Don’t Hate Player, Hate The Game: Junior Jarrod De Ferrari Excels In Competitive Gaming

Photo Credit: JEREMY HAAS

BY LOUIS DENNIN

Spending time at the typical American high school, one can expect to meet a variety of people who have a variety of stories. The youth of today are a wildly ambitious band of people who set themselves to whatever ridiculous goals their hearts desire, and they will explore that goal with every ounce of their spirit.  What’s really incredible, though, is when they excel. Sometimes these students succeed and do something absolutely incredible in the process. This is the path of devotion taken by junior Jarrod De Ferrari, one of Cooper City High School’s most ambitious souls and an extremely devoted gamer who, like many, seeks greatness at any cost.

The path he has decided to follow to achieve such greatness, however, is a slightly less conventional one.  De Ferrari practices tirelessly to master titles in the Super Smash Bros. (SSB) franchise, which are two-dimensional fighting games produced by Nintendo.  The games feature a cast of popular characters from Nintendo’s long lineage of video games such as the world famous Super Mario Bros. Because of this, the SSB series has become a popular pick for casual entertainment among Nintendo fans of all ages, giving fans a way to compete with their friends as their own favorite Nintendo icons.  For De Ferrari, however, the Smash Bros. games are anything but casual fun.  They are a journey, a craft, an art, and a true test of skill.  These highly esteemed games have spawned a number of tournaments all over the world, which are followed by the game’s immense fan base. These competitions are streamed online by huge pools of gamers using websites such as twitch.tv, which hosts video game streams of this nature.

It was through such streaming sessions that the competitive scene of SSB first intrigued De Ferrari.  The live commentaries reminiscent of ESPN sports coverage and the frenzied excitement of the players resonated in his mind, and he decided to see if he too could join the ranks of the top tier “Smashers,” (People who play Super Smash Bros competitively).  He had a humble start, simply firing up his Nintendo GameCube and pitting himself against computerized opponents to test the techniques he’d observed on the online event streams.  Eventually, competing with computers provided little value as his abilities began to grow.  His next course of action was to join a group of local Smashers, and so he paid a visit to Flippers Cinema, where a well-stocked gaming room served as a hangout spot for competitive players of all sorts.

“When I began playing another game, League of Legends, I started watching streams of it on twitch.tv,” De Ferrari said. “While I was on Twitch I noticed that one of the most viewed videos was a Super Smash Bros. Melee tournament, so I tuned in and watched it.  Even though I knew very little about the game, it was still exciting to watch.  I knew I wanted to try that.”

It was at Flippers that De Ferrari met a group of Smashers lead by David “Seibrik” Silberberg called the “Tier Breakers,” players who work to hone their SSB skills in a collective effort.  The group hosts tournaments and tracks the progress of its members during each of its “seasons,” which span roughly two or three months.  Members are arranged into small teams lead by a very experienced “team captain” who works on coaching the less experienced Smashers in their group.  By having the teams compete against one another, it creates an atmosphere similar to that of large tournaments and thus allows all of the new players to practice alongside and against veterans.

“Tier Breakers is an educationally focused tournament that will reward players for improvement,” Silberberg said. “All the teams will play each other while their captains coach them in the middle of the match.  Nothing replaces first hand experience.”

Using the same screen name he used on League of Legends, “Teachable,” De Ferrari joined the Tier Breakers to see where his practice at home could take him.  Some members of Tier Breakers are renown as the best at their character in the region, or even the world, while others were just beginning to get serious about SSB.  This dynamic environment proved to be the perfect place for “Teachable” to delve deeper into the secrets of the game he’d grown so attached to.

“When I found out that there was a local Smash Bros. scene and met actual competitive players, it made getting involved a lot easier,” De Ferrari said.  “The guys I met were all really nice, and everyone’s just trying to help each other get better as the new Super Smash Bros. game comes out.”

The name “Teachable” became more and more appropriate as De Ferrari continued to work with the Tier Breakers crew; it has evolved into a nickname that reflects De Ferrari’s ability to quickly learn the ins and outs of competitive gaming.  It suits him well, as after roughly six months of real practicing, he has begun analyzing and playing SSB at a much higher skill level than before.  He examines the details of each character, down to the number of individual frames it takes for them to perform certain actions, to find out what makes a top tier strategy as good as the professionals say it is. He’s made it clear that the game is not just about fast fingers and reflexes, but also about having an expansive knowledge of the game’s technical detail, or the “physics of the game,” as he refers to it.  De Ferrari’s talent at the beginning did not go unrecognized, and was certainly noticed by Taylor “Xaltis” Rose, his team captain during De Ferrari’s debut season with the Tier Breakers.

“During our first season, I hadn’t met him before, so I just thought ‘okay, he’s a cool guy,” Rose said. “But then he ended up beating players of a higher skill level, and that made me like him.”

All of this hard work has served De Ferrari well, as his team during his first season ended up winning the Tier Breakers tournament, netting him a $150 cash prize.  Even more astonishing, at the end of his second Tier Breakers season, the team he was placed on happened to win the season two tournaments.  By practicing with the local Smashers often and performing the way he did, Teachable began to carve a name for himself among his newfound companions.

“There’s a running joke now that whatever team has Jarrod on it will win the season,” Silberberg said.

Though those two victories may not seem like all that much, they were De Ferrari’s first true tastes of triumph, which prompted him to not only improve himself for a third season, but also reach beyond the local SSB setting.

Thus, for the weekend of January 18, 2014, Teachable decided to see what he could learn at APEX in New Jersey.  APEX is a large scale-fighting tournament where players from all over the country compete in a wide selection of fighting games, with the SSB titles being the featured attraction.  APEX is, in fact, considered to be the world’s largest tournament for Smash, and so it is therefore quite rare and exceptional for a player as new as De Ferrari to travel so far to participate.

He left for the entire weekend to play against some of the best and see what this experience would teach him.  De Ferrari met people he’d only previously spoken with online, as well as a number of very high-end competitors with years of experience under their belts.  Overall, while he wasn’t able to make it exceedingly far in the tournament itself, he refers to it as a very “hype” experience and yet another step that helped him grow as a player.

“When I was at APEX, I didn’t do all that great,” De Ferrari said.  “Since it was my first out of state event, I wasn’t expecting to, either.  I did pick up a lot of gameplay concepts from watching and playing against some of the more high caliber players, though.”

De Ferrari did not venture to APEX by himself, however.  A number of his comrades from Tier Breakers embarked on the experience with him, including their leader, Seibrik, who says that being able to see new players like De Ferrari invest in the trip was one of Tier Breakers’ grandest moments.

Since becoming a competitive Smasher, De Ferrari has matured not only as a gamer, but also as a person.  Having such a fierce desire for greatness has taught him to manage his time and work hard every day.  De Ferrari aspires to reach his goal by spending a lot of time doing research on the game that has given him so much, and he practices its fundamentals to achieve the most polished Smash performance he can muster.  He’s also been privileged to make an entirely new group of friends who share his dreams; in a way becoming part of a family that he’ll never forget.  Overall, the travel, excitement, disappointment, and friendship of being a Smasher have taught (or “Teached,” as he prefers) De Ferrari the same valuable lessons and created the same irreplaceable memories that are ever prevalent in the sports, clubs and the other common paths of the American high school student.

“To improve my Smash Bros. gameplay, I have to be cognitively aware of every action I take,” De Ferrari said.  “I try to apply that to the real world, always thinking about what I’m doing and why I’m doing it.”

Despite his goal being a slightly less orthodox one, De Ferrari has shown through his dedication and fervor that any ambition can become something that means the world to its pursuer, as long as the effort and perseverance are there.

“He really is one of those people to really have the potential to keep rising and rising,” Rose said. “He’s…well…Teachable.”