CTRank 2024 Part 2: 20-16
Welcome back to CTRank 2024. We're continuing with the players ranked from 20th to 16th place as determined by our panel. To recap, our six contributors submitted 30 player ballots, awarding points 30 points for first and 1 point for 30th: those who received votes outside of the Top 25 were given honorable mentions. We considered all open playstyle tournaments (and, to some extent, single-player accomplishments) in this calendar year, with an emphasis on the standard 1v1, 18 start, 39DKS ruleset. A minimum of ten played matches was required to qualify for consideration.
Intro & Honorable Mentions | 25-21 | 20-16 | 15-11 | 10-6 | 5-1
We're also proud to present a respective graphic alongside each ranked player, summarising their year. Some things to note:
- The W/L Record table shows how elo-rated matches and games they've won and lost versus those ranked in our top 10, top 25 (inclusive of the top 10) and the field (everyone else).
- The slash line sources from the Omni Match Statistics database, which tracks all premier CTM, CTL and CTWC matches. A player's ranking in each stat is among those with at least 21 games logged (equivalent to the ranked player with the lowest amount of tracked games), of which 40 players qualify.
- CTWC regionals and CTWC itself ranks players eliminated in the same rounds first according to games won and then combined losing score.
20 ALLENBOT
For how much he plays (very little!), Allenbot holds up well against his competition. Most people might remember his many Masters exits to Tristop, but his Fair Median Score is actually a respectable 1.128 million, good for a spot in the middle of the pack this year. He also is in the Top 10 for Fair 19 transition rate. Allen's peak was probably at the beginning of 2024, when he made his second CTM Masters semis in January. He also won Challengers Circuit in April, the lone month in 2024 he didn't make Masters. The rest of the year saw him be an unfortunate poster child of Round 1 Masters' fodder, although it's always been to strong opponents: Sidnev in Mega Masters, dog in May, Tristop from July to October (once in the Top 8) and DanV in February and No Cap November. Here's the thing: the infamous Tristop streak wasn't any fault of Allen's. Aside from the odd early topout, it's a sprinkling of 1.1s and 1.2s, with a 1.8 million game in July and an almost-rollover (1.587 million) in September. But he was playing against summer 2024 Tristop, who was seemingly invincible at live events; those consecutive losses were a streak of bad seeding luck. Allenbot lives in Singapore, so he hasn't played any live events other than the Singapore regional he has hosted (and won) for the last three years. His ceiling is high and he's had simply stunning performances in the past, but even if that doesn't happen, he can still be relied on to put on a decent show most of the time. -sonic
19 PORTALLL
No player does aggression quite like Portal. A CTL fixture throughout most of 2024, no one outside of the top ten on the premiere poll notched as many big wins as he did. His ability to put big scores on the board propelled him to decider victories against dog, Dengler, and Coal, with his fifth game against Coal entering 29 less than a thousand points shy of a 1.4. The true highlight of his year, though, was a five-game thriller against fellow pace demon iBall. Though he went down 0-2 after a couple of early topouts, he found another gear and capped the set off with a 1.7 in what would be one of his final games of the year. This aggression does come with a downside, though, with a propensity for topping out early and a fair number of losses against soft competition. Still, his highly entertaining brand of Tetris is dangerous enough to threaten even the best players in the scene, and he finished mid-table in all three CTL seasons he played this year.
Portal is the best Kazakh player by a country mile and Nek0's primary competition in Russia-focused tournaments. He landed in the Masters event four times without making it past the first round, though he did make it past O and DanV to get into the top 8 of Mega Masters. He's been quiet since heading off to school in August, but one can hope that he'll have the time and equipment necessary to play again soon. -arbaro
18 HUFFULUFUGUS
In a year with the most offline tournaments Classic Tetris has ever seen, few took the opportunity to show off their skills in front of a crowd like Huffulufugus. He made it to four CTWC regionals across the Midwest in addition to CTWC and Lone Star over the summer. And yet, his biggest performance of the year was in one of the only three online brackets he played.
Huff's run in Mega Masters was one for the history books. A last minute qualifier, he upended the bracket by nabbing the tenth seed, then went on a rampage from there. He pulled out consecutive sweeps on two perennial top ten players in MylesTheGreat and Dengler, which re-established himself as a top player on the spot. The run finally ended versus Gerald Freeman, who was himself having the run of his life, and it went down to a pitched killscreen battle in a decider.
That would end up as the apex for Huff's year, but he had many other good tournaments. The biggest was actually the week before his Mega Masters matches, where he attended the Illinois regional and won the whole tournament with victories over Coal and DMJ. He also had a great day one at CTWC, qualifying as the fifth seed, but would falter on championship Sunday. Here, DMJ got his revenge for Illinois, but not before Huff took it to game five, clinching a ninth place finish.
Though the second half of the year didn't have another monumental run for Huffulufugus a la Mega Masters, his regional tour still paid dividends. He managed a top eight placement at Lone Star, only losing in another hard-fought decider to dog. Huff followed that up with a run to the finals at the Ohio regional, then an excellent MinneD performance, beating Rhubarb and nearly chasing down Fractal on the killscreen in game five of the semis. Huff capped off the year with a return to No Cap November, collecting a highlight reel win over SV before one final decider loss against Sidnev for the road. -Marfram
17 TOMMYNTG
New year, same Tommy. His only Elo-tracked matches for the year were in CTM Masters and Mega Masters, where he beat his few easier matches while losing only to the best of the best. He tends to qual near the bottom of the Masters pack, which doesn't help his chances when he faces some of the most in-form players. Probably his best performance of the year was in CTW Battle Royale, making it to the top 8 finale against the undisputed 7 best players at the time and putting up a solid showing in the finale itself. Tommy continues to shine stats-wise despite the relative lack of major results as he's top 10 in all 3 “slash line” categories. He's also been tearing it up in the recent DAS renaissance with a top-5 FMS there. In fact, he recently said he might fully pivot to DAS for the time being due to a lack of motivation for roll. Unfortunately, he still hasn't made it to an in-person event yet, but we hope to see that change next year. -Lucy
16 NEK0
In the beginning of the year, when CTM was full of players like Fractal, Alex T, and PixelAndy at their peaks, Nek0 might not have been on most people's radars; his only competitive appearances were CTRussia, CTL, and the occasional Challengers. After a loss to trapzone in the first round of Mega Masters, though, things began to change drastically. He started off his first season in CTL Div 1 with a win against Portal, and in July, the season after, he began putting up some big wins: DanV, Sodium, and Rahmations all fell to him in top form, landing him fourth in an absolutely stacked division.
In the entire history of Masters, August 2024 was arguably the most difficult month to make it in—but that month Nek0, ever full of surprises, qualified for the very first time with a whopping 1.48 million average. His round of 16 match against Myles saw two insane rollovers and two 1.2 million scores; the fact that a set like that still handed Nek0 a round 1 loss is truly a testament to how crazy August was. He's made it in every month since, though, and in one of the highlights of No Cap November, he defeated Myles 2 - 1 with another 1.6 and a 1.5. His overall FMS of 1.088 million is solid, but Nek0's 29 is really where he shines—his 2024 fair 29 score of 145,950 puts him at 14th for the year, and if that wasn't enough, he's also an invisible 29 mode monster! Thankfully, Nek0's definitely not invisible to us going into 2025. -catsugiri
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