If you're an esports fan and have never been to a Smash Bros. tournament, I'd suggest adding it to your bucket list; even at their most local, they tend to be one of the most inviting, positive experiences in a live setting.
If you need an in, they'll put you to work.
Pound 2016 as an event is hard to classify. It's big enough to necessitate renting out the Ritz-Carlton in Tyson's Corner, Virginia, but did not have the key players that would qualify it as a SuperMajor tournament like Las Vegas' yearly Evolution Championship Series.
Like many other tournaments, it played host to a number of different tastes in the Super Smash Bros. series: players could enter 1999's Super Smash Bros. for the Nintendo 64, 2001's Super Smash Bros. Melee and 2014's Super Smash Bros. for the WiiU.
There were both singles and doubles events for all three games, which earn their share of attention. Melee and WiiU obviously have most of the mindshare in mainstream esports, but 64's crowd are fiercely passionate and have rigged up some impressive do-it-yourself solutions to the world's waning supply of functional N64 controllers.
This was also arguably the first "real" big tournament for all three games since January's GENESIS 3, as special events like the Battle of the Five Gods at SXSW weren't open entry to the public. This made the Pound all the more exciting; typically tournaments like these are where storylines are developed and breakouts can happen.
As a media member, the first few days of an event can be fairly low-key. You're setting up contacts, getting pictures just in case you miss something during Top 8, and generally trying to get a lay of the land in terms of turnout, prominent players in attendance, and how things work in terms of infrastructure; you don't want to be a huge bother and get in people's way, but you want to make sure that you can do your job in terms of access to photos, players and space.
At this tournament, I decided that the best way to dive into the atmosphere was to help lug CRTs.
CRTs, or cathode-ray tube televisions, are the big, bulky, heavy units that your grandma probably still owns. They're unwieldy, don't handle HDMI input, and can leave you at the mercy of whether your remote has an "input" button on them as to whether you can use them for console gaming.
To Smashers who play 64 and Melee, they're gold.
Like other fighting games, certain inputs for Smash Bros. require frame-perfect inputs. Something that can only occur within a 1/60th of a second window seems inconsequential and too hard to predict, but as we've seen, when you're good, those type of things become second nature.
Because Smash Bros. Melee was developed for the Nintendo Gamecube and can also be played on its younger brother, the Nintendo Wii, CRTs are the primary delivery vehicle. For the original Super Smash Bros., the Nintendo 64 is woefully incapable of being played elsewhere. HDTVs can introduce input lag if not to the right specification, and playing on monitors may require adapters that not everyone has access to.
So Smashers raid Value Villages and garage sales for prime TVs; they know the brands and the features they need. Someone, eventually, has to carry them into the venue. For Pound 2016, one of them would be me.
From the outside, it's easy to gloss over the grunt work that sets up a tournament, but you get a ground-level look at it when you decide to volunteer. You meet and build a camaraderie with your fellow volunteers, and there's a pride in making sure that the event comes together properly; this obviously works in the tournament organizer's favor, as the labor is cheap-as-free.
However, there's this implicit trust that's put on you because you happen to like something as common as the same video game; they're expecting you to do the work, aren't surprised if you bail out early, and are prepared to show the patience if you're willing to learn. That's how I learned how to run a fiber audio cable for a projector and help erect the massive screens on either side of the main stage. If someone wanted an apprenticeship in audio/visual stage design, I'm pretty positive you could volunteer at a local, then major level in Smash Bros and come out the other end fairly competently.
The tournament met a crowdfunding goal for an early open on Friday that would've already been used for setup, so the venue got progressively more full of people arriving to the hotel, setting up consoles and cranking out warm-up matches for the event to come.
Saturday, though, that ballroom was a completely different landscape. What was an already full space the night before was absolutely packed now. I overheard a comment later that likened tournaments like these to comic conventions in terms of personal space. If you've ever been somewhere like New York or San Diego Comic Con or a PAX, you can probably sympathize when I say that space is limited, and you get really good at directing an "excuse me" to that jerk with a backpack that sticks out way too far into the aisle.
For Melee, Smash tournaments have players take part in pool play, which is seeded. Each pool produces players that shrink the field until a Top 32 (or in Smash for WiiU's case, 16), which plays out until the tournament finishes. Until then, the room is filled with the endless clicking of triggers, joysticks and buttons; it eventually blends into the background, like the endless chorus of the Gourmet Race music that plays on the Dreamland 64 stage.
The Pound name is a bit divisive with Smashers. Its last large-scale iteration - Pound V, in 2011 - was an early failure in the model that's prevalent now. Issues in overestimating the amount of hotel rooms that would be rented and attendees that would pay for entry led to money coming out of the players' prize pool and eventually tournament organizer Jonathan "Plank" Graybeal's pocket.
There was an apology. It was frank, honest and simple: there was no money to pay out to the winners of the events that were played. The event's prize almost became a myth: people would get their Pound V money the day that hell froze over.
While people understood the organizer's situation, the controversial ending hung over the community, occasionally poked fun at. In perhaps its finest moment, one Smasher brought a sign to WWE's Monday Night RAW proclaiming "Plank, where is my Pound 5 money?"
And then, in November, messages began to trickle out: nearly five years later, the money would be paid out. The wrong would be righted, and hopefully, things would be all good moving forward. A smaller event, Pound V.5, happened in 2013, and was a considerably smaller experience.
Whoaa!! Plank is providing the long awaited Pound 5 Payouts after all. (2011 Tourney+ hotel = payouts were nixed) pic.twitter.com/B9oOToijOk
- Juan DeBiedma (@LiquidHbox) November 18, 2015
As seems to be common in esports, someone's reputation is only as good as their latest results. After Pound 2016 finished, I had a chance to talk to Michael "Nintendude" Brancato, who was the main tournament organizer for the event; Plank was still here and still helping, but was picking up the truck to start packing up the event's immense TV supply.
"I feel like the general sense the community had around Pound V was that Plank was a good guy, didn't mean anything bad. ... In a way, Plank was ahead of his time," Brancato said.
"He was one of the first people trying to transition into hotel venues for tournaments for Smash, and he did it during the dark ages of Melee. That was just unfortunate timing and inexperience in that level of planning."
Brancato refers to the "dark ages" as a way to describe Melee's status before its return to the esports forefront that came with the release of 2013's "The Smash Brothers" documentary, which brought a new wave of "doc kids" to watch the phenomenal EVO 2013 and 2014 tournaments, and create fans that may latch on from other popular competitive titles. I am actually one of those self-described doc kids, becoming fascinated with the personalities that were on display at these kind of events, and the accessibility that follows them.
Tournaments are essentially open spaces, and save for some events that will allow top players to skip competing in pools or invitational tournaments, the public is generally able to watch pros play over their shoulder, approach them for advice, autographs or photos.
It generally lends itself to a warm atmosphere, where people are eager to meet new friends and connect with old ones. A number of relationships I've built with Smashers come from the use of Twitter and Facebook, and then meeting them in person. Someone who knows me from Dota 2 called for a fist bump as I walked by; I had no idea who he was until he pinged me on Twitter later. I felt both weird that someone actually pointed me out, and embarrassed that my hand was still wet.
Because there is no first-party online play for Smash Bros. Melee, or 64, it's on a person to make the trip if they want to experience things "how they're meant to be." There is no LCS for Smash as there is for League of Legends, nor is there a governing body as Riot is for LoL; the grassroots community leads to a lack of elitism, mostly because the community cannot afford to sustain itself without relying on that openness.
"Smash is unique is that there's event everywhere -- just about everywhere, and local communities are almost always very welcoming," Blancato said. "Local communities don't have huge amounts of people, so it's not hard to get involved with that and integrate yourself from there. You start small and go up from there."
By the Sunday of Pound, the event was running as close to "normal" as possible, save for a few concessions in Smash 64's schedule; the setup tables had been cleared away for more floor space for chairs, and players in the upper stages of the brackets could be found warming up backstage, or getting a hand massage from the event's on-site physiotherapist. The latter is a wholly new innovation, as many players are noting the importance of ergonomics for taking the game seriously over a longer term.
"I think [the tournament] went phenomenally well. I think that very few things went wrong, and most of the things that went wrong were an afterthought at this point. We ended on time," Brancato says with a smile. "That's very rare."
Brancato has organized tournaments for at least five years by his count, running them at a local and regional level while performing tasks like making brackets for nationals. He was part of the group of tournament organizers (TOs) that salvaged APEX 2015 when the event was in danger of being canceled altogether due to a damaged venue; being able to draw experience from other TOs present allows him to have numerous people to ask for help if something goes wrong.
"I've learned so much about A/V this weekend. The area I lack most experience in is A/V and production -- I've never really done that before," Brancato said. "I made some very last-minute adjustments as I was learning on the fly as to what I should do and what I should not do. Even for someone as experienced as me at TOing, I learned a ton just from having all these resources here, talking to people and seeing the whole process of it."
The concept of a community experience pool is really fascinating to me, mostly because it feeds into the grassroots notion that multiple people with a lot of passion can make a large event like this successful. While Smash is not at the same level of attendance as League of Legends, Dota or Counter-Strike, we're starting to see little samples of the transition to bigger things: for instance, the balcony/auditorium crowd at GENESIS 3 definitely had an LCS vibe to it.
Seriously, Smash is really rocking the League of Legends look right now. #G3 pic.twitter.com/GlQqozPbY1
- Demers @ #Pound2016 (@MattDemers) January 18, 2016
However, Smash's greatest challenge in the next year or two will be finding a pleasant balance between what fuels their passion and what helps them survive. While the two are not mutually exclusive, it can be hard to keep both in pleasant flux; you need to grow your fan base without alienating the core.
As a relatively recent addition to the Smash community, it can be hard to feel where my "place" in all of it is. Currently, I feed the pot with my entrance money, go 0-2, and won't ever likely progress out of pools to the bracket. I told people on Twitter that if they could prove they added me to their fantasy team for the event, I'd give them a maple candy (because I'm aggressively Canadian).
As I depart Virginia, though, I'm surprisingly cool with that. Going to a Smash event is good for the soul in the same way going home to your parents' house is after a long time away. You feel comfortable, welcomed and like you have a purpose, even if it's fleeting.
Opening yourself up to the possibility of having a great time is required, and it will rarely disappoint you; while there are problems, as with any community, enough people seem to be committed to making it better that the trend seems to be going up, rather than down.
I'm just hoping it can continue that momentum without worrying about when it will end.