Team:SLAPAHO

SLAPAHO is an Iowa City based crew, research team, tournament host, and smash film-making organization.

History

SLAPAHO was founded in the fall of 2007 by Aaron "Foghorn" Kirschner and Alex "Ax" Schumacher. It was originally formed simply as a crew that focused primarily on doubles play, but quickly evolved into many other roles.

They are mostly known for their research and tournament organizing. They have sponsored and played in a number of tournaments in the Iowa City area, generally posting good results. They hosted the first large tournament in the central Iowa area with the Last Hurrah Doubles tournament, which exceeded 40 participants and nearly 60 observers.

They plan to continue their active role in the Smash community by encouraging the burgeoning tournament field in Iowa and researching in-depth all facets of Super Smash Brothers Brawl.

They, but more particularly Ax, are vocal critics of the Smash community. They believe the community is too sophomoric, disorganized, naive, and critical to inspire a competitive or in some cases even casual atmosphere that does justice to the game. Thusly, their efforts within the community itself have promoted a 'casually competitive' approach to Smash Bros. They promote competition, but prefer to preserve the spirit of the game in their tournaments, providing an accepting and non-critical atmosphere to encourage all entrants, and promote fun through mutual enjoyment of the game.

Tournaments

For complete information, see UISCS

SLAPAHO is dedicated to increasing the amount of tournaments in Iowa. They are starting with small tournaments at the University of Iowa, but have begun to spread into larger tournaments. Their most recent tournament was the Last Hurrah Doubles Tournament on the 23 of February. Aaron Kirschner usually is the head organizer of the tournaments and officiates, while other members are known to compete.

They have also competed in tournaments in Iowa City, with Foghorn and Palmer closing out finals in their debut singles tournament. The team of Ax and Palmer placed third in the Last Hurrah Doubles Tournament.

SLAPAHO is currently planning a series of Brawl tournaments in Iowa City called the University of Iowa Smash Championship Series (UISCS). This series will consist of two preliminary tournaments (each player may only enter one of these), a "last chance" tournament, and the final championship. The first two tournaments are open to any number of players, and the last chance tournament is open to anyone who did not make the quarter-finals of the first two tournaments. The final championship is open only to the 20 players who receive bids. The top eight players in each of the first two tournaments will earn automatic bids to the championship, and the winner of the last chance tournament will also earn a bid. Additionally, there will be three "sponsors' exemptions." There are, as yet, no set rules as to how you get a sponsors' exemption, but they will include anything from posting a good video on YouTube to demonstrating a strong set of skills.

The UISCS will be held in both the Fall and the Spring. The Fall is singles, and the Spring is doubles.

SLAPAHO has recently expanded, with concrete plans for an Iowa Smash bi-weekly tournament, and hope to have an Iowa Power Rankings established in the next 6-8 weeks.

Play Philosophy

While their focuses have greatly expanded, SLAPAHO is still a crew dedicated to the enjoyment of Super Smash Bros. As such, they tend to develop their own metagame, which is often quite different from the rest of the smash community. They also aim to develop the metagame of bottom tier characters. Almost all tactics used by the crew were developed through trial and error in intra-crew play. This has led to them being rather unpredictable in tournament play, as their maverick style often goes against what players expect. The crew utilizes many advanced edgeguarding techniques, including the SLAPASTICK.

The crew also stresses the importance of knowing how to play multiple characters. Entrance into the crew requires a display of proficiency with at least five non-clone characters (i.e. Fox and Falco count as one character in this test). At least one of these characters must be a bottom tier character and another must not be a top or high tier character. At the present, all members of SLAPAHO are proficient with at least 10 distinct characters.

SLAPAHO Epics

The SLAPAHO crew is currently filming a series of short smash movies. These films are comedy bouts of smash, sometimes with commentary provided by Foghorn and Ax. All of these can be found on YouTube as they are aired, and links will be placed here.

• SLAPAHO Epic #1: Every Character gets Eaten by the Fish
• SLAPAHO Epic #2: How OGs do it: A Tribute to 187 Ride or Die

SLAPAHO also will release some material from their filming sessions that isn't worthy of true epic status. This can be either behind the scenes looks at the making of a SLAPAHO Epic, outtakes from epics, or failed projects that are so bad they're funny. These can be found here:

• Giant Bowser v. Giant DK

Additionally, SLAPAHO will periodically put out videos of friendly matches between Foghorn and Ax. These are usually training matches and they use a variety of characters. They can be found below.

• Foghorn (Zelda) v. Ax (Sonic)
• Foghorn (Fox) v. Ax (Link)

They have plans to record all matches in the UISCS past the quarterfinals and air them.

Research

SLAPAHO has done extensive research on glitches in Super Smash Bros. Melee, including the discovery of the SLAPASTICK. They were among the different groups trying to find the strongest non-glitch attack, and in the process were able to determine the fastest possible pitch in Melee is 1474. They are responsible for the writing on deterrence edgeguarding and spring canceling. They pioneered much research into the anti-strategy to edgeguarding, which can be found at Guard Break.

On May 4th, 2008, SLAPAHO recreated and documented the well-known Brawl glitch involving Ness. It is named SLAPAYO because it involves the failed retraction of Ness' yo-yo and has no official name.

They have made a proposed tier list, with video and commentary to support their decisions on the way.

They are preparing a new, definitive, theory on character comparisons. They hope to run an actual double-blind experiment to confirm their suspicions.

Members

Aaron "Foghorn" Kirschner--Marth, Zelda

Alex "Ax" Schumacher--Zero Suit Samus, Pit

• SLAPAHO is looking to recruit new members in the Iowa City area, though their crew limit is 4. Any prospective players should contact them through their YouTube account or participate in the UISCS.

Former Members

C.J. "Palm Tree" Palmer--Ness

Dustin "Callista" Quam--Fox

Common Quotes

• You Dead!
• Here's a box!
• Baby, why you make me hit you?
• It's bomb time!
• I'm the Gingerbread Man!
• The Goombas can't see me!
• Camel!
• And now it's time for the cavemen...
• FISH!

Trivia

• The name was taken from an opponents' flag football team.
• They record their videos via an uplink with video signal splitter hooked into an electric shaver charger and captured on mediocre video editing software.
• No members of SLAPAHO are allowed to choose their gamer tags; they are given generally in ridicule by other members or even passersby.
• The clan tag (a set of characters after the gamer tag which identifies the clan, crew, or association of a player such as the famous multi-game clan 'Meet Your Makers' "MYM]") is {~XTRM}~. For example, Ax's full tag would be {~XTRM}~Ax. As can be seen, sometimes the tags can have nothing to due with the actual crew name and more to do with what Johnny Xtreme says.
• They are no longer allowed to have a car battery in their room.
• As if they ever were.
• They are also professionals at the PS2 game '187 Ride or Die' and are currently ranked first on the North American Ride or Die power rankings.