Zephyr’s Internal Ranking Tournament 2024-2025 Q3

“Alaaf” to all the readers. Currently, the Dutch celebration Carnaval is taking place in Eindhoven, but do you know what else is also taking place in Eindhoven? That’s right, the third Zephyr Internal ranking tournament! Well, to be exact, it has already happened as of the writing of this blog post. The tournament was on Wednesday the 27th of February and of course we will give you a rundown of the tournament. 

The tournament this time had a total of 8 competitors, the same amount as last time. However, surprisingly enough, the 8 competitors were not the exact same people as the last IR. Essentially, we traded three players. Unfortunately, competitors Martino (Tino) and Florian (Irregular) could not join the tournament this time and Jeffrey (Future2025) who was an exchange student, has now left Zephyr since his exchange is over (O7 you will be missed). Instead, we had one newly joined Zephyr member and competitor Lean (“I have a snail btw”), one returning competitor Akam (AkBob) who missed the previous tournament and Matthias (Mattie) who is both a returning competitor and technically a newly joined Zephyr member. Mattie is known and feared by his competitors as the best defensive player in Zephyr and took second place in the global IR of last year. This year, he had been MIA as a Zephyr member for the first half but has returned for the second half and surely will fire up the competition.  

Furthermore, the tournament itself this time was AGAIN a little different from previous iterations. The whole tournament was all best of 5 sets EXCEPT the first round which was best of 3. Even though, we had the same amount of players as last time, this decision was made as there was a concern for going over time. This concern was mainly due to a shift in the meta of the Zephyr Smash community. This change is the closing of the gap in skill levels between players and can be explained by, among others, usage of coaching from the esports committee and returning players whose play style counter other dominant players. As players get closer in skill level, games and sets will overall take longer. This is an  exciting development, as matches between equally skilled players are always the most fun to watch and feel even better to win.

Lastly, we got Tanglad taking back his crown as winner of the IR Q3 tournament, with Mattie getting an amazing second place despite having had a half year hiatus from competitive smash. Their grand finals set was a treat to watch with clip worthy moments that will definitely be put in the clip compilation, so stay tuned for that.

The bracket results can be found here.

Points earned from the Q3 tournament and a nice graphic for the top 8 can be found below:

1. Tanglad (Kazuya, Donkey Kong) – 10 points

2. Mattie (Rosalina & Luma, Zelda) – 8 points

3. Unique (Falco, Wolf) – 6 points

4. Muurverf (Inkling, Pyra & Mythra) – 4 points

5. DVoid (King Dedede, Sephiroth) – 2 points

5. Vincentg (Byleth, Joker) – 2 points

7. AkBob (Yoshi) – 1 point

7. I have a snail btw (Dark Samus, Pit) – 1 point