Questions about prestigious, official competitions

[opiaboy]

I am pretty new to posting here (but not to the community; I've been browsing this site since december, keeping tabs on Brawl), so I am not very familiar with the community yet. But I wanted to ask a few questions about tournaments.

I know that many of the competitions here are informal, "come to my house, we'll have chips!" kinds of tourneys. Although those are fun, I'm not much up for going over to someones house to play. What I am really interested in are the big tournaments, the ones where you have to pay to an entry fee. I have searched the Smash Wiki, and looked at the list of professional players, such as Ken, Chu Dat, and M2K, and I have seen that they play in tournaments such as Tournament Go and Major League Gaming. I have a few questions:

• How do I enter these tournaments?
• Which tournaments are considered in counting towards a person's ranking(goes along with next question)?
• Who decides whether a player is a professional or not?
• Are they held anywhere close to where I live?
• Should I even consider entering if I am merely an amateur player, with no knowledge of the metagame/advanced techniques?
• Does the fact that brawl can be played online change anything?
• Is there anything I need to do before I decide to go to one of these competitions?

Thanks a bunch for your help; I am glad that I have become a member of this community, and I hope to be posting here often!

 

[Apollo]

The best way to find these tournaments is to look in the tournament section of SWF. The posts there for tournaments will tell you where they are and how to get there, what will be played, etc.

One of the best ways to get better is to play great players. Tournaments are usually a great place to find them (exceptions being something like a gamecrazy tournament or something).

Tournaments are very fun, and while yeah, you can get out pretty quickly, if there is some free time you can usually find someone to play with. Depends on the venue.

Don't underestimate smashfests, those can be pretty endless fun, too, even if they are at someone's house and are somewhat different experiences.

Hope this helps. Sorry I can't answer all of your questions. You really only need a few bucks, a controller, and a ride to get to playing. And with wifi play in brawl, some things might change, but online play really doesn't beat gathering for tournaments. It's an entirely different experience.