Smogon Tour Coverage

Hello, and welcome to the Smogon Tour coverage! In this series, we'll be going over the three weekly Tours, their winners, as well as the Top 16 for each week. Enjoy!

Winners

Comments: What an excellent way to start Smogon Tour Season 17. A flagship metagame, a top tier battler, and several excellent matches in the path to victory. While tml may not be well known for battling, Chase and -Tsunami- are certainly both excellent battlers, and occupying Round 2 and 3 certainly gave Bloo an excellent chance at both good battles, and perhaps a chance to have been eliminated if a vareity of variables had not been in Bloo's favor.

Round Four, and Xi Liao Dong, was most likely not an issue, but the next two rounds likely were. dragonuser (Round 4) and Dice (Semi-Finals) are both excellent battlers, and gave Bloo a run for his money, but eventually Bloo came out on top. The finals... Pridy and Kojes are both good players, and managed to get the finals replayed, via having everyone go 1-1, but were unable to pull any match off of Bloo, and he eventually pulled victorious, going 2-0 and causing the Kojes vs Pridy battle to be unplayed due to irrelevancy.

Comments: Yet another XY OU Tour, this time with Double01 being victorious. Round 1 was, unlike most Tours, not an easy throwaway round, as he had to face the UU king fatty. Round Two made up for that, as he faced equin0x, a user who more than likely had little to no high-level competitive experience. Up next, Lord Elyis of Congregation of the Classiest was faced and defeated. If I had to guess, that would probably have been the hihlight match of Double01's victory run, aside (semi-)finals of course.

Round 4 had him face bluri, who apparently is a pretty good ladder player. Sadly, ladder skill doesn't often transfer well over to tournaments, and bluri likely got to Round 4 by not facing any particularily difficult opponents. Golden Sun was Round 5, which was likely another excellent battle, but Double01 managed to come out ontop of the Past-Gens genius. The semifinals had him face shartruce2, a pretty good battler, but not good enough, apparently. The finals placed him against FLCL and High Impulse, both excellent players. Just like the day before, the first finals were a stalemate, causing the players to play again. Double01 won against both FLCL and High Impulse in quick succession, causing the FLCL vs High Impulse battle to not even be listed in the thread's OP.

Comments: locopoke takes the third and last Tour victory of the weekend, proving he's a high level player once again. However, on looking at his path to victory, some questions do come up. I'm not going to sugarcoat it—it seems that until Round 4, locopoke had nobody really to battle, skill wise. chirac, flamz, and RockyRd don't exactly ring the bells names like M Dragon, Steven Snype, and yan[sogeking] do.

Nonetheless, locopoke had a likely easy path to Round Four, where he faced what is likely his first real match, in HBK. Luckily for locopoke, HBK was unable to pull a victory, putting locopoke one win away from the semi-finals. He faced Knight of Cydonia, an underrated but excellent player, but locopoke managed to pull out the victory, placing him in the semifinals. badabing was his opponent in that fight—it's always nice to see the high level players of previous generations clash in a new enviroment. locopoke pulled out the victory, and found himself in the (best of three, of course) finals. PDC and Forza were his opponents, and, unsuprisingly, they stalemated, everyone going 1-1 (locopoke lost to Forza). Lucky for locopoke, Forza had to leave, making the finals locopoke vs PDC; a battle which had just happened during the stalemate, in locopoke's favor. The result of the matchup didn't change, and locopoke pulled victorious.