Several of the best Street Fighter 6 players in the world went right from competing in the game’s biggest tournament to one of the most exclusive, traveling to Saudi Arabia to play in the Gamers8 SF6 Invitational over the weekend.
And, while every featured player is a big name, Kakeru managed to score a $1 million revenge set against one of the biggest, Evo Champion AngryBird, to win it all.
From Aug. 10 to 13, top-level SF6 was on display from Riyadh with a three-day group stage leading into an absolutely stacked playoff where round one featured a rematch from Evo 2023’s lower bracket final—MenaRD vs Punk, which Mena won 3-0.
Despite the more contained bracket, the final four players at Gamers8 saw Punk getting his revenge with a 3-2 victory over Mena to eliminate him in a tie for fifth, Big Bird making a deep run in his home region, and Kakeru clashing with AngryBird before falling 0-3 in their initial meeting.
After suffering yet another brutal loss on a big stage, Kakeru kept smiling and walked into his matchup with Punk already planning for how to adapt his game even faster to what the other top players were throwing out.
You could see where Kakeru flipped the switch in his mind after his JP went down 0-2 to Punk’s oppressive Cammy play, pulling himself up and proceeding to reverse 3-0 one of the best players in the world with a trio of perfectly paced wins where he didn’t drop a round—including multiple actual Perfect K.O.s.
With a rematch in the grand finals, AngryBird was able to keep Kakeru on the back foot in the first set, but after that, it was all JP.
Related: AngryBird tops 7,000 competitors, claims Evo title as Street Fighter 6 continues to rise
Kakeru would go on to win six straight sets, and even though they were close, you could see all those adaptations coming into play in real-time, highlighted by an absolutely wild highlight reel of perfect parries the Japanese star performed during the finals. As Daigo said after the event, he suspects “Kakeru’s adaptability is beyond anything the dev team expected to see.”
After performing 32 perfect parries in that grand finals matchup, Kakeru reiterated that it was all about adaptation because he saw other things weren’t working and he just had to go for it with something new.
“The other things weren’t working before and I didn’t know how to get around [AngryBird,]” Kakeru said. “This time I was just trying to [parry] and did my best to just make it every single time. And, well, it worked!”
Despite his own approach, Kakeru’s performance has seemingly shown the SF6 community just how powerful parrying can be as a tool if you can really nail the timings, and could lead to even more grinding to try and better utilize it.
With this win, Kakeru not only bounces back from his devastating Evo 2023 exit but also walks away with $400,000 from the largest SF6 prize pool in history.
This alone pushes him into the top 10 fighting game players of all time in terms of tournament winnings just three events into his SF6 career. And, even after losing, it was hard for AngryBird not to smile because it was some great SF6 on display and he still walked away with $200,000 too.
After two straight weeks of incredible Street Fighter, some players will be taking a break to prepare for upcoming Cpacom Pro Tour events, while a handful of competitors are headed to Birmingham to compete in VSFighting XI from Aug. 18 to 20.
