March 30, 2020
Tom Anderson
Couch Warriors / CouchWarriors League
Note: CouchWarriors apologises for the delay in event reports this month. The results are being reported here for posterity.
This month’s CouchWarriors QLD Ranbat was delayed a few weeks to account for Phantom, taking place on Saturday the 14th of March at George St Brisbane. Here’s a summary of the results in every game and how the top matches played out. A complete listing of match results and brackets for each game can be viewed on Smash.gg here.
Results for SFV, MK11, Tekken 7, and Smash U count towards the standings for the BAM Path To EVO series for that game, which can be viewed here.
A common theme for the ranbat was on display here; a smaller field, likely due to COVID-19 fears, left room for players to register personal best placings. For Benjamin “Destiny74” Jakabfy, this was his first trip to the podium since getting 3rd in September. Julian “Issedia” Petersen broke an even longer drought of his own.
Deoxy registered a big win here after squeaking by perennial contender Gabe “tk|jaBBu” Najarro. Also of note was the 3rd place finish for Jonathan “SLD|asa” Wai, who in previous months has mainly competed in Fantasy Strike.
Usual suspects like Mustella and Kenny “Negima” Bui suddenly had to contend with gatecrashers from the newly-arrived anime community – their leader, Ernest “hiero_yo” Chan, made it to Grand Finals to complete a tally of three top placings for the day.
Meanwhile over in Smashville it was Negima taking the chance to put his name on the boards in a new game. He matched his high 2nd place finish in the doubles but ultimately couldn’t overcome his partner from those doubles runs, Andrew “Shadrew” Isokangas. Shadrew has now won four monthlies in a row, and five of the last six.
There had to be an expectation with the release of Granblue Fantasy Versus that we’d see a return of anime to the QLD ranbats, but not everyone would have guessed one on this scale. Three new games were contested and many of the same names were in the thick of each of them.
After 4 months of Fantasy Strike officially being part of QLD ranbats, KaiDASH was finally brought down by the steadily-improving Lachlan “$$|BattleDolphin” How.
Congratulations to all of our top-placed competitors from March! You can find details of future ranbat events on the CouchWarriors Facebook page. And of course, if you have any great anecdotes or images from CouchWarriors tournaments, send them to me on Twitter or email to get them included in the writeup!
