If you wanted to go by technicalities Evo 2023, with its thousands of international entrants was, of course, the biggest and most stacked Street Fighter tournament to date. Even so, taking your first glance at the pool brackets for the upcoming Capcom Cup X Last Chance Qualifier well may elicit even more surprise and emotion than seeing Evo 2023 brackets did.
While only 321 participants have signed up for the LCQ slated to play out in Los Angeles this weekend, there are many, many names you’d expect to see already qualified for Capcom Cup. FLY|Punk and BST|Daigo, for instances, are not only both present, but in the same pool.
Capcom Cup is bigger in most every way this year as the prize pool has risen to an unprecedented (at least for fighting games) two million dollars, half of which will be gifted to the overall winner.
The finals bracket for the Cup has also been expanded with a whopping 48 players qualifying, which may nudge us toward some wonder about why so many international players who normally punch their ticket during the regular season have yet to do so this time.
Capcom has clearly aimed to garner a wider global representation with the Tour this year, hosting many tournaments for many regions across the globe. The concentrations of top level players can be especially dense in certain regions, likely most so in Japan, and thus only a select few have been able to qualify from any given area.
The tournament will open with all participants separated roughly into eight 40-person pools. Only two competitors will emerge from each of these pools, one from the winners side and one from the losers, to make up the LCQ’s top 16.
Since Smash.gg tracks previous performances it can also project the most likely winners before brackets actually play out. Below you’ll see the top four seeded players in each of the eight initial pools as well as the top 16 predictions from Smash.gg:
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You can view the entire LCQ bracket for further detail, and let us know who you think might qualify in the final Capcom Cup X spot in the comments below.
Whoever it ends up being, we know they’ll be the final participant in Group H of the Capcom Cup X Group stage, the seeding and organization of which has been received as controversial since it was determined on Wednesday.