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ChuDat is an American professional smasher who mainly uses the Ice Climbers and is widely regarded as the primary influential driving force for competitive Ice Climbers play in the community, and is still considered to be one of the best Ice Climbers in the world, along with Wobbles, Fly Amanita, and Nintendude. His name originates from the phrase, 'true that,' as he stated in the Smash Brothers Documentary due to his obsession of the phrase. In the early times of the Melee scene, Chu joined the legendary crew H2YL, and regularly attended tournaments with them. He was ranked 2nd in the United States on the discontinued Smash Panel Power Rankings. He notably defeated top professional Jigglypuff main Hungrybox at Zenith 2012 to take 3rd place at the tournament. In both Brawl and Project M, he is considered to be the best Kirby player, and also mains Kirby in the Brawl mods Brawl+ and Brawl-. ChuDat is currently ranked 5th on both the DMV Melee and MD/VA Brawl Power Rankings, and was formerly ranked 5th and 9th on the MD/VA Project M and Smash 4 Power Rankings, respectively.
ChuDat was listed as the 32nd best Melee player in 2014, the 49th best Brawl player in 2014, and is listed as the 35th best Melee player in 2015.
In addition to piquing the interests of the community at large about the Ice Climbers' metagame, Chu has also spearheaded the local community in Northern Virginia by hosting "NoVa Bi-weekliez !" at his parents' home. The tournaments have attracted a wide variety of top level competition including Mew2King, Chillin and Azen. His biggest original tournament placing in early smash was OC2 where he made an incredible loser's run.
He had been known to frequently visit Southern California to spend time with the Hoang family, which includes Ken and Manacloud. For several years ChuDat preferred to represent the West Coast due to his friendships and close ties to California but this put stress on his relationship with the other members of H2YL.
Recent history, sponsorships, and EVO
After a few years on the West Coast, (around when Brawl came out,) he moved back to MD/VA where he once again became one of the top smashers in the area and reestablished ties with the rest of the MD/VA scene. Chu Dat won a large number of the weekly S@X tournaments in Brawl, Project M, and Melee. In Brawl and Project M specifically, he became the top Kirby main. Due to his frequent results, he was sponsored by Mortality eSports along with Axe. However, Mortality dropped both sponsorships shortly before CEO 2015 which left Chu with little cash. For EVO specifically, a crowd fund was sponsored by Melee Hell (or MH) which sponsored enough cash for Chu Dat to be able to attend EVO 2015. He lost eventually in winners to Ice's Fox in round 2 pools. He then made an impressive loser's run, beating players including Silent Wolf and Westballz and winning a nail-biting set vs HugS to get top 8 before finally losing to Mango in losers, netting 7th at then the largest tournament in history.
ChuDat is the only Melee Ice Climbers player to make it to top 8 at EVO twice, EVO World 2007 and EVO 2015, showing that he has stood the test of time. The other Ice Climbers to make it to top 8 are Fly Amanita and Wobbles.
ChuDat is the first Melee Ice Climbers player to ever take a game over Armada's Peach in tournament, doing so at Heir 3.