By on March 30, 2017 at 8:50 pm 
The first bout in this epic battle of Street Fighter V superstars has been fought.
Monday night saw the first showdown in ELEAGUE’s Street Fighter V Invitational: the preliminaries of Group A. ANBU|Punk tore through Group A with only a single loss to RZR|Infiltration, while despite their efforts RISE|MaRN and EG|Ricki Ortiz were eliminated. EG|Momochi earned a spot in the semi-finals with Punk–just ahead of Smug–while the other four Group A members advance to Group A quarter finals.
Tuesday we saw another round of fierce fights to win the right to proceed into semi and quarter finals; this time it was CYG BST|PR Balrog tearing through, unbeaten save for his encounter with fellow Cygames Beast member RB.CYG BST|Snake Eyez–who joins him in advancing straight to semi-finals. Twitch.Hx.CYG BST|Daigo Umehara’s switch to Guile managed to secure him a spot in quarter finals, along with three other Group B players–except Alex Valle, and Gllty–who unfortunately failed to secure any wins in the round robin.
Yesterday saw Group C battle for progression; Wolfkrone and Grapht|Fuudo dominated the round robin losing only a single match each–Wolfkrone to RZR|Xian, Fuudo to Wolfkrone–sending them both straight to the semi-finals. EG|K-Brad only managed a single victory, and Gootecks suffered a 0-7 run, sending them both home while the rest of the group must now fight through quarter finals to survive. Only one group of preliminaries left!
Tonight: Capcom Cup 2016 champion Liquid|NuckleDu made it through the round robin with only a single loss to BX3|Phenom, who joins him in advancing directly to semi-finals for Group D. Sadly LI Joe went 0-7 and was eliminated, as was Circa|LPN–allowing the other four fighters to secure themselves a chance to fight on in the Group D quarter finals.
Check out the preliminaries results for Groups A, B, C, & D here:
A detailed breakdown of the wins and losses can be viewed on ELEAGUE’s website. The brackets for Groups A’s next bouts look like this:
This wraps up the Street Fighter V ELEAGUE Invitational preliminaries! The regular season starts next Friday on April 7; if you want to attend next week’s battles, head to ELEAGUE’s ticket page to grab yourself some passes before they’re gone!
And we're out! Want to join us for the live show next week? We want you SO BAD. Head to https://t.co/K0YUEmEgKt and get your free tickets. pic.twitter.com/CKHFqfISBS
— ELEAGUE (@EL) March 31, 2017
Sources: ELEAGUE (Twitter); ELEAGUE (Twitch)
