In the first week of September, Thailand hosted the recently concluded premiere fighting game event, Thaiger Uppercut 2022, where a battle between two rivaling Tekken countries, South Korea and Pakistan, took place.
Aside from Thailand’s very own Nopparut “Book” Hempamorn, international Tekken players such as Soo-hoon “Ulsan” Lim from Korea and Ruslan “Lan” Rahman from Singapore were also in attendance.
The tournament, which is also part of the Tekken World Tour, saw a number of intense matches, but the most notable was the one between Dawood Sikandar of Pakistan and the Korean Tekken legend, DRX’s Bae “Knee” Jae-min.
Dawood is part of Ashes Gaming, the team led by the first and only unified EVO Tekken champion, Arslan “Arslan Ash” Siddique, while Knee is the current reigning EVO champion, who also happens to be the rival of Arslan.
A known Alisa player, Dawood agrees that his main is B tier at best, and voiced his agreement with Knee’s character tier list published in July.
Months later after this tweet, Dawood got the chance of facing the recently crowned EVO champion at the biggest fighting game event in Thailand. As expected, he pitted his supposed low-tier character against Knee’s Steve and Feng in the Top 8 bracket of the tournament, which yielded unexpected results.
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Dawood Sikandar dominates Knee with Alisa prowess
In the first round of Top 8, Dawood took the first game against Knee’s Steve Fox with a no round brown in less than 2 minutes.
However, the second game was a completely different story. The EVO champ won the first two rounds, but the Pakistani player managed to catch up. In the final moments of the final round, Dawood evaded a classic Steve combo.
After getting hit by a Foot Stomp Right Hook (d/b+3,2), Dawood avoided getting hit by the Cyclone Knee Clip (3+4,d+2), and followed up using Alisa’s Reboot (1+2), clipping his opponent with a generic low kick. As a result, he reverse swept his rival to win the set 2-0, sending Knee to the losers bracket.
The DRX player was not done, however. He crawled his way through the losers bracket, eliminating Ulsan and Book to qualify for the grand finals for a runback against Dawood.
In their last match, the Korean pro decided to go with Feng Wei, the same character that he used to win the EVO championship.
Going for a bracket reset, the Korean pro player was able to take the lead 2-1 in the best-of-five set. Dawood, on the other hand, answered with another no round brown win to tie the series 2-2.
The fifth game went down to another final round. At 37-second mark, Dawood was able to connect a wall bounce combo taking away almost half of Feng’s life bar, giving him a huge life advantage.
Attempting to finish the set with a combo, Knee tried to sneak in a Sweep Kick (SS+4), but Dawood anticipated the low and was able to parry it, resulting to a combo of his own to end the match to become the Thaiger Uppercut 2022 Tekken 7 champion.
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