Combo Breaker 2026 Part One: The Run

This is more of a story or a diary entry than a real 'blog post.' Sorry! Enjoy! Whatever!

Hardware Nightmares

Basketball would probably be a lot less popular if you couldn't walk into any store on planet Earth and get a ball pretty much like every other ball. $20 is a low price of admission to be playing the same game Steve Nash played. This baseline level of internal consistency is more or less mandatory for a satisfying playing experience; it's why nobody likes those sickos who tell you that you can't tag them when they have one foot on the woodchips and the other on the asphalt. For a long time, playing Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R (+R hereafter) was not like that.

Playing +R competitively was a nightmare until the past two-ish years. When rollback first dropped on October 29th, 2020, it proved to the world that solid netplay could singlehandedly bring a game back from the brink of death, but it also demonstrated that dormant games cannot adjust to daily life without a lot of help. Specifically, +R had a problem with tournament hardware. The first handful of in-person +R tournaments after the game's resurrection were on PS3, which was widely acknowledged as sub-standard owing to its high latency. Given +R is oriented around high execution and omnipresent two- and three-frame cancel windows, +R was 'back' but tournament results had a fairly large asterisk next to them.

I'm walking into Dick's, trying to buy a basketball, and walking home with a bowling ball.

Nobody was happy with the PS3s. High-execution characters and playstyles were appreciably nerfed (I myself am in the middle of that venn diagram), and players that couldn't spontaneously adjust to PC-to-PS3 differences were doomed from the get-go. Around late 2022 / early 2023, office-grade mini PCs hit the scene; +R was incredibly small and easy to run, making it light work for even dated computers, and mini PC prices and form factors made them an excellent choice for tournament setups. With some heavy tuning, a relatively high degree of consistency could be achieved, though Windows still presented some driver issues and unresolvable variability.

I'm walking into Dick's, trying to buy a basketball, and walking home with a soccer ball.

Finally, the scene makes the jump from Windows to a specialized Arch Linux setup, and the mini PC model of choice gets nailed down. Setups are highly consistent, and are unlikely be more than one frame off of anyone's home setup (not the Linux box's fault, you just never know what anyone has at home). They're fast, responsive, easy to troubleshoot, and they actually feel like playing the game on modern hardware.

I'm walking into Dick's, trying to buy a basketball, and walking home with a basketball.

+R's setup woes always left me feeling a little hollow after tournaments. Come tournament day, I'd have to haphazardly hack off parts of my playstyle that consciously stuck out to me as at-risk, and simply give up on other things as I discovered them to be infeasible in the moment. Whoever was playing at those setups, on that stage, wasn't really me. At tournaments I was a shadow of myself. That doesn't happen anymore.

So, thank you to ChemicalJade, OmegaTomHanks, Chastity, and DigitalWatches. I literally could not play the game the way I do without your dedication to making our game worth playing.

Scrub

A little bit before Combo Breaker, I was talking someone in the Xrd scene who asked me point blank: "So how good are you at +R?" He had only ever known me as the scrub who could barely play Venom in Xrd, and all of my growth and competition was happening out of view in the +R scene.¹ 3,000 hours of hard work later, I... didn't have a good answer.

17/92 at CB2022. 9/22 at RH2022. 25/237 at FF2023.

Not bad for two years in. I was pleased with myself.

17/110 at CB2023. 2/18 at Garage Gear. 17/223 at FF2024.

I was the top of the little pond, and the bottom of the big pond. My losses were inglorious.

13/128 at CB2024. 4/8 at RH2024. 13/175 at FF2025.

It started to hurt. I wanted so badly to prove that the work meant something. I didn't know if it did.

9/94 at at CB2025.

I stopped commentating at events. No more consolation activities. Do or die.

7/18 at RH2025.

Where did the blood, sweat, and tears all lead?

17/184 at FF2026.

I was sick of losing, sicker of playing, and sicker still of grinding.

I've seen the Sanford Kelly video. I had pointed countless others to strong characters. I thought everyone floundering, insisting on doing it 'their way' with gunshot wound-sized holes in their gameplay was kidding themselves. I don't know why I felt I was any different, and at many times I was crushingly certain I was the least different. I felt so often while spectating that the better player lost to raw differences in character strength, and honestly I still feel that way about the game. I felt robbed by unconquerable matchups. But I was unwilling, maybe even unable, to envision myself doing it differently. I wanted to win on my terms. I wanted to play Venom.

In the background of all this was my actual life. Graduating from college. Job hunting. An internship that didn't go anywhere. Job hunting. Getting my Master's in September 2025. Job hunting. 200 job applications, three interviews, zero offers.

My faith in the ability of hard work to deliver had been ground into dust.

Combo Breaker 2026 will be the last dance.

Bracket

Pools

After a Thursday spent gallivanting around Chicago and making it to the hotel, it was time for bracket on Friday, 10 AM to 10 PM. For my money, having a first-day one-day bracket is a blessing. No matter which pool you're in, you're guaranteed that the vast majority of the middle of your day will be open. Early pools? 4-6 hour break until Top 24. Late pools? Do it all in one run at the very end of the day. Nobody is getting iced out by a full night, the house party vibes aren't stepping on the toes of competing, and there's plenty of time after to do whatever. My pool was at noon.

For those unfamiliar with fighting game brackets, they're structured to keep strong players as far away from each other as possible, ensuring as bracket progresses, average skill and difficulty rise. This also means that for stronger players, your first match or two will probably be kinda whatever. That was the case for me.

My first strong opponent was Agendine, a Potemkin player. Superficially a grappler vs. zoner matchup, I actually really dislike Venom-Potemkin. Venom has a tendency to die on his back if Potemkin is allowed to run offense; Venom's backdash is easily covered, he has no reversals, the damage differential is massive, all very standard Venom problems. Potemkin's neutral is also quite solid against Venom between Flick, Slide Head, and j.D, making the matchup an exercise in containment and staying outside of Potemkin Buster range. I approach the matchup as one that demands opportunism, turning weird stray hits into knockdowns and understanding where the Potemkin wants to be. Once Potemkin gets knocked down, though, he's definitely a victim in the matchup. His slow, long-duration backdash is completely invalidated, his mash options are too slow, and Venom can easily run offense without ever getting within Potemkin's grab range. 2-0 my favor, I advance to Winners Finals of my pool.

Waiting in Winners Finals of the pool was Excalibur (playing under the name Mr. Two), notable for getting 2nd at CB2025 and CB2023. The moment pools were solidified, this was the run-defining match I was looking forward to. I was seeded to lose here. Excalibur plays Justice, who I identify as one of Venom's three worst matchups. I frequently describe her as a sort of 'proto-Happy Chaos,' where her oppressive fullscreen game against Venom means Guilty Gear's universal defensive systems - designed to build space and reset to fullscreen - allow Justice to turn losing situations into winning ones at the drop of a hat with Burst and Dead Angle. The core of the matchup comes down to ball vs. nuke interactions. Justice's nukes have infinite durability, meaning they delete Venom's pool balls off the screen without detonating, leaving Venom in the awkward position of needing time-consuming thread-the-needle ball formations to fight Justice setting a nuke. Add onto that Justice's fullscreen laser super, menacing air presence, and high damage... get me out.

That said, it's one of my most-prepped matchups, and I think Excalibur plays in a way that is bad for Venom in the broad strokes but doesn't include some of the truly matchup-breaking particularities that make me want to eat my arcade stick. The set came down to Excalibur landing an awkward hit while I had burst, and he spent 50 meter just to stabilize the route before spending another 50 meter on a super to kill - which whiffed. I identified the whiff spacing and held burst, which let me gold burst, dump 100 meter on shutting him out in neutral, and close the set. 2-1 my favor, I advance to Top 24.

You know I got that Chipotle card at CB's first official +R bracket.

Top 24

You know what's really nice about making it to Winners Top 24? If you win one set, you're in Top 8. I was up against Axl player and flying kick-doer Digital Watches. In some ways, I think she's the perfect +R player. Or rather, the perfect player for +R. She's wily, down to scrap, unpredictable, doesn't believe in matchups,² and if you get clipped by the nonsense you'll lose half your health bar. I, on the other hand, am afraid of what happens when other characters start just Doing Shit™, which I think is a major strategic impasse between how Digital Watches and I play the video game. She is a committed thing-doer and I am a dedicated thing-stopper, which means I can get good mileage out of just playing containment. It was scrappy for sure, but I took the win through solid patrolling of screen space and tight lockdown on offense. Axl is endowed with like five tools that approximate reversals, and keeping a lid on that entire defensive suite is my main path to victory against her most of the time. We met at Frosty Faustings previously with similar results; 2-1 here my favor, I advance to Winners Semi-Finals in Top 8.

Winners Semis

Betrayal hurts. I had to face the man who played top lane with me when we were warriors on the Rift. The man I made a jpeg for when he needed an exhibition graphic made. Deft. More seriously, he's one of the hardest-working players I know, an American member of the Japanese Sportsland arcade scene come home to the US with a vengeance. He's also suffered a bit of a bridesmaid's curse. 2/184 at FF2026 in a showstopping match against Hotta from Japan, and 2/128 at CB2024 in an all-timer set against Gatchaman. A myriad of other high-but-not-first placings.

I think once I broke out of pools in Winners side, the tone of the rest of the bracket was set. This was a battle between my dark horse run and his bid for the gold medal after so many rejections. No animosity, no beef, just two arcs that had to clash because only one competitor can win. It was a blast. Some of the most fun Gear I've ever played, and the vibes on stage were phenomenal. We had just gotten food earlier that day, even!

The set was a nailbiter, and if I may, I think I kinda threw. A horrific burst in the last moments of the second-to-last round left me high and dry in the last, where he ran away with it. But that's what competition is about, and +R is a difficult game defined by slim wins on narrow margins. There were other times where I went for ambitious mixup options, where I probably should have focused on simplicity and lockdown. At the same time, Deft played neutral pretty much flawlessly and ran safe mix, I think respecting my defensive ability and willingness to punish small timing errors with Venom's throw OS.

Deft's composure was his X-factor, though as a silver lining, I'd rather lose to my own bad decision making than mark down my millionth 11th hour failure because Venom sucks. Adrift in an ocean of bad matchups, I was losing to me, not to the character select screen's collusion with a programmer 10 years ago.

As an easter egg, our set ended up being an accidental callback to elder god Millia Woshige stomping out GOAT Venom N-Otoko 4-0;³ same character colors, and I think the same stage. I did better than N-Otoko though. 2-1 Deft favor, he plays Winners Finals against Dizzy player Soup while I drop into Losers Quarter-Finals.

Losers Quarter-Finals

I need to air a grievance about +R. I feel like a very dominant playstyle in upper-middle to high levels of play is what I call the 'anti-level one.' No real effort towards winning the game, just a lot of work put into absolutely vaporizing normal decision making. "I will try to make you lose" versus "I will try to win," you feel me? People who do nothing but forward tech late double jump fall on you, that kind of thing. Playing ExoticJamm's ABA was a breath of fresh air because he did none of that. He played like he wanted to win on purpose.

ABA is a scary character, basically built entirely to snowball. Even played well, she drags you into the mud with some truly belligerent jump-ins, disgusting frame data, and a thousand ways to reset you into death. The Venom matchup is somewhat unique for ABA because Venom's low damage lets ABA play pretty comfortably in normal mode, without transforming and risking getting IK'd. There are also some small ABA-isms that really bug Venom, like the fact that you can't crossup overhead her in K Ball oki because her blockstun animation reels her out of j.S's crossup hitbox, giving her a landing throw punish. That said, Venom f.S is a complete nuisance in the matchup, and once in Moroha mode, Venom's easy-bake vortex goes from inconvenient to apocalyptic real quick. I got (deservedly) heckled/coached by Badoor and Hursh, two Venoms I respect immensely, for failing to IK ABA when I put her in Suka motion, but in my defense I wanted to be 100% certain and I prefer metered IK setups that I didn't realize I'd get the 25% for.

Anyways, the set was a brisk 2-0 in my favor, sending me to Losers Semi-Final.

Losers Semi-Final

A rematch against Digital Watches! I honestly feel like we just played a pretty linear second take on our first set, with the addition of Digital Watches making heavy use of Axl's FB guard point followup to really throw off game one. Games two and three were pretty straightforward vortex games. This is also where I noticed that Digital Watches leaned really heavily on wakeup burst, showing what read to me as obvious discomfort with dealing with my offense, since outside of the FB guard point, I think I was doing a good job of containing the Axl defensive rotation. I also got to show off my favorite setup, a midscreen metered combo that (in my opinion) helps solve some of Venom's midscreen damage woes. I still don't know what I'm going to call that setup... In any case, a sketchy 2-1 in my favor! Digital Watches out, me in Loser's Final.

Loser's Final

I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice I'm fucking nice.

Sorry.

I think this set was a miracle. "I'm seeing the matrix" levels of correct. I don't know if I've ever played that well in my life and I don't know if I'll ever reclaim it. This was a set against the Dizzy player Soup, who knocked me out of FF2026 and himself took 4th. First of all, Soup is an extremely strong player, obviously. Second, Dizzy is one of the many al-Qaeda members on the +R roster. Her damage is absurd, her mixups are oppressive and looping, her grounded and airborne buttons are disgusting, her projectiles can absorb hits for her, her blockstrings are incredibly scary, she has two airdashes, and her j.2S is UNTHROWABLE. ArcSys must fix bug. One of my least favorite matchups as Venom, and one of the most overtly bad for him in my opinion; the problems Dizzy presents are overt, front-and-center, and unavoidable. It really feels like Dizzy is just always in the game, and until the round is over, she is a contender.

None of that matters because I played the cleanest neutral in human history for three games, only dropping one round across all of them. I challenge you to find another human being alive who has gone three games against Dizzy and only gotten knocked down and put into oki once. I just felt very... awake. I was keeping close track of every Fish option, the offense was tight, I was 6Ping every airdash in offense, I was disengaging in my own offense when I knew Dizzy nonsense was about to end my turn anyways, I was reacting to burst. Like, what? Venom masterclass.

The most miraculous 3-0 of my life. Back to Grand Finals with Deft.

Grand Finals

I just wanna say, I'm so glad Grands was against Deft. Both 4-0 in pools, we got lunch together in our pools-Top 24 gap, we had a phenomenal set in Winners side, and here we were! It really was going to be bridesmaid versus dark horse.

We were both on one gameplay wise, and I think that fun factor showed through in how we played and communicated on stage; the commentators (thank you Brett and Klaige for the stellar commentary!) and crowd both seemed to love the energy, which brings me more joy than maybe anything else.

You know how I said my Losers Semi's set with Digital Watches was a pretty neat rehash of our Top 24 set? Perhaps superficially underwhelmingly (to be clear, I do not feel this way), that was my set with Deft too, in a way. I think that's kinda beautiful though; we were both playing how we wanted to out the gate, and it was just a matter of who was more on the ball at the end of this grueling bracket. As in Winners, his composure was the decision-maker; a few bad bursts by me, a few truly clutch plays by him, some great defense from me, more than a few truly absurd conversions from him, and the cards fell where they did.

3-2 Deft favor. Gold for him, silver for me.

I wouldn't have it any other way.⁴ It was a close enough set that, as was the Winners side one, I think it's easy to envision ways in which I won, either through Winners or a bracket reset. But that's not what I'm dwelling on, beyond the normal 'what can I do better next time?' and 'It'd be so cool to have a trophy' thinking. This isn't a haunting loss. I think we both got what we wanted. Deft earned a major win, one that's been a long time coming, and I got to finally play the Venom I know I've always been capable of playing on a big stage, in front of a crowd screaming my name. I will never forget it.

I like to think they loved me, and I certainly loved them. My popoffs (my first ever) are evidence of that.

Me (left) and Deft (right) before Grands.

Postmortem

As I said in the first part of this long post, I've been grappling with my relationship with this game, with competition in general, and - this is the part I didn't say earlier - with finding community in the fighting game scene. Finding bonds deeper than 'we play the same game.' Getting 2nd at Combo Breaker is not some silver bullet; the 'fire' of competition isn't magically back, I'm not ready to put in another thousand hours, you will not catch me mega-grinding netplay... but I think I'm at peace with the things I struggled with so much. I'm grateful for everyone who showed up for me, at the event and online, and that means the world to me too. I'm starting to think I've found my people.

Likewise, I know I said it a little earlier, but my biggest struggle with tournaments has always been feeling like I was forced to leave the 'magic' in my play behind. I love how I play when I'm 'on,' I really do. I think my play is audacious and distinctive, and I don't think you'll find another Venom out there who plays quite like me. My Venom is as much a window into who I am as something like my music taste, and that's not just flavor, it's something... integral, foundational, structural to how I understand and play the game. When I have to shelve that, it hurts, both emotionally and performance-wise. So finally feeling unchained by hardware limitations, feeling backed into a corner by my own relationship with the game, and then putting on a monstrous dark horse run, having the crowd cheering for me until the very last hit? That's special. That's vindicating.

All I ever wanted was to put on a show, and I finally did.

He knew...

Footnotes