Last weekend’s Apollo XIII—the last Nebulous event until further notice—was brimming with talent, including eight current SSBMRank top 100 players (and several more who will likely be ranked within the next year). Of those high-level attendees, one of the most formidable was the 27th-ranked Kyle “dizzkidboogie” Athayde, whose read-based and wobble-heavy Ice Climbers play have made him a mainstay of major Top-32 brackets.
At Apollo, however, dizzkidboogie found himself in loser’s bracket in pools. In the bracket-qualifying match on winner’s side of his pool, he faced off against Jaime “Whisker$” Nino, a fast-moving Yoshi main long known in New York City as part of the Columbia University scene.
Picture this: a young mid-tier main, unranked in his region and known mostly for joking about eating ass on local commentary, sits down next to a top-30 player at a regional. Two games later, he walks away victorious. Are you picturing it? Well, you don’t have to—it actually happened, and there’s a VOD.
Thanks to Yoshi’s prodigious tools in the Ice Climbers match-up, including his Neutral-B Egg Lay, which easily and efficiently puts the backup Climber out of action, and his blitz-like platform movement, Whisker$ was able to pull off the seemingly impossible and defeat his top-player opponent. As a growing crowd of onlookers cheered, he effortlessly separated a rusty dizzkid’s Ice Climbers and brought back a two-stock deficit in game two to win the set.
To experienced members of the tri-state scene, this upset comes as less of a surprise than it seems to those unfamiliar with Whisker$’s accomplishments. The hidden boss Yoshi player has already defeated many of New York’s best, including top-100 players such as Alex “Captain Smuckers” Cottrell and Cody “iBDW” Schwab. Regardless, a win over dizzkidboogie is quite the feat, especially given the Ice Climbers’ lifetime winning record over top Yoshi Masaya “aMSa” Chikamoto.
Check out the set (commentated by yours truly) on Nebulous’s YouTube channel here:
