Tagged: Wize Guy

Everything you missed at KOTD’s Gastown

The crowd at Gastown
The crowd at Gastown

KOTD Vancouver’s recent Gastown event was supposed to launch the division. Daylyt, who’s always one performance away from another million views on WorldStarHipHop, was taking on Fingaz, himself coming off a strong performance against Ness Lee at Quarantine. The other main event pitted Uno Lavoz against Sketch Menace, fresh after both of them dominated at Blackout 4. Unfortunately neither of those battles happened, along with Cadalack Ron vs Cody the Catch.

The battles that did go down, however, mostly satisfied the large crowd. Some veterans made successful returns to the ring and some up-and-comers gained momentum.

Ayem
Ayem

We got the homie Ayem, who made the 17-hour drive up from San Jose with Madflex, to give us a rundown of how things went from his perspective. Ayem’s a Grindtime alum who faced off with DNA in 2009 and who has more recently been putting on some completely slept-on performances against the likes of The Deadman and Megadef in KOTD’s Fresh Coast division.

Continue reading →

Top 10 KOTD battles of 2013

Bigg K

King of the Dot spent much of 2013 trying to find a balance.

In Toronto, Blackout 3 had the biggest audience a KOTD event had ever seen, but the massive crowd meant that it was difficult to see and hear the battles in the venue. For Vengeance 2, the venue was too big for the smaller crowd and for World Domination 4 the venue was fine but the audio in the footage was hit-or-miss and the crowd was often unruly.

The California division rebuilt the West Coast battle scene to its former glory, providing a platform for both returning legends and a slew of new talent. Each event (Resurgence, Alcatraz and Takeover) showed progression, eventually culminating in the year’s best: Battle of the Bay 6.

Calgary’s Quarantine and Vancouver’s GZGP semi-finals events featured those cities’ best matchups to date and hinted at even bigger things to come.

But as for the battles, KOTD put out more classics than any other league this year. The quality of content from WD4 and BOTB6 was unrivaled and most of the big-name matchups lived up to or exceeded their expectations.

Honestly, picking the 10 best battles from KOTD’s releases this year wasn’t easy, so if your Top 10 list varies from ours, we won’t necessarily say you’re wrong.

Continue reading →

Everything you missed at KOTD’s Quarantine

Screen shot 2024-11-03 at 2.08.22 PMLast weekend King of the Dot put on the biggest battle event the Calgary division has seen yet. There wasn’t as much hype over this card compared to the anticipation of BOTB6 and WD4, but from what we could tell from updates on RMBVA, most of the battles turned out well and at least a few verged on greatness.

T.O. Battle Blog caught up with Tricky P (henceforth known as Trick Stephens) over the phone while he was in line for fried rice at the Calgary airport to get his thoughts on the event.

Continue reading →

Everything you missed at GZGP Round 4 (Toronto)

A lot happened in battle rap this week: Math Hoffa KO’d Serius Jones and the remaining battles on the SM3 card. Daylyt made his URL debut by battling Smack outside the venue. KOTD dropped one of the most epic battles in recent memory. And at the Annex Wreckroom in Toronto, Ground Zero put on a hidden gem of an event for the GZGP semi-finals.

If you want “bars over names,” forget URL. GZ is where it’s at. No gimmicks, no drama, no BS, just four entertaining battles. Even with three battles cancelled, the night managed to be laid-back, relaxed and fun.

The crowd was a good size, especially for an event so soon after WD4, and there were a lot of new faces. The obscure references to the GZ scene were mostly lost on them, so if you’re bringing someone new, tell them to read this post and our recaps of Rounds 1, 2 and 3 before coming to the finals on Nov. 23.

Oh, and the “ladies-free-before-10:00 p.m.” plan worked like a dream.

STEP EASY VS WIZE GUY (Battle of the night)

Wize Guy and Step Easy. Photo by Jen Schenkel Photography via The Annex Wreckroom on Facebook
Wize Guy and Step Easy. Photo by Jen Schenkel Photography via The Annex Wreckroom on Facebook

Step took this on a 3-2 decision and moves on to the GZGP finals in November. We heard a few people loudly calling it a robbery outside the venue, though they were mostly Wize Guy’s boys and the judges who voted for him. There was so much going on in this battle it’s easy to see why opinions were so divided.

Let us break it down two ways:

Continue reading →