AUTHOR: CHRIS "BEARLIGHT" LEE / @BEARLIGHTCASTS
It has been an incredible year of Turbo Tuesday Rocket League weekly tournaments at Stay Plugged In. With a majority of seniors who competed in the Spring receiving offers and heading into their college careers, to the incredible Turbo Tuesday Summer Series presented by Coca-Cola season that featured teams now currently pushing toward their division's CRL playoffs, Turbo Tuesday continues to be the perfect place to begin your Stay Plugged In journey towards college scholarships. This week, the reign is over for seven-straight bracket winning duo of Resonal and Tide. See who took them out, and what other teams and players made our breakout list in this week's BearLight breakdown.
BREAKOUT TEAMS: FARMVILLE & ICON ESPORTS
Farmville has been around in a different form before, but this is a team that knows one another quite well. They are always willing to come together to compete in weeklies for more name recognition through the Stay Plugged In platform. As a group that is always competitive in RLCS open quals, and with TEKOZ a Carry2College champion back in the Spring alongside DAUNT (now of the Charlotte Phoenix), you figured this team would breakout in their first return to Turbo Tuesday since Week 25, and they did not disappoint.
Icon Esports is a little less known currently in the Stay Plugged In network of players, as they are new relatively to the scene. That being said, they have had about equal success in the RLCS open qualifiers as this current version of Farmville, and have been challenging the top teams each time. Icon Esports had a tough match in Round 1 against Farmville and dropped to the lower bracket early, but they managed to fight to the Lower Final, where "reidthesloth" would take them out and solidify Icon Esports as the 3rd place finishers on the week.
FARMVILLE vs REIDTHESLOTH FOR THE TITLE
When the week began, team "reidthesloth" were still the heavily favored roster given their recent domination of Turbo Tuesday. Things appeared to be in place after two games in their Upper Final match against Farmville, as they pushed to match point in the best-of-5. It all changed with a 4-1 Farmville win in Game 3. After putting up just 1 goal in the first two games, VEGAS, TEKOZ, and BROC put up 4 goals each game as a team over the next three games (5 goals, 4 goals, and 3 goals respectively). Their reverse sweep would give them a one-game advantage in their Grand Finals rematch.
It's not often that RESONAL and TIDE need to work their way back to the Grand Finals through the lower side, and even less often they are challenged to this degree to get back up to it. In hindsight, seeing that they ultimately did get the job done in the Lower Final feeds the tendency to glance over the match, but Icon Esports played it so close that we couldn't. When reidthesloth kept a defensive focus, they were unstoppable. When they slipped a bit, players like AV were piecing together 4-goal games and leading Icon Esports to wins in the barn-burner games. Reidthesloth were able to hold them off in a (3-2) match win, but with just a +1 goal differential in the series, credit goes to Icon Esports for scaring them a bit and proving that they are a team to keep eyes on.
In the Grand Finals, a mirror image of what we saw in the Upper Finals was showing it's head, as Farmville won two games to kick it off and moved to match point at (3-0). Reidthesloth just surrendered the reverse sweep to Farmville, so you have to imagine that their motto was, "If they can do it to us, we can do it to them". Three in a row game wins for reidthesloth followed large in part by CRAVE and his 5 goals, working in tandem with TIDE who finished that run with a hat-trick to force a Game 7. With the winner-take-all $100 prize on the line, it would come down to one final game, and it was a tight one. The first and only goal of the game would be initiated by BROC using the corner to pass to VEGAS, and a 50-50 that was available for BROC to tap in with just 10 seconds remaining. Farmville edged out the 7-week title holders and are your Week 37 Turbo Tuesday Champions! Congratulations!
TEKOZ gets the MVP title for the week with his 2.08 saves holding down the back line and allowing his team to be comfortable in their offensive aggression. For your chance to become a Stay Plugged In event MVP, make sure to keep an eye on our events page and register for our events now!