Kansai trip

Working in Nagoya on Monday, and since it's such a boring town I decided to bypass it and go to Osaka for the weekend. Players from Akashi were going to the arcade Monte to play some Osaka people, and since my birth town is sister cities with Akashi, I wanted to go. I anonymously posted that I was an A-groove player from the Kanto region that was going to be there for business... and when I showed up everyone was surprised. There were some good players - a C-Akuma/Kim/Sagat player and a C-Hibiki/Sagat/Chun player stood out. I don't know about the Kim player but the Hibiki player was from Akashi. I wanted to play him with a Zangief team to see how my Gief did against his Hibiki - the answer was better than it should have! Gief vs. Hibiki should be like 10-0 for Hibiki, but I got him down to about 1000 vital with about 15 secs left. VERY good for Gief. I refrained from using my real team for a while, just because I wanted to try out all my sub-teams against everyone. I got a few short streaks (2 or 3 wins) with various characters, then an 8 win streak with my real team. Dari showed up for about 5 mins and we decided to team up for the VIP tournament the next day.

At VIP, I got to play Uma a bit in casuals. He beat me like 6 times and I beat him once. In tournament play, there were 8 teams. They split them into two blocks of four teams, one block to each cabinet. If you lost in first round, you were done. If you lost in the second round, you played the loser of the second round from the other bracket to join the final round-robin.

We drew Desora/Chari in the first round. We were playing by Waseda rules, which meant 2 people faced off, then their partners faced off, and then the winners faced off if there was a split. I played Desora first and won with an activate-and-throw. Dari played Chari next and lost. That meant I had to play Chari. In the last tournament, I OCV'd his C-Honda/Vice/Sagat team with Yamazaki. Today he was using Blanka instead of Vice, but his order was Blanka/Sagat/Honda2. I came within pixels of OCV'ing him again, but I missed a combo at the end. After getting him down to almost nothing again, I won with another activate-and-throw.

Our next opponents were YSK and Uma. Chari lost to YSK, and I played Uma. My Yamazaki took out his Blanka and almost all of his Sakura, but his Bison came back to win it in the end. I choked and I knew it. However, we could still make the final round-robin if we beat the losers of the other block. FK and RCK were playing against Hirata and Saw for the other block. RCK had Hirata down to almost NOTHING and Hirata came back. I hate playing against Sakura-ARE teams so I was kind of worried. I decided to go first against them, but FK was going first for their team. For some reason, FK does really well against me. My Yamazaki had been taking everyone out pretty easily to that point, but his Blanka got him down to low life before eating a custom. In the end, my Blanka owned his Sagat to take the win. RCK faced Dari next. Dari was using Guile instead of Geese today, and his Guile isn't very complete (for example, he doesn't do s.strong anti-air or take advantage of a landed cross up by comboing into a flash kick). Somehow he made it to RCK's last character with full life and no meter, but he slowly worked RCK down and built meter, and landed a combo into super for the win.

In the final round-robin, YSK and Uma played Hirata and Saw first. YKS/Uma won easily. We were set to go against Hirata/Saw next. I hadn't played either of them in casuals much, so I didn't know what to expect so I had Dari go first.







We won, so we faced YSK/Uma again.

They owned us to take the tournament. Dari and I took 2nd, and Hirata/Saw took 3rd. I had to make my train to get to Nagoya on time, so I couldn't take a group picture, but they took a solo of me for some reason. Oh well, I had fun as usual (Osaka is always fun!), and now it's back to work...