EVO 2014 begins tomorrow in Las Vegas, Nevada. The largest fighting game tournament in the world will feature another strong showing from Super Smash Brothers Melee and the nearly 1,000 Smashers in attendance. The big story of the tournament will be the rivalry of Armada and Mango - they stand nearly (possibly entirely) equal in set wins and game wins against each other. The two have been trading sets all summer and EVO may be the final tie breaker. One drawback to the tournament, though, is the prize pool. With only $10 per entrant going to prizes, the pool of $9,700 is over $5,000 less than MLG Anaheim 2014
The organizers of EVO
released final entrant numbers for each game. They are as follows:
- Ultra Street Fighter IV – 1979
- Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 – 1014
- Super Smash Bros. Melee – 970
- BlazBlue: Chronophantasma – 508
- Killer Instinct – 338
- King of Fighters XIII – 319
- Injustice: Gods Among Us – 311
- Tekken Tag Tournament 2 – 257
With 970 entrants, EVO 2014 is the largest Super Smash Brothers Melee tournament ever. EVO 2013 is second with 696 entrants, and Apex 2014 is third with 630 entrants. Large tournaments are now a common occurrence in the platinum age of Smash - in the past month both MLG and CEO saw over 300 Smashers in attendance. If you want to catch the action, be sure to tune into the livestream! There will be two channels to watch the main event stream on:
twitch.tv/srkevo1 and
twitch.tv/srkevo2 - as well as a community stream by
Clash Tournaments.
With 18 hours of stream time scheduled for the weekend, Super Smash Brothers Melee finally appears to be getting respect from organizers. In 2013, organizers relegated Melee to their third stream and only 2 hours of content was shown on the main stream (finals only). Below is the schedule for Smash content only:
- Friday 8:00AM - 4:00PM: Pools - twitch.tv/srkevo1
- Friday 4:00PM - 8:00PM: Pools - twitch.tv/srkevo2
- Saturday 10:00AM - 2:00PM: Quarter and Semi-Finals - twitch.tv/srkevo2
- Saturday 2:00PM - 10:00PM: Doubles - twitch.tv/clashtournaments
- Sunday 1:00PM - 3:00PM: Top 8 - twitch.tv/srkevo1
Probably the biggest news at EVO came late:
Nintendo was announced as a sponsor for the tournament. Many have speculated about what this means and most seem to think there may be a special announcement in the 3:00PM - 3:30PM time slot. Make sure not to miss the finals! If you are looking for pool information every tournament and pool can be found on the
official brackets page. If you are a competitor, most everything you need can be found on the
schedule page - late badge pick up is Friday at 7:00AM.
Will Super Smash Brothers Melee get more main stage time this year?
The stage is set for EVO 2014 (photo credit: @TheTantalus )
