If you would indulge me, the introduction to this article involves you following my instructions in order to physically participate. Don’t worry, you won’t have to move out of your chair or from your keyboard. You just have to take one of your hands off the keys momentarily. If you’re busy, it isn’t as if you don’t have plenty of practice typing one-handed.



First, sit up straight in your chair. I want you to picture, somewhere on your desk, an invisible mug. It can look however you please. It’s invisible. Inside the mug is a whole mess of glitter and confetti. Now, I want you to take one of your hands and use it to pick up the invisible mug by its handle. Make the same fist you would make holding a visible mug. Hold your invisible mug against your stomach, just over your navel. Now shake that mug up and down and spew confetti everywhere.



That is exactly how I feel about SBO.



Grab a towel and get yourself cleaned up. Quick show of hands. Not that hand, the other one. How many of you were happy to pay twenty dollars to watch a stream and not see a single American play?



Follow up question. Let’s say that you and a friend fought your way through SBO qualifiers and earned Wonka’s golden ticket. You paid thousands of dollars out of your own pocket to travel to Japan to compete. After arriving, you are told to go home; there is no room for you. Luckily, one of your fellow American travelers speaks Japanese and is able to broker a compromise. The best the SBO committee will do for you is make you play yet another qualifier match with a second foreign team in order to re-secure the position in the bracket that both of your teams had earned back home. Despite the fact that you have logged thousands of travel miles and cleaned out your bank account, the two local teams that wiggled in at the very last chance aren’t forced into a playoff. You are. Make sense?



Final question. Can you imagine the community’s reaction if someone had pulled that sort of shit with Daigo Umehara at an American major?



It is time to stop legitimizing Tougeki. It is time to stop allowing a single foreign tournament to dictate affairs within our national scene, to create strife and drama within our national scene, to belittle our players, and to make our hobby look bad.



Every single legendary American Street Fighter player has always had an asterisk next to his name in the record books, a footnote that reads identically for all of them : “*has never won Super Battle Opera.” It is a fact that comes with an unspoken connotation, that until we put someone on the stage at the Tokyo Game Show that can win the thing, we will always be inferior to the Japanese in fighting games.



Can someone please explain to me how our players are judged so critically for failing to do well in a tournament that favors Japanese players in a hostile environment?



How many single elimination two-versus-two tournaments have you attended lately? In America, team tournaments are a novelty, a side-show. They are a social exhibition within the more serious competition of the overall tournament, a format that allows players to hang out while working together and allows spectators to enjoy the drama of larger scale battles with an element of fantasy football thrown in for good measure. Furthermore, there is no American tournament that features single-elimination anything, teams or otherwise. Yet we are disappointed yearly when the players we send to Japan fail to flourish in an environment within which they literally have no experience outside of the qualifiers for that same tournament?



When the Japanese visit America for our tournaments, they find gracious hosts that often provide translators (when possible), lodging, transportation, and hospitality to their guests. It is ridiculous that we invest so much, as a group, into providing players for a tournament where they are obviously not wanted.



When they play through our brackets, they win some, and they lose some. Of course some Japanese players are very good; so are some Americans. However, when placed on even footing with American players, they are beatable. Latif proved that in Las Vegas. Filipino Champ proved that at back to back tournaments.

In complete denial of those facts, the "conventional wisdom" dictates that our achievements don't mean jack shit until we've won Super Battle Opera. The community is obsessed with sending someone, anyone, to Japan that can win, so much so that they are willing to show a disturbing trend to mercilessly cannibalize the qualifying tournament victors the moment grand finals is finished and their tickets are punched. "They aren't good enough to win SBO," they say, as if they, the millions that didn't fight and win a qualifying position, have any right to say so.

Even if we dominated at SBO and won for the first time, what would it prove? The idea that the Japanese are better, by default, is delusion. No, I wouldn't send Johnny Q. Sheepfuck from Boulder, Colorado to Japan and bet on him against Taito Station killers, but that doesn't mean we don't have players on our side of the Pacific that can, have, and will beat the Japanese. The sort of people who believe that the Japanese are our betters, naturally, are going to believe so until the day these games are no longer played. It is a piece of pop culture canon.

Furthermore, I feel someone should say it, and if it's me, it's me. American events, like Evo, like the majors all over the country, are just better. They are a better product being distributed with higher production values. Compare top 32 at SBO with top 8 at Evo; it's comical.

Tougeki is an outdated institution. Its format does nothing to showcase American talent. Instead, it places them at a disadvantage, while tournament organizers actively discourage American efforts. It is far beyond time that we stopped allowing SBO any credibility whatsoever within our community beyond being a fun travel experience and an interesting novelty tournament.



Until that happens, I’ll be here, shaking my invisible mug when someone mentions SBO.