This weekend (July 10th, 2017) was the RAGE e-sports Street Fighter V grand finals. I didn’t have a chance to go, but am watching it afterwards on openrec.tv. I thought I would keep some notes as I watch the archived video. You can sign up for a free openrec.tv account easily enough, and a free account is able to watch archived videos once (seems strange that they only let you watch once, but that is enough for me.)

When I checked out the live stream, they had an English and a Japanese version, but I’m watching the Japanese version just for fun. Check the videos portion of the rage-esports account if you want to watch too.

They said this tournament (which has spanned a few weekends already) has the highest payout of all domestic Japanese tournaments. If you assume 100yen to the dollar (close enough, but it is actually a bit more) then they are paying out over the top 8 finishers, $20,000 for 1st (plus a Tag Heuer watch), $5000 for 2nd, $1500 for 3rd and 4th, and $500 for 5th through 8th.

By the way, in Japan none of the local weeklies have any sort of payout, since it would be viewed as gambling here and runs afoul of some laws.

I really like the production values here – very nice produced interviews before the matchups where they talk about their character, what they are doing, and a bit about their opponent. I didn’t know much about Ponzaman or Mishie so that was cool to see.

In Momochi’s introduction I love how he explained that he wants to be the strongest in Japan, and since Daigo uses Ryu and he wants to beat him, he thought using Ryu’s rival Ken would be a good idea. And he thinks Ken looks cool.

Overall results, for those who are curious:

1. GRPT|Fuudo (R. Mika)
2. AW|Nemo (Urien)
3. GRPT|Haitani (Necalli)
4. DNG|Itabashi Zangief (Zangief)
5. Kichipa-mu (Zangief)
5. Mishie (Laura)
7. FOX|Momochi (Ken)
7. Ponzaman (Rashid)