Should You Join Tournaments You Can't Win? Confessions Of A Fighting Game Loser

Despite having molded most of my brand to be about them, I wouldn't consider myself particularly good at fighting games. I'm an intermediate on the best of days, and I couldn't tell you specific counterplay for anything like Alex in Street Fighter 6 or even Jam's array of kicks in Guilty Gear Strive. 

That being said, I love tournaments. Catch me joining as many brackets as I can. Heck, I spent a non-insignificant amount of money flying to Japan just to drown in pools at EVO Japan. I bring my fightstick with me on overseas trips and see if there's a local I can make time to stop at before I go home. 

Within the beginner community, there's this belief that you have to be a certain level of good to join a tournament, especially offline ones. That somehow, the idea of joining a bracket for fun is somehow inherently wrong, and that you need to be capable of winning a bracket just to fill in your name on Start.GG. 

It's one of those weird backwards boomerisms that the FGC needs to shrug off if it wants to stop losing community members to age and FFXIV raid nights. Yes, you should always give a game your 100%. But somewhere along the way "Do your best" got conflated with "If you can't get medals you shouldn't be playing". It's a mixup so nasty you'd think it was authored by Leo Whitefang- one of a community that constantly whines about "deterring newcomers" while actively deterring newcomers by trying to gatekeep community spaces. 

Fighting Game Tournaments Are Just Another Game Mode

The way I see it, joining brackets may as well be another game mode. Sometimes you're in the mood for casual matches, sometimes you want to grind ranked, and other times you want the high that only a bracket can give. 

This isn't limited to big majors like EVO, either. Joining a tournament is a totally different vibe from free play. It's like a boss rush, where you neither have control of who you fight nor can you suddenly bow out when you're tired (well, you can, but why would you?). When you're in a bracket, you have the intimacy of a casual match. If it's an offline event, you will see that person next to you parsing your gameplay, and fighting to move up in the bracket. You wanna trash talk? Sure. But you don't have the computer to hide behind. 

Even if it's an online match, this isn't going to play out like a regular ranked climb. Tournament play is much more structured, and there's still a human element at work. Sometimes it can be as simple as pinging another player to start your match, while in others it can be in the obligatory GGs when your wake-up DP gets blocked for the third time in a row and now you're on loser's side.

"GGs, that was a tough match", you say. It doesn't matter what you screamed in the solitude of your room as you were being juggled and shimmied- when the set's over, you'd do well to act like a normal human being. 

At the same time, you're also dealing with the limited sets that you'd normally encounter in ranked. No matter how much you kick and scream, unless your name is Perfect13gend, you can't ask for more matches. The buck stops with you, and for as long as you're holding that stick you will decide who goes to the next round. 

"But I-"

 "What was the score though".

 TOs are nice people, but at no point in a tournament do they want your life story. 

It's an intense situation where you have to put your best foot forward, and you can feel the feedback when you lose. You can always regain lost ranked points- but once you're out of a bracket, you're out for good. You can come back to the next tournament, sure. But there's a sense of finality when you dejectedly march up to the TO and tell them it was 0-3 (but it was close though). 

Human After All

If you want the core fighting game experience, tournaments are some of the best places to get them. You can play matches anywhere, yes, but the feelings you feel when you're in a bracket- those are what makes you feel human. It's not like Ranked and Casual matches are inherently bad- but to join a tournament is to be part of a community- even if it's just for that one day. 

Even if you're a beginner, I cannot recommend joining a fighting game tournament enough. You never know what can happen- even if you go 0-2, you might meet new people, or discover new elements to a game you didn't know you liked. For me, it's watching my opponent react to my plays in real time. I may have lost the set, but every time I watched my opponent sigh as he got hit by a counter-hit 6H into Elphelt's Rekka, I knew that wasn't a feeling I'd get to experience alone in my hotel room. 

Is it scary? So many things in life are. And it's all the more reason you should acquire a taste for chlorine and jump into pools anyways, drowning be damned.