fact that even pre-regs were put in pools without having to check in made things very uneven. I didn't have to play anyone to make top 16, while some pools had 5 man round-robins. This is extremely unfair. As a TO I always try to seed my brackets a fairly as possible. Pools are only warranted when there are a lot of entrants. BB did not need pools, and I'm sure a lot of other games didn't either. In the future, please run brackets for smaller turnout games. This was a terrible decision.

2). Power and Setups. I don't think the area TXSD was set up in was bad, but if there ended up being a huge turnout there wouldn't have been enough room for everything. Later I had learned that we ended up getting a smaller area than originally planned. The fact that they had to run power from the arcade area just showed that whoever gave the TOs that floor space didn't take the time to see if there was enough power for a tournament to be run there. The locals didn't bring enough setups, or the TOs didn't ask for enough. BB was fine because it was a small tournament, but games like Marvel and SF4 needed way more resources. The whole MK in the bathroom thing was a troll. No one told them to go in there, but the fact that there were power issues and some people were pretty much already playing inside the bathrooms didn't help the reputation of TXSD. The MK players wanted to get their point across, and they did, but let it be known that they were the ones to set it up in there.

3). 3 Day event + $50 venue? There was no need to make TXSD a 3 day event, at least for BB. I'm sure that making it a 3 day event ended up being a good call because of the lack of setups, but in the future you should plan for everything to be done in 2 days. Almost every other major does this. Marvel and SC ended up playing out grand finals the night before, which was a pretty smart move IMO. The third day was a waste, except for the chance of being able to play on the main stage. Also, charging $50 for a major that small probably felt like robbery for some people. A cheaper badge that limited what you could get into would've been a better idea.

Later I had learned that in past the venue had been in one of the panel rooms upstairs and not the main hallway. The move to the hallway was because the TOs wanted to hype up the event by having the tournament in a more public environment where a lot of "random" people would walk by. To me this was a really good idea that ended up backfiring. They had a huge projector that you would've been able to see from anywhere in that hallway, but because of power issues they weren't able to use it. It kind of sucks because some of the hypest moments of the tournament ended up being in the arcade area where people would crowd around the BB and Tekken cabs. Everyone would talk shit and and the crowds would grow and everyone would get hype. It was a lot of fun. If you were in the arcade, the projector would've been perfect to get more people to come watch the actual tournament.  I'm pretty sure this is what they wanted to happen the whole tournament, but bad planning caused this to never happen.

Another thing I learned later was that PZ John was responsible for running all of Anime Matsuri. What this means is, although he owns PZ and has run qualifiers in the past, he wasn't only responsible for TXSD. He also had all of the big shows, market, artists, panels, and import show to worry about. To put all of the blame on John was a very quick move for some people. This was a big event. I don't think all of the blame can be put on one person for some of the blunders. People will point fingers all day. This solves nothing.

Overall I had a lot of fun except for Saturday where I was just hungover all day. I was hoping to go back next year, but apparently Texas Showdown will no longer exist. The community was really pissed at this event and I can't really blame them since some tournaments were ran horribly. It's a shame really, because the venue had a lot of potential. To add to this, recently it was discovered that PZ is closed/closing. There aren't a whole lot of details on this, but my reliable source has said that PZ is done.

I hope people learned about the mistakes that can go into running an event. You can only take these in stride and improve each year. Learn from your mistakes and don't dwell on them.

Take it easy people. Hope you enjoyed my write-up and got something from it. Please keep all talk positive and keep all hate and bashing out of the comments. I'd really appreciate it.

Stay godlike people.