With every amazing championship, there’s bound to be a few upsets. And with all of the best players in the world competing at Evo last weekend, there were more than just a few early casualties.

Here are the biggest upsets from Evo 2019.

JDCR

Kim “JDCR” Hyunjin was one of the favorites for this year’s Evo, but he ran into early trouble against a pair of Japanese pros.

His first loss was against Takehiko “Take” Abe. JDCR struggled with Take’s numerous low pokes and mix-ups, which ultimately broke down his defense.

With his Armor King not being able to punish or counter Kazumi efficiently, Take grabbed a win with a score of 2-0.

In the loser’s bracket, JDCR faced Daichi “Nobi” Nakayama, another Japanese pro.

JDCR struggled throughout the whole match. In the last round, both players entered a slow-motion clash, but it was JDCR that fell in the end.

From the replay, you can see that JDCR inputted the wrong punish, leaving him just frames away from potentially winning the round.

LowHigh

Expectations were high for Evo’s reigning Tekken champion entering the tournament. However, Yoon “LowHigh” Sun-woong’s tournament run was abruptly cut short by Hoa “Anakin” Luu, in the Winners’ top 16.

The Radiance/RedBull player read through his Marshall Law and dominated the game with 2-0 on the scoreboard.

LowHigh finally switched to Shaheen as he faced Nobi in the Losers’ top 8.

This match was much closer, and came down to the last round.

However, Nobi eventually got two wall splats in a row, bringing LowHigh down to a sliver of life. With LowHigh unable to quickly recover, Nobi went in for one more kick and ended the defending champion’s hope of repeating.

Qudans

Compared to his amazing run into the grand finals last year, Son “Qudans” Byeong-mun was a ghost throughout Evo 2019.

Sadly, Evo was only able to capture one of his matches on-stream, against Disrupt’s Rodney “Joonya” Desjarlais, which Qudans won 2-0.

It turns out that Qudans’ next two games were losses against Andy “725” Lam and Shojo “Double” Takakubo. With 725 being part of Qanba and Double being a well-known Japanese pro, it’s truly a surprise that both games weren’t on the official stream.

Qudans has been taking a break from the TWT this year, so maybe it’s not too surprising to see him crash out of Evo early. Hopefully, he’ll return to form soon.

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