Across the board, Smash 'N' Splash 3 was a crazy tournament for Melee. From William "Leffen" Hjelte's exceptional performance to Juan "Hungrybox" DeBiedma taking a rare set off of Adam "Armada" Lindgren, the event was incredible overall.





Just looking at the results page, though, it can be easy to overlook one of the craziest performances from the weekend: the deep run that DaJuan "Shroomed" McDaniel made.

Walking into the first day of the tournament, Shroomed didn't appear to care all that much about his pool. Based on his perfect record in round robin pool D16, he didn't need to, either.





With that performance in pools, he was set to move on to his round two bracket pools the next day.

During round two pools on June 3, Shroomed's first set was against Kashan "Chillin" Khan. The set was 2-0, but apparently a relatively close one. Still, Shroomed advanced.





After that, Shroomed stormed through the rest of pool J3 with a duo of 2-0 set wins in order to advance to the top 64 bracket winners side.





To kick off his run through the top 64 bracket, Shroomed simply triple three-stocked a Falco by the name of Padre. It was after that set, though, that he was up against the killers.

In his second round of the bracket, he had to play against Justin "Plup" McGrath. There was solid Melee from both players throughout the five-game set, but come the final game, Shroomed turned it way up.





The combo in the clip above was the second-to-last one for the set and showed how much of a lock Shroomed had on Plup's Fox for the final game.





With his 3-2 victory featuring two separate three-stocks, Shroomed was headed into what was potentially his final match to qualify for top eight firing on all cylinders.

Next up, Shroomed had to play Johnny "S2J" Kim, making the set an unfortunate compulsory team kill between the two static doubles partners.





Still, that's no reason for the two of them to go easy on each other. The first game looked quite rough for Shroomed as he got tossed around Battlefield by S2Js hard-punishing Falcon, but he wasn't out of the set after just one loss.

Instead, Shroomed ended up taking the set 3-1 with two stocks in the last three games. His neutral was just a tad safer than it had been the first game, and he did his best to aggressively capitalize off of any open that he was able to create.





After these victories over Plup and S2J, Shroomed was in winners side of top eight, guaranteeing him at least a fifth place finish.





Fighting his way through winners looked impossible, though, as his opponent in winners semis was none other than Adam "Armada" Lindgren.

The first game of their set looked rather as expected as Armadas Peach dominated Shroomed with a two-stock game on Dreamland.





After that, though, Shroomed started playing like he would be the first non-God to defeat Armada in seven years (Leffen being a God/Godslayer exempts him from the statistic) as he took the next two games off of the world's best Peach.





However, Armada had one advantage on his side: his Fox vs. Sheik practice with Andreas "Android" Lindgren. Since the Peach couldn't do it, Armada broke out the Fox and beat Shroomed that way. The set was extremely close, but the #1 player in the world would deny Shroomed the win in a 3-2 set.

To get himself into losers semis, Shroomed then became single-handedly responsible for the double-elimination of Plup. The set was 3-1 this time, with more of the same from their first set.





Shroomed out-punished Plup for the most part and got a lot of solid reads while Plup's Fox made some mistakes that betrayed the fact that he didn't main Fox.

One of the most entertaining, back-and-forth sets of the tournament, Shroomed then had to play Leffen in losers semifinals. Only playing Sheik for the second game, Shroomed instead opted to use his Marth for almost the entirety of the set.





Both of them played clean punish games that led into well-polished neutral games, and it looked at times as though Leffen was stymied by the Marth.





Come game five, though, Leffen ended the run Shroomed had been on at fourth place.

FUUUU so close



Should've had faith in my Marth. Live and learn



Time to bring it back through losers — DaJuan McDaniel (@Shroomed08) June 5, 2017

Although, it's possible that the one game he played Sheik is the reason that he was put out of the tournament and finished in fourth place. This is the best Shroomed has done at a major with at least four Gods in attendance ever and serves as an excellent follow-up to his fifth place finish at Royal Flush.





Some had thought he had been slipping for a while, but this kind of gameplay proves that he's anything but slipping.