The open qualifiers for the Splatoon 2 Inkling Open started last Saturday, and they’re off to a flying start! A Turf War match between the teams of Komodo and Beard Bois ended in a dramatic way when Beard Bois won by the slimmest of margins: 0.1%.

For those who don’t know, Splatoon 2 has a variety of multiplayer modes where the players control squid/humanoid creatures that use a variety of weapons that fire colorful ink. Turf War, the mode chosen for the Open’s opening matches, has two teams competing to cover more of the floor in their team’s ink in the span of three minutes. It’s possible to kill (or “splat,” as the game’s family friendly way of describing a KO) your opponents, but all it does is force them back to their spawn point after a few seconds of delay. All that matters for points are the ink-stained floors.

The battle was incredibly close, but the results could have been a lot different if team Komodo had followed a simple yet important piece of advice. If you go to about eight seconds in the Twitch clip above, you can see a decent-sized patch of land above Komodo’s spawn point at the NW side of the map. That’s right. They had failed to fully ink their spawn point, an area which is extremely defensible against the opposing team! If they had managed to cover that corner, they might have been able to squeeze out a win.

It’s always a tragedy to see a game lost by such close of a margin, especially when it could have been avoided so easily. But on the other hand, it not only provides the viewers an amazingly close match, it also reinforces that old lesson to always ink your spawn.

You can see more of the 2018 Inkling Open at it’s official Twitch channel here.