This past weekend the fighting game community was blessed with one of the last offline stops in the Street Fighter 6 Capcom Pro Tour before the Capcom Cup this year, the CPT Paris Premiere event in France. The tournament saw some fierce competition in a field decorated with fighting game legends such as Daigo Umehara, MenaRD, Fuudo, Nuckledu, EndingWalker, and Phenom. Ultimately, it was Hong Kong player Chris Wong playing a masterful Luke and defeating MenaRD in the grand finals to win the tournament and qualify for the Capcom Cup.
The tournament had many great matches and while the usual suspects such as Luke and Ken ran rampant throughout the tournament it is interesting to note that the third character normally accepted into Street Fighter 6’s “God tier”, JP, was absent from the top 16 entirely. JP’s relatively low representation is reminiscent of his performance in East Coast Throwdown where only one JP was able to make it to the top 8. While this could mean that the power of JP is overestimated it could easily just mean that many of the JP specialists didn’t show up to the tournament with the most famous JP player, Kakeru, sitting this tournament out.
One beautiful thing I wanted to point out is that, because this event granted the winner a direct trip to Capcom Cup, players from all around the globe participated in the tournament and the top 8 featured 3 players from Hong Kong, one player from Taiwan, one from the United States, one from the Dominican Republic, one from Japan and one hometown hero from France. The entire tournament had representatives from countries all around the world and it really speaks to the power of the fighting game community that they can still bring a playerbase like this together in an era where online tournaments are probably largely preferred by most players.
With his win at this tournament, Chris Wong has cemented his name as one of the 48 participants in the Capcom Cup 2023 for the grand prize of $1,000,000 alongside names like Angrybird, Gachikun, Snake Eyez, Caba, and many others. The Capcom Cup itself will start on February 21st, 2024 and run through February 24th on the Capcomfighter Twitch channel, where you can also watch any other CPT events that will occur between then and now. If you’re itching for more high-octane Street Fighter 6 content then these next few months will definitely help that urge.