There is no offseason in the competitive Smash Bros season. It’s a year-long battle to the bitter end, but even with tournaments starting to wind down before Genesis 4, we get our last tournament-filled weekend of 2016. Don’t Park On the Grass and the 2GGT: ZeRo’s Saga are the two major tournaments this weekend. One for Melee, the other for Smash 4.
Hungrybox Confirmed for DPOTG
First off, let me just praise the tournament organizers for coming up with another brilliant name. Only Melee can produce events like “Don’t Park on the Grass” or “In Not Yelling” or even my personal favorite: “Don’t Go Down there Jeff.”
Now with that out of the way, let’s talk about serious business. DPOTG will be held in Seattle, WA, and Juan “Hungrybox” DeBiedma has confirmed that he will be in attendance. Hungrybox alongside Sweden’s William “Leffen” Hjelte will be the only top-five players at the event. The rest of the player field has 28 ranked players.
DPOTG is coming off the heels of UGC two weekends ago and Eden last week in Chicago. It will be the last major of 2016 with most players taking the holiday break off and focusing up for Genesis. It will be one final test for the best players this year and some are still jockeying for position.
The top three finishers at Eden will all be in attendance: the winner Sami “DruggedFox” Muhanna, Mustafa “Ice” Akcakaya, and Zac “SFAT” Cordoni. I’d look at these three as the favorites to pull the major upsets over Leffen or Hungrybox. DruggedFox will have the momentum after a dominating performance just last week.
It will also be important for players like James “Swedish Delight” Liu and Aaron “Professor Pro” Thomas to have bounce back performances after finishing outside the top-8 at Eden. The field is predominantly Fox heavy with hard hitting Otto “SilentWolf” Bisno and Javier “Javi” Dantes Ruiz showing up. Two Fox players that don’t have great attendance numbers but can take out any player in this field.
Leffen vs Hungrybox
I don’t want to jump ahead here, but this is the most likely winners finals match we’ll see. Hungrybox has proven that he’s consistent enough to make his way through the bracket to at least Winners Finals all season. He’s also shown that he struggles with high-level Fox play and Leffen could present trouble in that regard.
Leffen is a bad matchup for Hungrybox because almost no one, outside of Adam “Armada” Lindgren, plays the Jigglypuff match up optimally with Fox. His ability to pop Puff up in the air to capitalize off vertical kill moves is second-to-none. Leffen’s just now returning to his past tournament form, but still faces a 1-2 deficit against Hungrybox this year.
2GGT: ZeRo’s Saga with a $10,000 Pot Bonus
The last event for the 2GGT event saga’s and it ends with our player of the year: Gonzalo “ZeRo” Barrios. The event will take place at Rio Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada and host most of the top-10 players in the world.
It will be tough to slow down ZeRo who has won his last five events. He’s ending the year strong and avoiding the upsets that were his problem at the start of the year. He will have to fend off a flurry of strong competitors to take his sixth event in a row.
Here’s just a few of the top names in attendance this weekend
If the event turns out to be anything like the rest of 2016, we’re in for a interesting weekend of Smash 4.
