Shin Blanka (Larry) Rant about Final Round

Ok so the storage is packed and the players are paid out from my end (Minus velorean **I need his contact info**) It's time for the shout out post for FR21!

First and foremost I would like to thank my wife, my staff, and all of the volunteers that made this the best FR ever! Shonda made sure we had more than enough volunteers! That way we wouldn't run them into the ground if some volunteers bailed and not showed up! The volunteers rock this year 200%! We had a new batch of volunteers and I didn't get one bad report of any this year up to this date. Thanks for making FR2018 awesome!

Shout out to the FR Main staff:

Patrick, Justin, Jordan, Ben, Jon, Scott, Josh, D, Matt, Mel, Ant, Scooby, Nasir, Edward, Shola, and Mayflor. All of you guys made my job so easy this year. I was very happy with everyone's effort this year. I actually got to compete in the old man games this year and that's very rare for me! Thanks guys y'all are awesome! Love y'all.

To the streamers:

Great job everyone for having flawless productions throughout the whole weekend!

FunkyP
Bifuteki
DataFGC
10/0 productions
Kombatnetwork **edited**

The social media was on fire talking about each and every one of your streams at one point or another!

Thanks to BigE gaming crew:

To E, Lil E, Holland, buck, rice, and (smurf even though I never saw you until sunday!) Thanks for helping your cousins down south!

Thank you to the sponsors:

Capcom and Bandainamco for being apart of FR2018! Not only with the CPT and TWT but also having play testing of your newest titles in SF 30th anniversary and Soul Calibur 6! The attendee's of FR2018 were excited to play both games prior to the games release!

THANK YOU TO EVERYONE THAT COMPETED AND SPECTATED AT FR2018! While this was the lowest turnout in over 8 years I really appreciate each and everyone one of you that attended this years event. To the person that got rude with my wife about the clear bags;

fuck you and the rotten vagina you crawled out of! I wish I would have been there when you got sideways with my wife! I would have kicked your ass out with no refund and took the free bag away and if you got froggy I would have had you thrown in jail! Some of you are real scumbags and you need to stay home with your self absorbed, selfish ass! I don't want you or anyone you associate with at any event I do! Go find an empty 15 foot deep pool and jump in head first! Thank you bye!

This leads me to this portion of the post when I address my retirement. I made a brief statement at the end of the event, but it wasn't fully explained and we had to pack up our equipment and be out the exhibition hall at a certain time. Unfortunately we have never recovered our attendance from the social media witch hunt from FR19. While i've taken responsibility for everything that happened that year and I understand why attendance dropped.

I thought last year was a great step in the right direction, but I guess I was wrong as we had less competitors this year (FR21) than last year 9(FR20) and we lost 2/3 of our total attendance from fr19 to fr20! i went outside my means to get a bigger venue with enough space in one room for everyone to be comfy. I love the venue, but the size of these past two events doesn't warrant that size. The funny thing is I heard people complaining that the room was too big if they played in multiple games they had to walk to far and too much between games!

I can't win for losing. I got a 24 hour byoc room and people said it was too small, but I never saw it packed in there all weekend to warrant renting a bigger room. To me it seems that anything I do is now being put under a microscope and if one fiber is out of place it's made into a story while other events have had their events end at 1am-3am constantly and nothing is said. There is a tournament standard for others and a different one for me. Unfortunately E gets pulled into it also and that isn't fair.

People complaining about clear bags just leads me to feeling like it doesn't really matter what I do to try improve my event it seems it's more popular to troll than to try and understand what is going on. I've given my pound of flesh and jumped on many of stakes and i'm done! In my opinion It is crystal clear that the community doesn't want or need FR anymore! When you have more foreign top players than domestic top players at your event that is a loud statement that says we as the usa fgc community have quit on FR. We don't care what you do to try and improve your event it is dead in our eyes!

What makes me upset is I never quit on the fgc even though I should have when my mom passed away two days before the event. I thought since I sacrificed my mourning right after she died for the fgc that the fgc would never turn on me. Obviously I was wrong and that was stupid of me to think in that manner. I understand now that FR was dead after FR19 and I was holding on for two years trying to breath life into a dead body! .

The joy of organizing events has been sucked out of my body these past two years. I always known it was a thankless job, but now it was worst because of the constant double standard I see throughout the fgc. I can't and won't continue to waste my money or (most important) my time on a group that doesn't me apart of it anymore. All good things comes to an end I guess.

When you have people asking for a full event schedule prior to 4 weeks before the event and you have barely 300 people registered how are you supposed to properly plan? Of course we don't know what we're doing if we don't have a full schedule out prior to a month in advance! Obviously we ended up with almost 900 competitors when we closed registration, but we did the best we could with information we had available at the time.

My plan was to make this event great and walk away. When you have your lowest turnout in 8 years and plus your highest budget ever you just want to be able to pay for the venue and your staff and walk away. Message received loud and clear! It would take a damn near perfect event to have me think about returning to do this again. I was pretty much done in my head, but I wanted to go out on a high note.

This FR was great. Staff and volunteers were on point. We stayed on schedule, and would have been early on most of the big games if it wasn't for getting matches on the stream. I had time to reflect of the weekend about all the years i've been apart of this scene and how it has grown since house tournaments! I felt so at ease and that's why I wore my suit because if this was the last time y'all would see me I wanted to make a lasting impression! I also didn't want to say tell anyone that this would be my last event because I didn't want people to come out just because it would be the last FR!

I wanted everyone that came to fr to be there because they either still believed in Fr or they were will to give it another chance. That way I can see the people that really had faith in the FR brand. I needed to see if FR was still needed or just another event. I got my answer and I understand why. Now I get messages asking me am I quiting being a TO? I didn't quit on the fgc. I feel FR isn't wanted or needed by the fgc as a whole! I honestly didn't believe FR can return to what it was once before.

That's how I felt before the event and after the event. When I saw the faces of the people that stayed to listen to me talk after we ended the event i saw disbelief in people eyes as they stared at me. Then a lot of the foreign players were like Please don't end Final Round! We love your event! Others came up and just was like yo I feel you larry and whatever you decide it's cool. We hope you stay but we'll understand if you leave.

My staff is hitting me up about future plans for next year to kick more ass and make fr even bigger and better brings a smile to my face! I think they wasn't sure if I was serious or not, but they still have my back either way! So in closing this venue was waaaaaaaaaaay out of my price range but I got it to correct one of the biggest complaints of fr19 was the size was too small. I can't waste money and time. I've gotten a lot of feedback, but I need time to think about doing another FR again. Right now TFC is the last event I plan to do at this moment. I don't want to leave E in it alone when we started to plan for tfc2018 already.

This year was the best FR i've ever been apart of and I thank EVERYONE that was there this weekend! I truly appreciate it from the bottom of my heart! I never wanted to be a problem in the growth of the fgc. If that means for me to stop so true progress can happen then i'll gladly do so. Never say never but i'm chunking the dueces at TFC! Later guys/girls! It's been real shawty!