After almost a year of retirement from competitive Super Smash Bros. play, Gonzalo “ZeRo” Barrios has announced that Smash Conference, a Smash Ultimate tournament in Port St. Lucie, Florida, will be the site of his return to professional Smash. But the Chilean player will be competing using a very unorthodox strategy. In a tweet last night, ZeRo announced that he would be using the random select function to choose his character in each match.
In order to have a shot at winning the event, ZeRo will have to become familiar with each of the 74 characters in Smash Ultimate’s roster. On his Twitch stream, he has steadily worked his way through the roster through viewer battles and iron-man challenges, giving fans reason to believe that he might just pull this off.
It won’t be easy, though. Nobody has ever managed to win a large tournament using random characters, though in some regions, players “maining” random have been able to earn themselves spots on their local power rankings. But Tempo Storm’s Smash Ultimate champion won’t just be contending with local hidden bosses; his tweet indicates that Leonardo “MkLeo” Lopez Perez will be at the event.
Smash Conference’s full list of attendees has not yet been made public—the event, which is scheduled for January 5-6, is still a couple of weeks away—but if MkLeo is truly entering, then he will likely be its first seed. The Mexican player was a thorn in ZeRo’s side during the Smash 4 days, and defeating him with randomly selected characters will be quite the challenge indeed.
But if anyone can do it, it’s ZeRo—and if he wins, he will add another impressive accomplishment to his already legendary resume.
