I've enjoyed looking the OT thoughts other people have posted, so I thought I'd make my own. This is the first OT I've competed in, and I've been placed into D4 (which contains players roughly between level 65 and 76 this tournament). I was level 75 at the beginning of the tournament, so I'm planning to track my scores on the d5 songs as well to see how I would have stacked up.

Round 1
D4: Debut (60)
Score: AAA
This is definitely the kind of song that I play better on sightread. There's a pretty rude jack right in the middle that got harder to hit each time I replayed this song. Other than that, most of the rest of the song is pretty easy, so I managed to snag the AAA after a few tries.

D5: THE BADDEST (74)
Score: 3-0-0-0
Round cutoff score: 21-0-2-1

Round 2
D4: Forever (63)
Score: AAA
Good song, but the patterns unexpectedly break my brain a bit. I have a tendency to rush in the slow anchored patterns toward the beginning, my fingers seem reluctant to cooperate with the split jumpjacks, and the flams toward the end are very chokable. I managed a missflag at one point that I cleaned up into 1-0-0-1, then came back on another day and snagged the AAA.

D5: Gym Leader Battle Music [Hi Tech Remix] (78)
Score: 8-0-2-2
Round cutoff score: 13-1-2-1

Round 3:
D4: Ordine (68)
Score: 3-0-1-2
This round is a bit rough on my end. My right hand hasn't been feeling great, but I'm also experiencing intense mindblocks on this song (oddly, 3[34] minijack patterns at the beginning seem to be the most affected, which I think is tied to my right hand issues). My best score was from my initial sightread, and since it looks like that will likely get me through the round, I think I'm planning to let it stand. Going to give my hands a day or two of rest to see if that helps things.

D5: Traveler ~Stand Aloof~ [Heavy] (79)
Score: 13-0-0-0
Cutoff: 3-1-0-0
This would be the round I faced elimination if I were competing in D5. Very intense cutoff this round!

Round 4:
D4: It's All Over (70)
Score: 8-0-0-0
I got surprisingly mindblocked on this song and ended up doing most of my runs with the audio muted. (Maybe the title of the song was getting in my head a bit too, haha.) The hardest part of this file for me was definitely the miniwalls, since they were far too fast for me to roll legit and manip is not my strong point.

Round 5:
D4: Leviathan
Score: 8-0-0-2
Ooof, more mindblocks. The 3-note anchors (particularly the first one) were a big choke point in this song for me, along with the wall (see: last week's song). I did improve pretty substantially by the end of the week, but unfortunately I ended up being 1 boo over the cutoff for this round. I would have liked to make the top 8, but I finished in 10th, which is nothing to be too disappointed about.

When I created my username as a teenager, I never thought anyone would be in a position of needing pronounce it aloud. But to make everyone's lives easier, I have decided the official pronunciation is "Zlice" (like "slice", but starting with a z). This has been a public service announcement.