The Alberta Esports Expo was a lot of fun. There were a few different tournaments available, like Smash Bros, Pokemon, and more. My strategy in Smash Bros, which is just mashing random buttons and hoping it works, isn’t a viable strategy. My Pokemon team wasn’t ready yet for the Pokemon, and any other games required a team, so the only tournament I stood a chance in was Mario Kart. In December, I finished third in the Mario Kart tournament hosted at NAIT on a wicked boomerang snipe.
The first round was simple: three groups of ten to 11 people, and the top eight moved on. The first race was funny because I didn’t get an item for the entire first lap, but I was doing fine. It was once I started getting items that things started going badly. I got hit by multiple items and sent into the back. Some good item usage got me into eighth, but I got a last-minute Bullet Bill to pass three people to finish fifth place in the race. The rest of the first round was pretty uneventful, with me playing well enough and holding my own against some very good players.
The second round was two groups of 12 with the top six advancing to the finals. It had an excellent start. I was fighting with another racer for first place, which would have been my first place in the event. Unfortunately, my controller had a different plan on the second last turn of the track, I went into a drift, and it didn’t register, causing me to fall entirely the course dropping me from first to fourth. I didn’t know it then, but that would be a sign of things to come and one of the reasons I got eliminated. The second race was on a track called Sweet Sweet Canyon. At the beginning of the track, there is a cannon that shoots you a very far distance where the remainder of the track is. On lap two, someone lays a bomb on the cannon right as I’m coming through. There was no way for me to avoid it, knocking me off the edge. The worst part was that it was right at the canyon Lakitu respawns me back before the canyon, making me lose a lot of time. I tried my best but could not make up the ground and finished eighth in that race. Race three was pretty uneventful. I got fourth and was entirely in control of my destiny as I was in sixth, one point up on seventh. Unfortunately, items were not on my side in the final race as I got no power items in the bottom, only triple mushrooms in the far back of the pack. I finished eleventh in that race, my worst race, eighth overall and finished five points out of sixth. What makes it hurt that much more is the difference in points from fourth to first is six points. If I didn’t have the drift on the first race, I would have gotten first and advanced to the finals. Losing is frustrating, but a technical error making you lose makes the loss so much worse. That’s what still hurts: not the loss, but how I lost.
