Have you ever played against a top-level player in a video game?

I played against top-10 players in NHL 14 and NHL 15 back in the day. I even made a YouTube video where I played against the former number 1 player.

More recently (aka yesterday), though, I played against Komodo in Melee, the current rank 76 player in the world. He was my first-round matchup in a local Melee tournament that I went to in central Florida. I lost the set 0-2. I got 4-stocked in the first game, and 3-stocked in the second game. I consider it a victory to take a stock off of a player of his caliber.

Panda, the 31st-best player in the world, was also at the same local. He beat Komodo in Grand Finals.

Back when Paladins was still a competitive esport, I was a support for a play-in style team. I was also ranked pretty high on the competitive ladder. I played against top ranked players all the time, both in scrims and in solo queue. Since the player base wasn't as big as other competitive games, it would be easier to go against top players, I always found pride in going head to head against people who played for real organizations (like NAVI).

Its a real shame that game died, only game I was truly good at.

I also race competitively (albeit I'm not too competitive) and have raced against real life and top sim racers. There is no competing with them, you're just racing for second. Jaden Munoz is a great example, who I've raced against a few times in Indycar. He puts in laps that are 1 or more seconds faster than even the fastest indycar one tricks. It is quite impressive to watch.

So without a doubt I've faced many top level minecraft players in different pvp wins but with most servers not having a clear ranking it's hard to say how many. I know I have wins over the all time winningest team sg player on Mineplex before it died. I also have some experience facing actual competitve teams, one in turf wars which I have no idea what they were ranked but considering me and Furret destroyed them I doubt it was highly. I also faced a top 5 ranked cakewars team while me and the rest of Fallout Edition (the team me and my friends made) were practicing before a tournament and we ended up winning againt the highly ranked team ghe tournament is 1 I'd like to forget.

As for what I really wanted to talk about as soon as I saw this thread I am 1-0 vs Pokemon World Champions and that is true. For some context Pokemon has an official competitive format called VGC which is double battles and you pick 4 of your 6 pokemon to use during team preview, I wasn't aware of VGC until Furret explained it once when I was talking about how much I hated Dynamax and he said it was better in doubles which made me curious and I got pretty hooked on it for a while and unknowingly battled a world champion. As for said World Champion he's one of the more famous ones as he won Worlds in 2014 with a Pachrisu his name is Sejun Park. He was using a team built around none fully evolved pokemon with Gmax Pikachu being the star of the team and when his name came up I thought it seemed familar but I couldn't think of why but after winning and playing a bit longer I decided to watch a stream WolfyVGC another world champion was doing and for some reason I decided to leave chat open which I never do and someone said Sejun was saying on his stream he'd beat Wolfy with his baby pokemon team and that's when it clicked that's who I battled earlier that day so I looked him up and found the stream and watched it back and the only thing he said in English was that I was very lucky which Thunder missed several times but when you put moves with 70% accuracy on mons your asking for trouble. That said he didn't save the stream so I only have a few screenshots now which I'll add later if the site will let me and you may think "but he was using babies" and to that i'd say 1 rufflet was destroying me for no reason and 2 he was confident enough in the team to challenge another world champion with the team. I'm glad I didn't realize who he was during the battle as I fear I would of messed up from the pressure I would of put on myself.

His reaction to Thunder missing lol I miss my Gmax Lapras I loved that team.

This is going to make me sound ignorant but I had no idea that competitive Minecraft was a thing. I know that Minecraft speedruns are incredibly popular, but I didn't even realize there were ways to directly compete against other players. I guess a lot has changed since I last played Minecraft in like 2014 lol.
SonicOlmstead :

The win against Sejun Park is sick. I like VGC a lot (even though I'm not very good at it). Even if your team was stronger than his it's still super impressive to win over such a talented player.

Barathemos : You race in real life or sim? Or both? I read it as you saying that you raced against him in real life, but I just want to make sure I'm understanding correctly.

Haha, only on the sim. I can't afford to race anything more than Karts at the moment lol.

Some kart racers are actually quite scary to go up against too lol.

tgags123 : Oh yeah tons of Minecraft servers back in 2015-2019 had a large focus on pvp mini games and then some of those team based ones had actual competitive leagues around them not sure of how much you didn't know about mc pvp but pretty much for java everyone kept playing 1.8 because of things like the attack speed,w tapping for extra hits, snowballs and using the fishing rod for combos, etc.

Honestly my win against Sejun is probably my favorite gaming accomplishment of all time there's others that probably mean more to me but it's the easiest one to explain like yeah I beat a world champion lol. I had no idea you liked VGC I wish I enjoyed gen 9 VGC but I can't get into Terra as a gimmick I didn't like it playing Scarlet and I don't like it the little I tried playing VGC.

I've played against top level players in both Summoners War and Pokemon Sword but didn't do well on either. Back when Splitgate was big, I was one of the top players and constantly coming up with new strategies so I was always up against some of the other good players.

I think the closest thing I had was I encountered ArnKratos in MK11, I believe he was the most prominent Shang Tsung main during the games comp life and he had a pretty filthy Mileena.

I was on rain who was considered low tier as well as Mileena throughout the games life span. Kept getting duck OSd and lost 2-1(Ranked is ft2 even though tournies are ft3.)

Just a good reminder I need to vary my offensive layers at the time.