Kakeru’s heartbreaking mistake that got him eliminated from CPT Japan broken down by Brian F and what should have happened

The first Capcom Pro Tour of Street Fighter 6’s competitive life is seeing one of its most stacked events this weekend with the Japan qualifier where many top contenders are getting taken out long before the finals.

Ibushigin|Kakeru was one of the potential favorites to win going into the big tournament, but one small and heartbreaking mistake saw him get eliminated before reaching top 16.

This is of course his last set against WIP|Jaccy and their Kimberly, and while it was back and forth throughout the whole thing, we’re going to be focusing on the final game and final round that decided everything.

Kakeru manages to catch Jaccy’s command dash mixup attempt with a couple of jabs that allows him to go into JP’s powerful level 2 Super Art to change sides and seemingly open the door to the end of the match.

He gets to go through his entire sequence, leaving Jaccy with a sliver of health and burnt out in an apparent checkmate scenario with double Departure portals over his head, but then the unexpected happens.

Jaccy wakes up with Kimberly’s own level 2 Super that manages to somehow slip by the Psycho Power spikes and nail JP to seal the set in his favor.

Since Kakeru was streaming his tournament run on Twitch, we can see his reaction and personal disappointment, and after sitting for a minute, heads to Training mode to figure out what went wrong.

This is the second time an apparent portal issue has cost Kakeru a major set after something eerily similar happened to him at Evo 2023 against Rohto|Tokido at the very end of their top 8 match.

Fellow JP competitor Brian F happened to be watching this CPT game as it unfolded as well, so he went in to do some testing himself.

Brian’s now put together his own brief breakdown explaining two key areas that Kakeru made a slight but costly misstep in trying to finish off Jaccy.

The first of which is Kakeru could have actually KO’d Kimberly in the level 2 sequence instead of going for the OD portals by going for the OD fireball after the fierce and then into Triglav for the last bit of damage — but the high damage scaling made it difficult to determine if that was going to be enough in that contested moment.

Many people aren’t understanding what happened in the Kakeru vs. Jaccy match, so here’s a quick video breaking it down. Key points:

1) bnb combo would’ve killed
2) The chip sequence kakeru went for IS a checkmate, and more optimal w/ chip, but he had a slight error in the setup https://t.co/54obQfeHfg pic.twitter.com/KlcRrXqVjv

— Brian_F (@Bri4nF) January 6, 2024

So instead, Kakeru went with what he thought was the more safe checkmate option to force the chip out, but Brian F shows how the fellow JP main mixed things up.

We’ll let you watch his video for the full explanation that goes into more detail as to what Kakeru did and what he should have done, but one major thing is he used the light medium version of the OD Departure instead of medium heavy that would have more reliably covered Jaccy’s options.

Kimberly’s level 2 Super has no invincibility on it at all, but the odd firing angle compared to her startup can apparently cause the spike to sometimes miss her completely, and Kakeru got extra unlucky here since she slipped past and couldn’t block in time.

This unfortunately means that Kakeru joins the growing list of top Japanese players who won’t make it to Capcom Cup unless they win the last chance qualifier including BST|Daigo, DFM|Itabashi Zangief, Saishunkan|Nemo, Victrix|Momochi, Saishunkan|Shuto, and many others.

Jaccy is certainly no slouch either considering they went on to eliminate GyoGun|Mago to reach the top 8 on the loser’s side where DFM|Nauman will be the next opponent.

Hopefully, we do get to see Kakeru make it out to the LCQ next month because otherwise this is going to be an unfortunate end to his very strong season.