Results[]
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | West Division |
|---|---|
| Match # | 46 |
| Match Date | Friday, August 15th, 2003 |
| Vote difference | 7,609 |
| Oracle Expectations |
Ryu - 53.20% 41 for - 17 against |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Ryu - 37.54% (15,413 brackets) |
As odd as it may sound, Ryu defeating Dante was the second-biggest upset in the first two rounds of this contest. Only Magus defeating Ganondorf was bigger, and the board actually expected Magus to win that one. You could fairly say that this match was the upset of the first two rounds, both from a casual and board standpoint.
...and no one really cared. Most people had Dante winning this match without putting a second thought into it during the bracket phase, and Dante > Ryu looked just fine after the first round. But when the match began and Ryu was in the lead, complacency was the victor despite Dante still being in the match early on. It's not that the match wasn't an upset, but most people didn't really care that Dante was losing. Either Ryu is massively respected, or people hated Devil May Cry 2 enough to not mind seeing Dante get his ass whipped.
Ryu maintained a steady beating of Dante all through the match, and the final result was one of those polls in which the numbers weren't a true indicator of how dominant Ryu actually was in the match. If anything, Ryu underperformed a little due to being the underdog. This match remains as one of the more boring upsets, simply because there was no outcry.
Skipping ahead a little, a quick glance at the 2002 stats reveals that Ryu wasn't really the underdog in this match at all. There was simply no way to know this before the contest started, and I again say damn the stats for sucking all of the unknown out of these polls.