First Time In The Fighting Game Fray: Winter Brawl's Newest Players Speak

So you want to be a professional fighting game competitor. You’ve dropped every one of your friends and family members multiple times, even your dad who didn’t know what he was doing and just pushed all of the buttons randomly to annoy you, and now you want some real competition. What should you do to prepare? What have other first-timers done in your place? While I was attending Winter Brawl XII last week I asked a few first time FGCers exactly that, and they have some words of wisdom for any prospective combatants in the future.

The first major point brought up by these new players is simple and obvious: train. In their eyes there’s no such thing as too much training, and first time Winter Brawler Michael Hallman summed up his thoughts in one word: practice.

“Practice, practice, practice,” Hallman explained. “Don’t just practice online either, practice against AI, practice against friends, practice against anyone that will play you basically. Learn as much as you can about that game, that characters, the setups, the strategies, everything you can think of you make sure to learn it.”

Hallman's good friend and fellow first timer Daniel Hart echoed that fact, but made sure to bring up another key point: adjusting to the new environment. “I trained online, face-to-face, and talked strategies as long as I could,” Hart said. “It’s a whole new ballgame once you get in here, the pressure is on and the palms start sweating, so training is half of it and learning to adapt is the other.

Part of that adaptation is learning to deal with distraction, which was in huge supply at Winter Brawl with multiple streams and games going on around each room. Hart hadn’t considered just how noisy it would get and laments not being prepped for it. “I didn’t bring any headphones or anything for noise,” he told me, “so looking around and taking things in before a match is a key mistake because it breaks focus. You have to pretend no one else is in the room but you, but the noise makes that difficult..”

Even FGC veterans can feel the pressure of distraction while playing, as Jumaani “Maestro” Haskins described while telling me about his run in Tekken 7. “That’s one thing about me: if things around me are chaotic it definitely gets into my headspace and shifts my focus,” he revealed. “In the main ballroom for Tekken 7 the biggest mistake I had was not having headphones.”

Another key element of a first FGC appearance is not entering too many tournaments at once. The layouts of the venues hosting these events sometimes means that games are spread out or even in different rooms, so a new player may get confused or lost in the shuffle and earn a DQ by complete accident. When I asked him for advice for future first timers Daniel Hart made a great point on this, suggesting that players “only sign up for two games max the first time out. This will help you learn how the tournaments are played out, where the seating is, and all of the logistics without feeling overwhelming.”

While most first-time attendees won’t make it very far in their respective tournaments, sometimes a brand new face can shock the scene and go deep. Winter Brawl XII’s Tekken 7 competition had one of those stories in Jordan “Fat Ugly Jojo” Gilmartin, who was only two matches away from Top 32 when he was finally ousted from the tournament by F101|Rin.

What was his takeaway from nearly making Top 32? By his own admission, he came into the tournament thinking he’d do better, which as Josh “BXA KN J Kun Prime” Green mentioned in our Winter Brawl veterans piece is sometimes a fatal mistake. Luckily it worked out for Jojo.

“I thought I was going to come here with the utmost confidence and do people dirty,” he told me after his loss, “but I had some real competition. I signed up for Injustice 2 and got blown out really fast, but I grew up playing Tekken so Tekken 7 was a much better tournament. I’m impressed with myself, I’m proud of myself, my girlfriend is proud of me, so it’s good.”

If he could do it all again, Jojo would have made sure to add one crucial element to his training regimen: starting position. “If I could tell my past self one thing, it would be to pick your best side,” Jojo said. “If you’re better on the left side and you get sent to the right you’re probably going to lose, so be sure to brush up on both sides of the screen. The first game I played I was on the right side and I was getting smashed, I had no idea I was that bad on the right.”

Finally, because I felt I needed to, I asked him where he got his name from. He didn’t exactly fit the “fat” and “ugly” parts of the moniker, but as he told me that’s by design. “I’m sort of a troll so if I go online, people see that name and tend not to take me seriously until I smash them,” he said with a laugh. “Then people on PSN follow me on social media, they’re like ‘you’re not so ugly or fat, you’re actually quite good looking’ and all I can say is ‘I know.’”  Based on his Winter Brawl performance I’m sure we’ll see Jojo again, and I’m really looking forward to this guy’s next deep run.

Jojo, Hallman, and Hart all prove that there’s plenty of room in the fighting game community for fresh faces. While expecting to come in and immediately take 1st place is a fool’s errand, learning from those who’ve come before and formulating a proper game plan is key to any first time player’s success. Just try not to let all the commotion kill your focus, and remember to bring headphones.