Final, Final Round?
- pickletripper
- Mar 29, 2018
- 3 min read
Host of the fighting game tournament Final Round in Atlanta, Larry aka Shin Blanka, has announced his retirement Sunday evening at the closing ceremony.
Returning to Facebook on Wednesday, March 21 with a long post explaining why he is choosing to retire. Shin started off thanking all of the staff and saying how great the volunteers are; continuing on he addresses all of the streamers and everyone who else helped. He goes on to explain his decision for retirement. One of the biggest attributes is attendance.
Final Round 21 wrapped but with it’s top 8 tournament this passed Sunday. Champions such as PG|INFILTRATION for Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition, ROX.Dragon|Knee for Tekken 7, CAG|GO1 for Dragon Ball FighterZ and WN.PAG|LostSoul for Guilty Gear Xrd REV 2 were decorated and celebrated.
Street Fighter V made its debut at FR19 two years ago. Due to the popularity of the game registration became overbooked when door registration became available. This proposed an issue, since FR19 is being held in the Hilton hotel, the ballroom couldn’t hold all of the hype SFV generated for this event. Since the ballroom became so crowded during pools, players felt overwhelmed with the amount of people around them during their matches. Alex Jebailey, CEO founder and organizer said,
“Getting bumped during games, once your match was done you were stuck waiting on the people next to you to be done.”
This is what many players were feeling according to the Reddit thread. Many people commenting on the post don’t want Shin to end FR, many are saying they would support it if he goes back to doing it in a hotel.
Darryl Brown, an active FGC member and avid supporter of FR said,
“As of now it sucks that it has come to this. Me personally I don’t think he should stop… he just has to not listen to everyone[‘s] suggestions and run his event the way he wants to run. I also think he should go back to the hotel as well.”
Sponsored player, Frankie Gomez & Heavenly Skies, owner of ITS|Heavenly Skies, agree they are more than willing to support Shin & FR if he goes back to hosting in the hotel.
Shin mentioned in his Facebook post that he’s never recovered from the social media scrutiny he faced for this experience.
He also goes on to mention that there were some big sponsors this year such as Capcom and Bandai Namco. FR21 is where Capcom Pro Tour and Tekken World Tournament made their first stop. Even with these big names supporting Final Round this past weekend it seems this in the lowest turnout it’s seen in 8 years. Deciding that he couldn’t recover from the FR19 fiasco he’s decided to shut down the systems for good. Getting a bigger venue seemed like the right move to appeal to his attendees but that hasn’t helped either. From FR19 to FR20 ⅔ of the attendees vanished. In his thinking, he feels he wasted time and money organizing better accommodations. Not only did they not fill this new venue, only half of the usual attendees showed up.
After speaking with Steve Murray, who’s been with FR for four years he commented on FR coming to an end he said,
“The Final Round staff are good folks and FR is internationally beloved…” When asked about how Jebailey went about putting in his two cents regarding FR19 he said,
“What he said was right but the way he did instead of talking to his fellow T.O about correcting the flaws were wrong.”
Everyone who remembers the FR19 SFV hype says that it could have been handled better from a tournament organizers and an attendee stand point.
Many people believed that the scrutiny Shin faces is bias. Brown said it could be due to racism; mentioning that Black tournament organizers are under a microscope compared to others.
Other players in the FGC like Jeremy ‘BlackMambaMoan’ Florence, disagree and chalk it up to Shin being a bad TO; that FR has been going down for years and that players are finally catching on.
“Bad tournaments aren’t criticized enough,” said BlackMambaMoan
Final Round pulled in international contestants likes Ceasar ‘STKF|AkaRed’ Sales who’s first major event was FR and says he feels sorry for it coming to event because FR had the opportunity to be a countrywide event.
It looks like more people are at a lost that Final Round has closed its doors for now. Shin did mention that he is not quitting the FGC or the TO lifestyle for he has another event to do with his long term FGC partner. The FGC is losing a major event, perhaps this will get people to consider how they treat, TOs, venues and the comments posted about them. Or maybe TOs will tighten up and continue to look for ways to appeal to the crowd.
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