By T’Neil Gooden
On Sept. 19, the Brooklyn College Esports Club held its annual Super Smash Bros Tournament. Over 88 students attended the event to watch students compete in a tournament that sparked cheers and applause for the players.
Three Smash Bros games were being played simultaneously on the second floor of the Student Center, with students awaiting their turn in the best-of-three games at each station. The prizes were $50 for the first-place winner and $25 for the second-place winner.
Alexander Raff, the founder of the Esports Club, expressed that this event is one of the best ways to bring the esports community together as it builds positivity within the BC community.
“You can hear the cheers from the halls,” Raff told The Vanguard. “This is the loudest this room has ever been and this tournament brought us all together for it.”
To leaders of the club, the best part about hosting the tournament is seeing how the crowd reacts to their players competing.
“Seeing everyone show up 15 minutes before the event even started shows how invested students are in this affair, and we are so happy to see everyone playing and enjoying this event,” Eli Kutsenok, the president of the Esports Club, told The Vanguard.
The Esports Club has continued to put its name on the map with the Super Smash Bros Tournament, adding new members to the community at a rapid pace. At the end of August, the Discord server peaked at 671 members, and after the Super Smash Bros tournament the Discord Server reached over 770 members.
“The esports community is very supportive of each other even if [students] are from different schools,” Sijian Wu, the social media manager for the Esports Club, told The Vanguard. “We usually hold the Smash Tournament every semester to let everyone in BC know that we are always looking for people who are interested in gaming competitively or casually.”
Students in the Super Smash Bros Tournament not only competed with each other, but also learned the dynamics of the game by having conversations in between each competitive round about the different functions and strategies needed to participate.
“The Smash Tournament lets students exchange advice on how to do better and what to fix to become better in the future,” Wu told The Vanguard. “Our players never look down on anyone even if they only played Smash for one month or one year.”
The support that echoed across the room for each player was felt by all the students who watched the players compete.
“One of my favorite things to see is whenever all the players are just watching one great play, they’re screaming the name of that person,” Kutsenok told The Vanguard. “[The support] really shows the unity that this club has, it’s a lot more unified than other clubs who really don’t have the bond as we do.”
The Esports Club is just getting started as they begin to expand their gaming community in competitive teams and casual gaming. There is a new women and marginalized gender Valorant team, an all-new Overwatch team, a Tekken team, and a Hearthstone team. To the leaders of the club, their hard work and dedication demonstrates that their reach extends beyond the digital world.
“Everyone that joins this club and team is not afraid of taking up a challenge,” Wu told The Vanguard. “It makes our whole Esports e-board ecstatic when we notice how much BC students are supportive of each other and interested in our events every semester.”
Interested students can follow the Esports Club on their Instagram @cunybcesports