Minnesota Kendama Open 2016 Recap

I am always surprised by the amount of people that travel from around the world to attend the MKO every year. It is truly humbling to have people love our event so much that they drop everything for 5 days and go dama crazy here in little old Minnesota. This year we had record breaking attendance and competition like no other year. If you made it out thank you very much, if you weren't able to make it out save those pennies and join us next year!

Competition Results

Freestyle Bonz Atron takes the win in our first ever Open Freestyle Competition! He secured his vicotry by lacing tricks on stage people have never seen before! Check out the replay on our saved livestreams HERE.  

We invited 8 of the best players from around the world to compete in the finals, and opened up 50 slots for players to sign up for. Those 50 showed their skills to our amazing judges on Friday, and the top 8 made it to the finals on Sunday. Huge shoutouts for everyone who gave it their all on the Freestyle stage. And thank you again to our amazing judges Alex Smith, Alex Ruisch, and Tamotsu Kubota!

Open Division 

Congrats to Nick Gallagher for taking 1st in Open! We started with 139 players in the open division. Nick had to win 7 straight matches to take home the trophy. He backs up his brother Zack Gallagher that took first place in last years MKO.

Also congratulations to CJ Martinez for taking 2nd, and last year's champ Zack Gallagher for taking 3rd!

Yank Spike Comp

The weekend is over, MKO 2016 is over, but I'm still reminiscing! Congrats to @nickgallagher42 for taking home first place in open division, the 4th Sweets MKO victory in a row! And congrats the grom @bonzatron for slaying the freestyle. I didn't get to post as much as I wanted to this weekend because I was so busy filming (Sweets Life soon), but today I will be sharing some of my favorite memories from the MKO: "The yank spike heard around the world" or "The Golden Yank." @zbmags77 wins the first ever yank spike championship, receives his hand-made trophy, and yanks the topper of the trophy first try in front of the whole Mall of America. Insane. So glad I got this on film 📽💥😱 #mko2016

A video posted by Cooper Eddy (@cooper_eddy) on Nov 1, 2016 at 1:37pm PDT

Beginner Division Winners 

Intermediate Division

Record Breaking Numbers!

This year we had more players than ever before. Here are some breakdowns of who came out: • 26 States • 6 Countries • 60 Players in Beginner • 71 Players in Intermediate • 136 in Open • More female players than any other MKO • 17k + Combined views on the Live Streams (as of Nov 2, 2016) • Thousands of new people introduced to Kendama Huge thanks to all our Sponsors! 

Online Full Brackets 

This year we did something different, and kept live brackets updated as players moved through Open and Freestyle. You can still find those here, with the scores for each round: http://challonge.com/2016MKO http://challonge.com/2016MKOFreestyle

Watch the Livestream  We live streamed both Saturday and Sunday at the Mall of America, you can find those videos on the Sweets Kendamas Facebook, and we put them all in a playlist here: https://www.facebook.com/sweetskendamas/videos/

MKO T-Shirts available today on the site. Limited Quantities

Feedback

Use this link to give us feedback for the 2016 MKO. We will use all this data to help make next year better! https://goo.gl/forms/UoPePMYqFbtFn5C72 There is no way this event can happen without the support of all the sponsors who helped us out. So thank you again to all of them!     If you made it this far here is a little treat. Sweets Life MKO Thursday Edition.