Chicago Weekly Results (6/27/16 - 7/3/16)

There are so many tournaments happening in Chicago right now that I wanted to compile all of the results in one spot so people can more easily see who is doing well within our scene. I've provided links to all the brackets and listed everyone who received payouts during the week. If I am missing a tournament please let me know and I will add it in!

Learning to Learn: 4 Resources That Have Helped Me Improve

One thing that I've always found fascinating within Smash is how every player will improve at drastically different rates. I've seen people that have played the game for years and are still stuck at the level that they had always been at, and I've seen people explode onto the scene and start to win tournaments within months of starting to compete. Some people tend to think that some people that start winning rapidly like that were born with some natural talent to win. I think this couldn't be further from the truth. Nobody was born to play Smash, it doesn't work that way. The reason some people see rapid improvement is because they are better at learning. This ability to learn isn't innate, it is a learned skill itself.

Although teaching somebody how to learn is a very difficult, I've found many different books, articles, videos and more throughout my years competing that have personally helped me in my quest to becoming really good at Smash. I wanted to share with everyone a few of my favorite things that I have saved and watched or read countless times that have helped me immensely. I recommend going through these at your own pace and coming back to revisit some of the ideas as you've learned more and gotten better as a player. No matter how many times I come back to these, I feel like I've always gotten something new out of them. I hope that these help you as much as they have helped me.

JJROCKETS' Weekly Wrap Up - 03/28/16 - 04/03/16

I haven't written anything on here in a long while, but I wanted to get back into it. I decided I would start a weekly wrap up series where I cover how I did at every tournament I went to that week and talk about the tournaments for a bit. Hopefully I can stay consistent in writing these! Comment if you like these and want to see more or if you have anything else you'd like to see me write about!

Five reasons certain players are better than you (and how you can be that good too)

It's pretty clear that most of the Chicago Smash 4 scene is new. Not many people came into the scene with backgrounds in competitive Smash. In fact, 70% of our top 10 started competitive smash with Smash 4 (Shel, JTWild, Dan, NiTe, Demitus, Big_Mak, etc.). I find it interesting that even though this is their first competitive game, there is a handful of players that dominate the scene and consistently beat everyone else who is trying to make their break through to reach the top 10. These top players have been playing the game the exact same amount of time as anyone else in the scene, but why are they so much better than the average player? I see so many people put hours upon hours into this game with little results, while this select few are blazing past the rest of the competition. Why is that?

JJROCKETS' List of the Best Weekly Tournaments in Chicago

Just a few months ago, the only Smash 4 tournaments in Chicago were E2C's monthly tournaments. Since then, the scene has ballooned in size, and weekly tournaments have been popping up all over the place, allowing players to get in tournament practice every week. As of the writing of this post, there are 9 weeklies in the Chicagoland area for Smash 4 that I am aware of, with at least one tournament every day of the week except for Wednesdays. In the past two weeks I have attended all of the weeklies that I could, and after having attended almost all of the available tournaments, I have put together my list of the top five weeklies. I ranked the tournaments based on the following criteria: quality of venue, strength of the competition, the number of set ups, how well the tournaments are ran, and of course my own opinion. Without further adieu, here is JJROCKETS' list of the best weekly tournaments in Chicago!