The First Aimlabs Community Tournament Has a Champion

On Saturday, May 30th, sixteen of the best aimers in the community stepped into a single elimination bracket for the first Aimlabs community invitational tournament of the year. What started as a Discord event pulled in over 100 viewers on the server, with hundreds more watching players rebroadcast on Twitch. Honestly, we didn’t expect it to blow up the way it did, but the community showed up, and the tournament delivered.

The Format

Each round featured three possible tasks revealed at the start of play, with players getting a few minutes to try each one before locking in their bans. The higher seeded player banned first, the lower seeded player banned second, and whatever was left got played. Each player then had three attempts to set their highest score, no restarts.

The tasks were grouped by category across rounds, tracking in the first round, flicking in the second, switching in the third, and a selection of three multi-phase tasks in the final, which gave the players the opportunity to ban from each of the three categories. That structure meant players who specialized in one category could find themselves in a comfortable spot or a tough spot, depending on the round and who they were facing.

Round of 16

The opening round was played across three tracking tasks, VT AirXYZ Small, Smoothbot 2.0, and Controlsphere 2.0, with Controlsphere being the clear favorite, showing up in six of the eight matches.

The first match of the opening round brought a bit of suspense, as nomy’s winning score of 2927 was the only attempt across their three runs that would have beaten their opponent, Salzi. Their other two scores, 2727 and 2694, would have fallen to Salzi’s opening attempt of 2742. One good run when it counted most, and nomy was through.

Zeonlo’s win over bardOZ was similarly close, with two static gods facing off on Controlsphere 2.0, a tracking task. Zeonlo’s second attempt of 4191 was the only score that cleared bardOZ’s second attempt of 4107. Zeonlo’s first attempt of 4104 would have lost the match by just THREE points, but their winning run secured it.

The closest match of the round on paper was AoD versus Opus, with just 26 points separating their final scores across consistently tight attempts throughout. 2lukyn had a scare against ness, needing their final attempt to finally clear ness’ opening score of 4605. And Matty, the pre-tournament favorite and Red Bull Ready Check champion, widely considered one of the top aimers in the world, advanced comfortably over fireguyrox, with a score of 4960.

Quarter Finals

Round two moved to flicking tasks, with VT Frogshot Advanced S3 being the dominant pick, appearing in three of the four matches. The exception was 2lukyn versus sillydomi on Deepflick Elite, which produced one of the most consistent matches of the day, as both players were locked in across all three attempts. sillydomi’s scores barely budged, 1340, 1330, 1322, a range of just 18 points. 2lukyn matched that consistency at 1588, 1597, 1593, a range of just 9 points. The final task of the round, VT Angleshot Advanced S3, did not appear.

Aznoheu’s quarterfinal was the most dominant performance of the round. All three of Aznoheu’s attempts on Frogshot Advanced cleared AoD’s best score outright, posting a 974 high score over AoD’s 790. Matty dispatched nomy by 414 points, the largest margin of the quarterfinals, with a 1147 high score on Frogshot that would have beaten every other Frogshot score in the round.

Zeonlo edged azure in yet another tight match, as both players peaked on their second attempt. azure’s best of 748 would have beaten Zeonlo’s first and third attempts, but it couldn’t top Zeonlo’s high score of 822.

Semi Finals

The semis moved to switching tasks, three options on the table: VT Speedswitch 180 Elite, VT Boltswitch Advanced S3, and Jumpswitch Elite.

Matty versus Zeonlo was not particularly close, with Matty’s first attempt of 3450 on Boltswitch Advanced setting a bar that Zeonlo, whose high of 2854 came on their first attempt, couldn’t reach. Unsurprisingly, Matty looked pretty comfortable the whole way through.

The other semifinal was something else entirely, with 2lukyn versus Aznoheu being one of the most anticipated matches of the day, two players with an interesting shared history in the aim community facing off with a finals spot on the line. Aznoheu had been a crowd favorite throughout the event, and though the match lived up to the hype, the Aznoheu cheering section was left brokenhearted.

2lukyn’s opening attempt of 3880 on Speedswitch 180 Elite set the target, and Aznoheu pushed hard across all three runs, posting 3807, 3780, and then 3820 on their final attempt… which was close, but just short of 2lukyn’s opening score. The Aznoheads demanded a third-place runoff match, but we opted against it. That said, this is something we’re considering changing up for the future.

The Final: Matty versus 2lukyn

The grand final was played on LG56 ACC Qualifier 6 Tracking, one of three multi-phase tasks available in the final round, with the players landing on the Tracking version after Matty banned the Switching option and 2lukyn banned the Flicking task.

To build suspense for the viewers, the players alternated attempts, with Matty opening the final up… and Matty was on another level. His three attempts went 5433, 5491, 5538, improving on every single run. 2lukyn went the other direction, 4527, 4491, 3996, though it is worth noting that 2lukyn was playing with deliberately silly visual settings and crosshair by the time the final rolled around, seemingly acknowledging that Matty was simply unstoppable on the day and deciding to have a bit of fun with it.

Matty takes home the title, $250 cash, and an Insta360 Link 2 Pro webcam, and adds a community tournament championship to a resume that already includes the Red Bull Ready Check. A huge congratulations to 2lukyn for an incredible run from seed 15 all the way to the final, and to all sixteen players who competed. We did not expect the community to show up the way they did, and we are already talking about how to make the next one bigger and better, with options to open up the format and get more players involved. Stay tuned!