Jillian’s is FUN! Community Blog

Bar Fights at Jake’s

Street Fighter IV was released with great anticipation in January of 2009 and sold out before it was even on shelves in stores.  Despite it’s popularity we were not too sure of the success that could come with hosting a Street Fighter tournament at our club.  Not willing to turn away any possible sell whether it be $200 or $2000 Jake and I met with someone interested in doing a tournament here.  After a few meetings we decided that the event was worth trying if nothing else but to get 100 people in our club that wouldn’t normally come. 

Shortly after we started to realize how “BIG” this community of Street Fighter acutally was.  Our host Ryan is one of the top players in the nation and had committment from the other top players in the nation.  It turned out that Ryan “Gootecks” has his own very well established website and was a star within this community.  The excitement started to build when he came in and filmed a mini commercial (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3A4rHDgt8Vg&eurl) talking about the event and Jake’s, and informed us that people from Japan and Canada wanted him to stream the event for them.

Although there seemed to be some buzz about the event we never would have imagined that it would turn out to be as “BIG” as it was.  The event was scheduled to begin at 5:00 pm, but we had guests starting to arrive as early as 12:00 pm.  By 3:45 we had a line that stretched down the alley to Colorado Blvd of the attendees that wanted to enter the “Beat a Pro Contest”.  We realized by 5:00 pm that we were at our 278 occupancy and we would have to start a line.  We had employees from neighboring bars coming over to see what was going on, we even had the Pasadena Police who were eating next door perturbed at the amount of people waiting to see this event.  It turned out that the Pros were all stars within the community, there was filming, interviewing and tons of picture taking.  

The best part of all was that these were people coming in to just watch so they were generously purchasing food & drinks.  In order to take the event to the next level we set-up promos with Jager and Bud Lt to have their girls come out, and we had a sampling from a new beverage company. 

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