Juan "Hungrybox" Debiedma made history this summer at Tipped Off 16, but it wasn't the kind of history he ever wanted to make. He finished 33rd out of the 469 singles entrants at one of the most stacked Melee majors of the year. That's a fine result for most. For Hungrybox, it was tied for the worst finish of his competitive life — he hadn’t finished 33rd since his first recorded tournament all the way back in 2007, a full 18 years ago. It was an unthinkable result for somebody who has been an icon of consistency for over a decade.

(This is from a tournament called GIGABITS - Let’s all Smash Together back in June, 2007. Hungrybox was so unknown then that you can see a rare “Hungry Box” misspelling.)

Luckily, CEO in Orlando, Florida this past weekend was poised to be the perfect bounceback event for the former world #1. For the first couple days of competition, despite some scares, things were going as planned. Hungrybox was in Winners Finals, just a few more wins from following up the worst performance of his life with a tournament victory. And then, the disaster every Melee professional fears: his controller stopped working. It started with small malfunctions earlier in top 64, occasional moments where his L-trigger stuck and he had to slap the controller to unstick the button. But gradually, the malfunctions mounted and with them, frustration — building and building until Hungrybox threw his controller to the floor in Winners Finals.

His opponent, MOF, North America's top Ice Climbers player, was gracious enough to allow him to go to the crowd and try to find a replacement. But Hungrybox doesn't use any controller. He uses a Phob, a custom-calibrated GameCube controller. Even if he could find somebody with another Phob, there would be no guarantee that it would feel right compared to his usual calibration.

After a quick warm-up, it was straight into the deciding game of the set. Even on an unfamiliar controller, Hungrybox showed that Clutchbox is still alive and well. He didn't just close out Game 5 against MOF, he also won an instant classic Game 5, bracket reset Grand Finals against Wizzrobe.

Here’s what Hungrybox had to say about his CEO win, his controller problems, and how he's feeling about chances at rank 1 as we approach the halfway point of 2025.

I want to start by talking about the moment where the controller really went bad, I guess, in that Winners Finals set. 

Hungrybox: Oh, the controller didn't even go bad by Winners Finals. The controller was going bad in Top 48 before anything even happened. 

Basically, I was playing a friendly, warming up for Captain G, the Falcon, and the controller got stuck. So I grabbed the backup and I won a scary Game 5 set versus Captain G's Falcon. And I told myself, okay, Captain G, he's a really good player, but he's someone that I thought I'd still beat confidently with a good enough backup, but he got a lot better. So I nearly lost that. 

But once I won, I was like, “OK, phew, I got over that barrier. Now all I gotta do is take my controller to a modder and fix it.” CEO didn't have any modding stations. There were people in the crowd who happened to be good with controllers. So I asked one guy to fix it. He opened it up and cleaned up the triggers a bit.

Then it seemed fine, because after I fought Captain G, I faced Jchu and I didn't have any issues during the Jchu set, and I 3-0'd him. I'm like, OK, awesome, he fixed the controller. 

Day 3, I had to fight Llod in Winners Semis. And when I fought Llod, it was also a Game 5, really close set. But during game two or three, I noticed it sticking. You'll notice various parts in the VOD where I start smacking my L-Trigger. 

I smacked it a couple times and it was fine, but it got to a certain point where the smacking wouldn't fix it and it just kind of remained. That's when I took a big sigh and I realized, I just have to switch off controllers. I had to officially switch off my Wario shell Phob, which at this point has been opened up and tweaked and modified by like eight different modders over the past three years or something. It's the controller I won Genesis with. I'm really sad to not be able to use it any more, but it got to a certain point where I just need something better, something more consistent, because it's just way too scary to deal with.

So when you talk about consistency, have you had experiences like that in the past with Phobs?

Hbox: Yes and no. I had one or two other Phobs that I used, and the issue with them is, yeah, they make my inputs and movements much more precise. But when I try to bring them with me to tournaments, I feel like after flights it gets miscalibrated, so you have to recalibrate it. And if you don't know how to calibrate it, it's an issue. I feel like it was getting decalibrated very, very often. And then also if you happen to drop your controller on the floor, it can completely mess up the Phob, which is really stupid. Whereas OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturer, referring to the original GameCube controllers made by Nintendo) don't really have that issue, they just kind of work.

I'm having a couple of modders build me new controllers, so we'll see what happens. 

Would you consider still using a Phob going forward? Are you going to go back to an OEM?

Hbox: I would like to go to an OEM that feels as good as a Phob. I like having a loose stick. I like my inputs being crispy and precise. Feeling like I can play on the same level, especially in the new meta, Puff's wavedashing on the ground is super important for her to juke really fast players. 

I just happened to get a decent enough Phob to clutch out the set versus Wizzy and the set versus MOF. 

How hard is that to do? How hard is it to go into a high-level set on a controller that you're not familiar with?

Hbox: Against ICs [Ice Climbers], it's one of the scariest things in the world. With ICs, it's not even about like, how well are you executing when you get an opening? It's like, if you miss one L-cancel or you misstep, you're dead. That's just the character. It's not like you can take a hit and tank it like, alright, I lost 20%. I'll come back. Nope, I got grabbed, that's my stock because my pivot didn't pivot when I wanted it to. My wavedash was the wrong distance. It's ultra scary. So I was frightened for my life. 

So how was your confidence level then heading into Grands knowing you were going to have to do it again on this weird controller?

Hbox:  One of the funny things is, when you're using an unfamiliar controller, you have to take less risks. In general, because your muscle memory is not going to be able to do the really cool swaggy stuff. So just by default I started playing campier and safer and more defensively. And that's exactly what worked against him at Genesis. 

 Wizzy was playing extremely well. So the fact that I was able to lock in, recollect myself as [I was] getting four stocked, getting 3-0'd [in the first set of Grand Finals] with a backup controller? In my own opinion, it's probably one of the times I've impressed myself the most in my entire career, I'm not gonna lie.

Did you know you were going to live the knee that almost killed at the end of Game 5?

Hbox: 80% of me knew I was going to live just because of where I was, where I got knee'd and stuff. But there was a little part of me that was like, what if it actually kills me? What was really scary is that if he got one more grab on me, that was it, it was GG. I went ahead and barely won that.

It's been a rollercoaster year for you. How important was it for you to rebound after the 33rd place finish at Tipped Off?

Hbox: Very important. You know, it's that smudge on my career, it's gonna be there forever. But I feel like the CEO win right afterwards is really, really cool. Yeah, it wasn't, technically speaking, a major event, but when I look back on it and I realize there were 13K viewers, that Grands was an insane one, with a lot of people talking about it. It seemed like an important victory for me given that it was [against] one of my demons, given that it was a case where all the odds were stacked against me to lose it.

It was a big sigh of relief because a year ago, Wizzy did the exact same thing. He was in losers, I'm in Grands sitting pretty, playing hot. And then he comes back and just double eliminates me.

How are you feeling about your goals for the year after CEO?

Hbox:  Right now after the CEO win, I'm, I still think I'm solidly the third best player in the world. And I think if I really end up winning Supernova for instance, the argument is right there. I  think, you know, I'm close, I'm close to it. It's the closest I've been, even with a 33rd at Tipped Off. 

What I like about rankings is that they don't really punish you for one really bad performance. Those will happen from time to time, even with a career as long as mine. They reward you for the good wins. So, while CEO might have not met their category of what a major technically is in Melee, it was an important win for me over Wizzy. And for seeding's sake, a reminder that I shouldn't be seeded anything less than third.