CouchWarriors League Online Results – June

Well despite the best efforts of 2020 we’ve made it all the way through June, and thu to the halfway mark of the inaugural CouchWarriors League season! Look out for a formal midseason recap to be published soon – in the meantime, here’s last month’s results!

The weekly CouchWarriors League Online events each focus on one of the major games supported by the League, with the placegetters receiving League points as part of our ongoing tournament season. Our monthly winners also received Steam vouchers from CouchWarriors.

A handy reference for our online tournament schedule during the pandemic period is on Twitter. You can always check the current standings for each game and player in CouchWarriors League here.

Street Fighter V

  1. ORDER|Travis Styles
  2. DS|Somniac
  3. AwildLLAMA

The online era of our SFV tournaments has been dominated by the rivalry between two men – ORDER’s top gun Travis Styles, and wily veteran Xavier “DS|Somniac” Nardella. The pair seem to be a few steps ahead of the pack, and as they began to cruise through the bracket from the 1 and 2 seeds it became obvious we’d see them meet once more in Winners Finals.

Travis seems to have a consistent edge on Somniac in these matches even on Som’s best days, and his play shows unparalleled confidence and composure. He refuses to give up even one round without a fight, and sometimes that results in the kind of lopsided set we saw here, with Somniac’s Bison bopped into losers 3-0.

There, Som met Michael “AwildLLAMA” Kalugin, who has proven a consistent threat in these online events. This month he had overcome a killer’s row on the Losers side. LLAMA defeated multi-game master John “ZEDDD” Le, Taylor “syo” Waugh and even the overall CWL points leader Ervin-Jason “pahnda” Garanovic – who had put him into Losers to begin with. Despite this impressive form, Somniac swept LLAMA’s Gill aside in a decisive 3-0, showing the gap between our top 2 and the rest of the field.

From there the grand finals played out in what is becoming predictable fashion: Travis used the first set to try his Chun-Li, which Somniac batted aside 1-3. Having burnt his Winners advantage, Travis hopped back onto Balrog to close things out in Serious Time. But things got perhaps more serious than he expected, as Somniac continued to put up fierce resistance in the dictator-boxer match and dragged things to the very brink.

Things looked momentarily dicey, but the ORDER star managed to grind his rival down in a trademark final round time out. It was heartbreaking to watch Somniac’s efforts thwarted yet again, but Travis’s intensity and nerve in the clutch is like nothing else. This win puts him in striking distance of the CWL points lead despite the lower rewards for online play. It’s going to be a tight 2nd half of the season.

 

Smash Melee

  1. LGC|DonB
  2. DS|Sora
  3. dice|Nangs

If the SFV season thus far has been a 2-man race, the Melee race is effectively just one: Josh “DS|Sora” Lyras. Lapping his closest competitors on points, the Joshman decided to give his rivals the month off in May by dropping halfway through the bracket. Not so this time. Sora ripped through perennial contenders Microsoft J and Nangs on his way to Winners Finals, where he clobbered Miles “LGC|DonB” Dobney 3-1 in the space animal showdown.

Losers side was a shark tank with strong players drowning left and right. Some were able to swim through nevertheless; David “Kanga|Dekar” Moore bounced back from an early Winners exit to eventually challenge Nangs in Losers Semis. Nangs steadied there to win 3-1, only to be whitewashed by DonB. There was clearly a man who wanted his GF runback.

And what an eventful runback it was! A last-hit clutch out in game 2 combined with some very strong reads secured DonB an unexpected reset, and suddenly the pressure was back on Sora to step up after a set where he was consistently outplayed. Step up he did, and this time the set went all the way to game 5. Sora busted out his best final boss impression on the last stock, evaporating DonB’s lead in 30 seconds of withering offence. But Miles found a gap in the pressure and popped up like a cork from a bottle, dropping back down from the top of Yoshi’s Story to nail two pinpoint shines and seal a great tournament win!

TEKKEN 7

  1. FAM|Daitooka
  2. JMKayz
  3. FAM|Gun_Mo

The online TEKKEN scene is a roiling storm right now, with players climbing over eachother each month to reach new heights. Some have been relatively consistent, such as FAMILY’s Gun_Mo, who was able to steer his way to the end of the bracket safely for the 3rd month  running. His fellow FAMILY member Daitooka was… playing a bit more loose.

But nevertheless both of them had the chops to make it into a Loser’s Final team clash, with Gun_Mo deposited there after an 0-3 drubbing from the unsponsored monster JMKayz. With the chance to take home his first CWL points of the season, Daitooka rose up against his fellow Melburnian and punished Fahkumram’s wild swings with a beautiful Raven sequence to advance.

It’s a cliche after such a defeat to demand your buddy go on and win it for you, but Daitooka must have taken that instruction very seriously. His momentum and confidence with his character seemed to catch JMKayz off guard, and before you know it Daitooka had not only reset the bracket, but swept through to outright victory! JMKayz will no doubt be wondering where things went wrong after an undefeated tournament run crumbled so quickly – but for until he can seek revenge in July’s event, our focus is on celebrating the breakout win for Daitooka!

Smash Ultimate

  1. GZ|SebPro101
  2. Dura
  3. Whissle

With over 100 players entered competition was again fierce for the most modern Smash title in CWL, and adding to the pressure is the knowledge that any unknown tag could easily be some deadly online warrior, who has been training 8 hours a day at home anonymously in order to stop your tournament in its tracks.

Online warriors such as Aiden “Dura” Scalzo, a Melbourne player who has been stepping up and snagging significant online results in both singles and doubles tournaments lately. Dura made the podium last month under the tag “Becchino”, when he was narrowly eliminated by Connor “Dags” Scott. He certainly didn’t rest on his laurels after that, because this time when Dura encountered Dags in Winners Semis he scored a 3-0 sweep!

You might imagine this would give the emerging talent a big boost of momentum, but that only carried him into a painful collision with the all-powerful Sebastian “GZ|SebPro101” Poli-Tabone. At least Dura can say he took a game before packing his bags for Losers finals.

Losers side itself featured a string of unusually great sets, with close matchups between KeitoRoy and Nurd, Nurd and Dags, and then finally Nurd and Whissle. The WiiFit specialist was out there hunting stocks like their owners owed him cash, but after bruising past Nurd it didn’t seem like he had enough left in the tank to take a whole set off of Dura.

Instead, Dura punched his ticket back to the rematch with SebPro. Normally this road would probably lead to a swift rebuff and top points for Seb, but there was just something about Grand Final resets this month. Showing some impressive adaptation from their set minutes earlier, Dura scored an impressive 3-0 to put SebPro on notice. While SebPro lived up to his name and ran out the last couple of games to win it 1-3, the community now knows they can’t afford to sleep on Dura and his Toon Link any longer.

 

That’s all the results for our June online events! Congratulations to all who competed – and we’ll see you for the 2nd half of our CouchWarriors League season, starting very soon!

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