Over his historic career in Super Smash Bros. Melee, Juan “Hungrybox” Debiedma has been a dominant player when attending Community Effort Orlando, better known as CEO, in his home state of Florida.
This year’s bracket featured a few lesser-known players and some rising stars of the Melee community trying to take the CEO crown from the current top player in the world. But Hungrybox took home the title once again.
Any series between Hbox and Zac “SFAT” Cordoni is usually a close contest since the two veterans have a good feel for each other’s games. It went down to the wire, but the Jigglypuff main secured three straight wins and moved on to the grand finals.
While that was happening in the winners bracket, newly-sponsored Justin “Wizzrobe” Hallett, now playing under Team Envy, was making another run in the losers bracket. He took down Sasha “Magi” Sullivan and played what might have been the highlight series of the tournament against Justin “Plup” McGrath.
Plup typically plays Sheik, a character that has a very good matchup history with Captain Falcon, leading to Wizzy rarely beating Plup in tournaments. This series went five games and came down to the last stock in the decisive game, but Wizzy pulled off an insane set of combos to finally take down one of his bracket demons.
In his first tournament under the Envy banner, Wizzy continued his run by playing another hype set against Cody “iBDW” Schwab, a well-respected Fox main who’s been placing well this season and rising up the ranks. This match wasn’t quite as close, but it still showed that the Fox main wasn’t playing around. Even after losing, iBDW has strung together a great start to the season and could end up within the top 20 players in the next rankings.
The grand finals was a rematch of Smash ‘N’ Splash 5, Hbox vs. Wizzy, who was coming off of a sweep of SFAT in the losers finals.
Just like at Smash ‘N’ Splash, the player who came out of the winners bracket had the advantage, but ended up struggling at points. Hbox ended up dropping a single stock game to start the series and almost lost game two, but he secured a win on Fountain of Dreams to even things up.
In game three, Hbox took a two-stock win and put himself one victory away from claiming his fifth CEO title. Wizzy brought it back with his own two stock on Battlefield and was on the verge of a reset before the top player sealed the deal with some insane tech to outlast the high-powered Falcon.
Wizzy continues to show that he’s in the conversation for the best player in the world for the upcoming rankings. A second-place finish at CEO along with first at Smash ‘N’ Splash 5 and second at Smash Summit 8 is nothing to scoff at.
The next Super Smash Bros. Melee Major is Low Tier City 7, running from July 12 to 14 in Arlington, Texas.
