Major Smash Melee tournament set ends in controversy over broken controller

If you’ve been following the Super Smash Bros. Melee competitive scene for years, one thing is abundantly clear: Europe HATES Jake “Jmook” DiRado’s controllers, apparently.

The French Melee major, Arcamelee, took place on Nov. 19 in Lyon, France. Top 50 players showed up in spades to make this tournament a stacked one, including Cody Schwab, Aklo, Trif, and Pipsqueak. While it made for a great spectacle of international talent, that’s sadly not what this tournament will be remembered for. Rather, everyone is fixating on a devastating incident that occurred in losers finals of the tournament.

This set was a rematch between Kurtis “moky” Pratt and Jmook, the No. 5 and No. 3 players on the Summer 2023 rankings, respectively. Earlier on in the tournament, Jmook beat moky 3-0 in winners semis, so moky wanted nothing more than to get his revenge and fight back. The losers finals set was a lot more competitive than their previous encounter. Up 2-1 in the set count, moky looked ready to knock Jmook out of the tournament and advance to grand finals. But the momentum halted in game four.

Jmook held a comfortable stock lead, but when moky landed a back-throw at low percent—something that is very easy to recover from—Jmook just… fell to his death. Immediately, the New York Sheik player looked down, recognizing immediately that his controller just stopped working on him.

Now at last stock, moky could have very easily thrown Jmook off the stage again and closed out the set for a win. Maybe that is not the “coolest” way to win, but all’s fair in competition. Instead, moky stood still alongside Jmook, as the two players conferred with tournament organizers on what to do next. In the end, Jmook was granted time to get a new controller, while moky was iced out and forced to wait for his opponent’s return.

When Jmook returned, the audience was completely in his corner, oohing and aahing loudly each time the Sheik player did something cool. With the morale boost from the crowd, Jmook defeated the Canadian Fox player and advanced to grand finals.

There’s a lot to unpack when dissecting this series of unfortunate events, but what I’ll say first is the most important: neither moky nor Jmook are to blame for this incident. Moky obviously took the high road here, which is beyond commendable. And Jmook was given permission by the tournament organizers to grab a replacement controller. Jmook even clarified on Twitter that “had the TOs denied [him], [he] would have understood with no hard feelings.” 

What makes all of this even messier is that Jmook should not have even been given the chance to begin with. According to the rules, it should have technically been a game forfeit on Jmook’s part. After all, the current ruleset widely recognized in Smash Bros. tournaments is that unplugging your controller midgame for any reason—even accidentally—counts as forfeiting the game.

While a controller breaking midgame might be different, there needs to be a rule added. As someone who’s organized and ran many tournaments myself, I’d suggest a rule where if a player does not have a spare controller handy and cannot continue the game in a reasonable time frame decided by the tournament organizers, that player must forfeit the game. This sentiment is also corroborated by Jmook’s tweet.

The main reason why this rule needs to be added is that this isn’t even the first time this has happened. On July 16, Jmook was in the grand finals against Zain, the No. 1 player in the world, at Fête 3 in the UK, when the exact same situation happened. To be fair, Zain ended up winning those sets, but it was still a devastating incident for both players.

As long as players are the ones tasked to enforce these controversial rules, what happens is that they either get flamed online and villainized by the community for following them, or in moky’s case, punished severely by losing for being the “bigger person” and giving the opponent some leeway. It might be uncomfortable for tournament organizers, who already do so much for the Smash scene, but it’s crucial that they interject in times like these, for the sake of fairness and not forcing players to make these types of uncomfortable decisions on the big stage.