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Saturday, September 5, 2015

King of Trios: Night 1

The bWo reunites
By Chad Smart
@chadsmart & @my123cents on Twitter
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The first night of Chikara’s 2015 King of Trios is in the books. As a first time attendee, I can say the night more than lived up to expectations. There’s no way to do a quickly written recap can do justice to the night. I highly recommend buying the show when Chikara makes it available on their website. Here are some quick thoughts on the night as best as I can remember them.

As with most shows, the night was split into two halves. The first half of the show was the matches that had little storyline implications or teams the audience weren’t familiar with while the second half featured the more invested matches.


United Nations vs. Team Attack
The first match saw United Nations defeat Team Attack. This made me 0-1 for my predictions. Sean “X-Pac/123 Kid” Waltman was on commentary and got into a stare down with Prakash Sabar after the match. Mister Azerbaijan had the pin but elected to let team captain Juan Francisco de Coronado get the victory for his team. Solid opener and Team Attack looked good in their debut.


BDK
While Team Attack had a good showing, it was their British counterparts Team Fight Club Pro that had the breakout night with their mild upset victory over the BDK.  Derek Sabato refereed the match. When the BDK was at their height in 2010, Sabato was the crooked ref who helped them win. Before the match, current BDK leader Jakob Hammermeier told Sabato it was nice to see him again and then gave an exaggerated wink. Fight Club, I think due to having a tag team called Mustache Mountain, walked in to a crowd that was polite in welcoming them to the Easton Funplex but walked out with a crowd fully behind them for the weekend.

Los Ice Creams
If I’d made official predictions for the tournament, I probably would have picked Crown and Court (Princess Kimber Lee, Los Ice Creams) to be the most likely to pull off the biggest upsets and advance to the finals. It’s a good thing I didn’t actually put any money on my prediction. Crown and Court fought a valiant fight only to end up losing to the Arcane Horde (The Batiri and Oleg the Usurper). As I said in my King of Trios preview, fans have really taken to Oleg this season and were happy to see him advance in the tournament. However Oleg will always be a murderer and therefore I can’t cheer him. RIP Dragon Dragon. Los Ice Creams looked better in this match than they normally do. Maybe in a year if they keep working together Crown and Court may be able to go on a winning streak.


Devastation Corp. vs. bWo

The last match of the first half was the Devastation Corporation taking on some up and comers calling themselves the Blue World Order. Dev Corp thought this would be a cakewalk to the pay window. They were wrong. The bWo proved to enough of a challenge that the “King of Managers” Sydney Bakabella had to interfere helping Flex Rumblecrunch get the victory.  One of the highlights of the match was the first time “Hollywood” Nova and Blaster McMassive were in the ring together. For those not in the now, Nova does a Hulk Hogan rip-off character and Blaster is a black man. Seeing the two of them face to face led to a “This is Awkward” chant and Nova bailing out of the ring to avoid having to fight. After the match the crowd gave the bWo a standing ovation and chanted, “Please come back.”

Battleborn
The second half of the show started with Dasher’s Dugout vs. Battleborn. I have Battleborn picked to win the tournament so I was glad to finally see one of my predictions for the first round come true. Former Grand Champion, Icarus seemed to take a nasty bump early in the match and then was hit with a chair to the face allowing Battleborn to pick up the victory. After the match, Icarus lay on the mat for a while and the doctor came over to check on him. Hopefully he’s okay and wasn’t too shaken up. My favorite part of the match was when Battleborn leader Kevin Condron was on the apron, the crowd had a dueling chant of, “We want Kevin,” “No we don’t.”  I wanted to record this and make it my ring tone for when Kevin calls me to ask why I haven’t written a blog in three months.

Airborne!
The Bullet Club defeated the team of Fire Ant, Worker Ant and Pharaoh Ant. While this match was really good, I don’t think the Young Bucks threw enough Superkicks for this to really classify as a Superkick party. I was seated near the Bullet Club’s corner. At one point, AJ Styles looked at the guys in front of me who were harassing him and said, “If this wasn’t a PG show, I’d give you the DX chop. I’ve got to be good.”  During the match, AJ went to do a top rope move and slipped. He blamed the “lucha ropes” for causing the mistake. After the match, in a bit of retaliation, AJ had the Bucks superkick the rope.

Kingston & Hallowicked
The story during the Nightmare Warriors vs. Snake Pit was former Grand Champion Eddie Kingston trash talking current Grand Champion Hallowicked. This was a brutal match that saw “The Last of a Dying Breed” Kingston working with his team only to end up on the losing end. After the match, Hallowicked and Frightmare tried to get Soldier Ant to become a full-fledged member of their team. Soldier eventually pulled off his mask revealing another mask that was a hybrid of his camouflage look mixed with the style of Hallowicked and Frightmare’s masks.

Swamp Monster!
The main event saw the Gentleman’s Club square off against Team AAA. Aerostar entered with a flamethrower. Gentleman’s Club captain Chuck Taylor suggested if Aerostar gets to use a flamethrower, Chuck should get to use a gun. A wild a crazy match, which is pretty much a given when on one side of the ring is a dragon and the other side features a swamp monster. The finish came after Colonel Doc Angus and Orange Cassidy tried to interfere to help the Gentleman’s Club only for Drago to mist Cassidy and Team AAA getting the victory shortly thereafter.


That was just night one. Can’t wait to see what nights two and three have in store as well as the fan conclave. I’m predicting come Monday, I will be sleeping all day in an attempt to recoup from the weekend.  Check out more pics on Facebook!

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