During last night’s Next Level Battle Circuit, a weekly fighting game tournament for online competitors on the east coast, top Street Fighter V player Brian “Brian_F” Foster got away with murder.
Ahead by a score of 2-0 in grand finals, Foster was a hair away from winning the whole tournament. His last Balrog combo had left his opponent’s Ibuki on the ropes, and as Foster moved forward to potentially finish them off with a throw, a special attack came out instead. Immediately after, Foster held his hand to his face in disbelief.
“I didn’t mean to do that!” Foster told his Twitch viewers as the stream chat went crazy over his victory. “That was an accident. That’s how I win? That was literally an accident. [Shine] did the right thing, he [defended against the throw]. I went to go throw him.”
NLBC runner-up Sean “Shine” Simpson was similarly amused by the situation despite being on the losing side.
“Every accident just works out for him, what the fuck?” Simpson said on his own stream while laughing it off. “You can’t win a match like that, the stars are just not aligned at all. Was that intended? I doubt it.”
In fighting games, sometimes you win thanks to carefully crafted strategies and a good read on your opponent. Other times, you get lucky when an input error causes you to use the wrong move, which in that instant happens to be the exact right move. This story is without a doubt an instance of the latter, but as they say in the fighting game community, we take those.