Tournament:Pro Impact BI-WEEKLY Smash

Pro Impact BI-WEEKLY Smash is the name given to a Central Canada Smash Circuit tournament series of bi-weekly double elimination Super Smash Bros. Melee contests for smashers living in or around Calgary, Alberta, Canada. These tournaments, which helped to fuel interest in competitive smash in central Canada, were organized and hosted by and the Pro Impact Players and ran from October 2006 until February 14th, 2008.

History
The Pro Impact Players had been keen players of both of the earliest incarnations of Super Smash Bros. for many years prior to spearheading the local tournament scene. Having never attended a tournament before, the crew met with other dedicated smashers for the first time in Red Deer, AB for CAST, hosted by Teh Fair.

RJM, having come away from CAST with a more comprehensive understanding of competitive gaming (as well as several relationships with other Calgarian smashers) proposed the notion of a bi-weekly tournament in the city. As the Pro Impact Players conveniently lived in the same 3-bedroom house, the venue was settled naturally, agreed that it would be helpful in improving their own gameplay as a whole and on October 22nd, 2006, the first bi-weekly tournament occurred.

Since then, Pro Impact BI-WEEKLY Smash has drawn some interest from other Calgary residents with some Melee experience, some relatively new to the game and some competitive veterans who have been pulled out of retirement to join the budding community.

After the considerably larger At Melee's End tournament (dubbed a Pro Impact CCSC Championship) in December of 2007, the bi-weeklies began to suffer cancellations and the practicality of RJM's continued hosting came into question. A final tournament was hosted on February 14th, 2008 and no further competitive smash events have been announced under the Pro Impact label since.

Highlight Reels
Since the beginning, the Pro Impact Players have had their venue outfitted to record digital video footage of the matches occurring at the bi-weekly tournaments. The conceptual idea behind taking advantage of this hardware was to produce a "highlight of the night" for each event that would be posted along with the results, thus allowing participants access to their own performance on paper, as well as a few extra seconds of video footage for posterity.

However, at the very first bi-weekly tournament, the local player,, managed to pull such an extraordinary number of Bob-ombs, Mr. Saturns, Beam Swords and stitch-faced turnips during his climb through the brackets that  simply couldn't decide on a "highlight of the night." Instead, he released a 90-second montage of BackItch's improbable projectiles, dubbed it a "highlight reel" and they have not been the same since.

Eventually, the highlight reels grew to be larger projects with a music backing and various enhancements to the video editing process. For the first ten tournaments, RJM was essentially producing a combo video from ~80 full matches of footage every two weeks. However, due to time constraints brought on by other contributions to the CCSC, the highlight reels were eventually released on a monthly basis, combining the best footage from all the tournaments within that time period.

2007 Improvements
For bi-weekly tournaments occurring in 2007, several organizational enhancements to the operation as a whole were implemented. The purpose of doing so was to make the tournaments both more appealing for newcomers who came across the information via SmashBoards, as well as enhancing the experience for current participants by allowing them to track their own progress and have a reference for general tournament information.

The enhancements included:
 * Standings - A relatively comprehensive table of win-loss data, numerical rankings based on that data and two separate "divisions" for participants from the north and south ends of Calgary.
 * Rules - After hosting six tournaments, there seemed to be a general consensus for what an acceptable standardization of rules for Pro Impact BI-WEEKLY Smash should be and they were officially implemented for the seventh event.
 * Roster - An attempt was made to establish a complete list of all the smashers in Calgary, however the project was not fleshed out fully before being ultimately replaced by later enhancements through ProImpact.ca.

CCSC & ProImpact.ca
As Pro Impact BI-WEEKLY Smash grew to be more popular with the attendees, various regular Calgary smashers expressed interest in donating to support the events on a more tangible level. In the interest of enhancing the presentation of the tournaments, RJM proposed a website at the proimpact.ca domain name that could potentially house an even more comprehensive standing/statistics list, as well as smasher profiles, downloadable media and more. Support for the idea was unanimous and development began behind the scenes in late February 2007.

Recognizing that the robust functionality of the webpage that had been laid out was more than enough to support the concept, RJM approached various other smash community figureheads around the province such as, and  regarding the potential for a Central Canada Smash Circuit. Since ProImpact.ca was already in development and no similar projects were likely on-the-go in other cities, it was chosen to house CCSC information for all new and budding communities across Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

April 2007 Cancellation
Progress with the ProImpact.ca domain, CCSC expansion and the bi-weekly tournaments themselves were brought to a sudden halt on April 24th, 2007 as tournament director RJM announced a temporary cancellation of Pro Impact BI-WEEKLY Smash.

Pro Impact BI-WEEKLY Smash returned on June 3rd, 2007 in recognition of the community's growth and enthusiasm during the summer season.

Rules
These are the official rules for Pro Impact BI-WEEKLY Smash; they were written informally by the tournament host to clarify the casual nature of these events:

As of yet, no official rules for 2v2 matches have been released.

Trivia

 * Every seven tournaments, the colour of the text in which tournament announcements are made at SmashBoards changes.
 * For the Christmas edition of Pro Impact BI-WEEKLY Smash (#5), thematic items including Freezies, Starmen, and Red and Green shells were set to 'Very Low'.