“I’m hooked forever”: Inside the small, toxic, and passionate Super Smash Bros. Brawl scene from the eyes of GENESIS X3 champion Chia

In the corner of the GENESIS X3 convention, with eight CRT TVs, no stage, no livestream, and no microphone, was a tournament for an 18-year-old game with a $450 prize pool on the line. And it meant the world to the 45 or so players who competed.

This is Super Smash Bros. Brawl. This is everything, especially for Christina “Chia” Korsak, ranked #4 in the SSBBRank as of Summer 2025. She flew to San Jose to compete in Brawl – to prove something to herself, to finally get first at a GENESIS, because she can’t help but feel compelled to compete.

But she told me that if she won this tournament, it might be the end of her Brawl career.

“The win would oddly be serendipitous,” she said to Esports Insider. “With the issues I’ve experienced in the scene, I’m highly considering that, if I win, I’ll announce that I’m retiring from the game. With the caveat that I will come back if the community is dealt with. It’s not an ultimatum. But I will feel I have achieved enough that I can go a year or two without playing Brawl and feel fine.”

This would end her nearly 25-year career in Smash.

Chia has been competing in Super Smash Bros. since Melee’s release in 2001. But when Brawl came out in 2008, she made the jump along with many pro Melee players. All of the big names were competing in Brawl, enthralled with the aggressive meta of its early days – before Meta Knight took over, of course.

It was an awesome time.

However, the competitive scene started to slow down in late 2013 when Super Smash Bros. 4 was announced. With a new game coming out in six months and Project M gaining momentum, Brawl was already starting to fade out. Only in Smash would a mod be larger than the official games. With more technical elements and a wider range of viable characters, Chia was one of those Smash players who made the switch.

But she never left Brawl.

It was always in the background, even when Super Smash Bros. Ultimate came out in 2018. That game had all the hype for a while. The community was dying to know who the next DLC fighters would be and the pro scene was thriving, featuring a prime Leonardo “MkLeo” Perez. There was no denying it was the Smash game for a while.

But there was something about Brawl.

“That mixture of being in a competitive scene when it first came out, being the most try-hard of try-hards. Me, Mew2King, and Velocity used to drive from Philly to Brawl tournaments twice a month all over New England, Virginia… His gamertag was Velocity because he drove really fast. We’d just find any big tournament, getting practice and exposure against people in Majors across the country,” she recalled.

And who could forget those endless summer nights where she’d just hear Meta Knight using Mach Tornado over and over again as Jason “Mew2King” Zimmerman practiced? The dude spent hours labbing, calculating exact projections for when characters were knocked back by certain moves at specific damage percentages. For better or worse, that memory doesn’t leave you.

There’s just something about Brawl that made her keep trying. Throughout the years, the Brawl tournaments have been getting smaller and smaller. Fewer people are flying out to compete. Some Majors don’t even have a stream. The Brawl tournament at GENESIS X3 had just a handful of spectators while Melee and Ultimate had hundreds of people watching a massive screen on stage, screaming so loud you could barely hear the poor TO call names out for Brawl sets.

“I just f***ing love playing this game,” Chia said. “It’s weird how it can still trap my attention, even more than the current titles. More than every other game. I’ll get sucked into a Zelda game for, like, three hours these days. But if you sit me in front of a Brawl bracket, I’m hooked forever.”

Brawl is a game of obsession and grit. When I even asked her what the prize money was, she didn’t know. I don’t think she even cared. Brawl is for the community. It’s for the love of the game. The rivalries, the storylines. I’ve always marveled at how games like Melee and Brawl have esports scenes fueled solely by passion. There is really no money to be had, no sponsors, no teams, no massive crowds.

All Chia needed was a CRT TV and long-time opponents to beat. That was enough to take the flight.

Despite the clear amount of passion it takes to play a game competitively for nearly two decades, Chia admitted that some of the passion has left her over the past few years.

While Brawl’s lack of support from Nintendo and major sponsors is what makes it so grassroots, it’s also what makes it a bit dangerous. There are no strict regulations that apply to every event. Crappy people can sometimes slip through the cracks, Chia said, because every tournament organizer has their own rules and bans in place.

This can be a problem when you’ve dealt with “relentless hate” like Chia.

“I have a lot of supporters and people will defend me,” she said. “But there is so much toxicity, and I can’t really reach out to TOs and tell them about issues with people. It feels like a never-ending loop of whether they’re allowed or not. It always feels like weekly discussions on stuff they’ve done to me two years ago at events.

“It’s weird that being in such a different niche – a top 10 player in the world – and I still receive hate and nothing can truly be done about it except banning them from my own events…. If a top player in Melee was harassed like I was, they’d be banned and in the media. In Brawl, it never gets dealt with.”

It frankly gets exhausting to keep fighting to improve the community. And it’s just as exhausting to compete when there are people saying certain things that send you into shock, throwing around dead names and slurs. Chia doesn’t want to lose her competitive comfort game, but she’s getting “too old” to deal with this stuff. It’s not worth her time to compete against someone who is sending her into fight-or-flight mode during brackets. She could just switch to Smash 6 when it comes out and be left alone.

She didn’t enter Supernova’s Brawl tournament last year – despite it being the largest in size and skill – to protect her mental health. She was also invited to a Brawl Invitational last year that included the two people she doesn’t want to deal with, so she missed out on the tournament (and the free flight that was offered to her).

“It just sucks that the majority of this stuff happened a few years ago, but it’s never been ‘handled.’ I want to move on as well. But I want to stick up for myself and other minorities in the community,” she said. “These problem people don’t have a personal issue with me; they talk very down on other LGBTQ+ members of the community.

“When they’re allowed, I just don’t enter.”

When you think of the most popular esports scenes out there – VALORANT, League of Legends, Counter-Strike 2 – you realize that the players retire quite early. It’s not very often that you see pros competing for over two decades.

Even though Brawl has some issues (Meta Knight, floatiness, tripping), players have continued to compete for years. What makes Smash players so dedicated? What keeps them playing the same game for 20 years?

“One way is that, whether we realize it or not, we were trained for this,” Chia told me. “Smash has been around 25 years or so now. Unlike other competitive games that get a new version every one to three years, our wait periods are five to eight years.”

Unlike games like Marvel Rivals, which get frequent updates, Smash has remained the same for years. The characters haven’t changed, the meta hasn’t really changed, and the gameplay has changed. But that’s the only Smash game you’ll have for years, so you gotta stick with it.

And you won’t be alone. With no quality online play, Brawl practice and tournaments are always in-person. This made constant grinding more rewarding, knowing you’d be a part of the community and travel all over the world.

Even while practicing at home, ahead of GENESIS, Chia told me she could go on Discord and ask other competitive players to practice and there was always someone willing. For Chia, the difficulty before the tourney wasn’t really the game itself. It was mental.

She didn’t really compete for over a year as she worked on the mental issues she felt were holding her back. While practicing, eating well, and sleeping were all helpful, being consistent was still a struggle for her. She realized that she would often feel that sense of fight or flight against lesser players, spiraling if she felt herself slipping against someone she knows she should beat.

“Someone will play worse with a gun pointed at your head. Playing during that fear… I have to do that for every bracket set,” Chia said. “Now I track my heart rate variability – lower means your body is going through it. Normal is like 40-50 heart rate.”

She was in the single digits.

You’d never know Chia was that terrified if you saw her at GENESIS X3. She seemed entirely in her element, talking with other pros and practicing ahead of sets. But maybe that’s all part of the process. Part of getting out of your head.

Still, Chia told me she was worried about the third seed of the tournament, ISH, a mid-tier Wolf player ranked around 14th-18th at the time. Chia beat them at last year’s GENESIS, but admittedy dropped some games. R.O.B., Chia’s main, has some issues with Wolf. Both are “sh***y mid-tier” fighters, and the fight isn’t baked into her muscle memory just yet. Last year, Chia had to whip out King Dedede to finish the job.

Throughout the weekend, Chia seemed pretty confident. She said everything short of “I know I’m going to win.” Even other opponents knew. They felt it. Kurobi, a top player from Japan, pointed at Chia after watching her bracket, saying: “Me and you, Finals.”

Chia had won big events leading up to GENESIS X3, but never a major of this size. Juan “Hungrybox” DeBiedma had previously told her: “Once you have proven you can do it, you can do it again a lot easier.”

But would Chia stick around after winning GENESIS X3? Leading up to the Grand Finals, she said she still couldn’t decide. There were some enticing events lined up after GENESIS X3 she didn’t want to miss. On the other hand, she wasn’t sure she could deal with the drama behind the scenes for another decade.

While the uncertainty of her future in Brawl remained, Chia was clearly very focused on the present. She wiped ISH 3-1 in the Winners Finals. She then faced Kurobi in the Grand Finals. It was close, but she beat him 3-2. The emotional, tiring, and exciting weekend was finally done. She took home $225. It wasn’t streamed. Barely anyone was around to watch her pop off.

But it wasn’t about that. It was about finally winning GENESIS.

After winning GENESIS X3, I asked Chia again whether she was going to retire. It didn’t seem like it. Maybe a break. Maybe a bit more selective with which tourneys to attend. On X, she still talks a bit about her rank in Brawl and the state of the game, but she’s been largely competing in Pokémon and spending time with her new girlfriend.

But is she fully done with Brawl? Is she retired? I’d venture to say no. It would be hard to leave a small scene after you won a massive tournament. It’d be hard to leave a small scene you’ve been a part of for decades. That’s just the way it goes for Smash. You don’t leave. You can’t.

Chia, I’ll see you at the next Brawl major.