By Justin “JWong” Wong of Evil Geniuses
Hey everyone, my name is Justin Wong and I am a professional fighting gamer for the Evil Geniuses. I want to talk to you guys about my schedule lately in the month of April and how awesome it is traveling for competitions and meeting new people along the way.
The first week of April there was a tournament called Texas Showdown, the longest running Fighting Game Community (FGC) tournament in existence. It is a three day tournament and had many new games as well as old fighting games. There were 3 players from our division that attended, me, PR Balrog and the newly recruited K-Brad. I saw many old and new faces and played the best players the south had to offer.
In the Street Fighter IV tournament, all of us finished in the top 3 final meaning we were the highest placers of the tournament, which is pretty awesome and not easy to do. Even though it was us 3 taking the top honors for the SFIV tournament, that doesn’t mean our competitive spirit wasn’t there. We still want to prove to each other who the best player is. I beat both of my teammates and took 1st place in the SFIV tournament. As we leave Texas Showdown, our next destination the following week will be PAX East.
At PAX East, the fighting game division for Evil Geniuses usually does “Beat a Pro” competition at booths such as Hyper X, BenQ and etc. This time we were playing SFIV. K-Brad and I were targets for the people at the convention because they can win amazing prizes from us like a PC, SSD, memory, and more. We went undefeated for the first day making sure no one wins any prizes!!!
What was also amazing is that Twitch was holding a SFIV tourney at that booth with $3,000 in prizes. K-Brad and I were really happy to hear this because we get to have fun at PAX East and win some prizes as well! As the weekend went along we still did not want to give anything away, which we succeeded in doing. As for the SFIV tourney, it was a 64 man capped tourney and ultimately in the end it was K-Brad and I in the finals. Once again, I came out on top and K-Brad took second making it a top 2 EG Finals and winning some cash/swag from Twitch in the process. What began as a relaxing weekend became an amazing weekend and good practice for the following week before flying to California for Norcal Regionals.
Norcal Regionals is one of the biggest USA tourneys out there. This time we had me, PR Balrog, Ricky Ortiz, and K-Brad there to represent Evil Geniuses. This tournament was not easy because Infiltration, the 2012 SFIV World Champion was in attendance. However, that did not scare us as we played our heart out for all 3 days. We played so well that eventually we had to take each other out. I eliminated Ricky O, Ricky eliminated K-Brad and PR Balrog eliminated me, which granted him the finals position with Infiltration. PR Balrog mustered all the power he had and bested Infiltration in dominating fashion and granted Evil Geniuses another big win in the month of April! Even though it wasn’t an EG top 4 finals we still held up 1st, 3rd, 4th and 5th respectively.
Now you guys know how intense fighting games events can be and if you are interested, please follow our activity on Twitter at @evilgeniuses @jwonggg @kbradjstorm @pr_balrog @hellokittyricky and thank you for taking your time in reading this.