This article is part of our Street Fighter series.
Just over a month removed from his godlike run at Stunfest 2018, Atsushi "Fujimura" Fujimura once again stood tall at a Capcom Pro Tour Premier Event with his win at CEO 2018. While he may have ended up with the win, things were a bit tougher this time around.
Fujimura was doing just fine all the way until the winners' final when he faced off against Zhuojun "Xiaohai" Zeng. After he and his Inuki dropped just two games in his previous eight series leading up to this set, he couldn't seem to solve the Cammy from Xiaohai. Things were back and forth, but Xiaohai came up with the narrow 3-2 to win to move into the grand finals.
Now down in the losers' bracket, Fujimura needed just one win to make his way back into the grand finals. Arman "Phenom" Rabiee Hanjani put up a valiant effort, but Fujimura with his EX Kunais were too much for the Norwegian, well, phenom (I'm sorry) to handle and Fujimura quickly punched his ticket into the grand finals with a 3-1 win.
It was then time for Fujimura to exercise his demons against Xiaohai in the grand finals. While things were incredibly close the first time around, Fujimura was absolutely relentless with his pressure and quite simply washed Xiaohai from start to finish in this match.
Xiaohai might have picked up a win in the first set, but Fujimura still easily ran through him with a 3-1 win that reset the bracket. If that initial set was a stomp, then the second set was just complete domination. Xiaohai didn't win a single round in the 3-0 set as Fujimura was on another level that just couldn't be matched. When it was all said and done, Xiaohai looked like he couldn't even believe what just happened.
The win, along with the 700 CPT points, has now catapulted Fujimura into the No. 1 spot on the CPT rankings as we get into the second half of the tour.
You might have noticed that I didn't mention some of the top names in Street Fighter V at any point here. Well, that's because the big guns were picked apart early on.
Lee "Infiltration" Seong-woo and Du "NuckleDu" Dang were the only players in the Top 5 of the standings to make the Top 8 of this tournament and neither made it further than the losers' quarterfinals. Then you've got Saul Leonardo "MenaRD" Mena Segundo and Hajime "Tokido" Taniguchi who didn't even make it out of the Top 24. Yeah, this tournament was an absolute bloodbath which makes it all the more impressive that Fujimura managed to navigate his way through this bracket to come up with the win.
While there's one more Premier Event, VSFighting, taking place later this month, surely everyone's attention is now turning towards EVO. The granddaddy of them all is just four weeks away and no doubt you will see those big names back in the thick of things as everyone battles for the largest CPT point pool of the year at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas this August.
