Orange Cassidy and Best Friends have been with AEW since basically the very beginning.

Though the trio didn't appear on All In, the “The Biggest Independent Wrestling Show Ever,” they took the ring at Double or Nothing in 2019, where Best Friends took on The Hybrid 2, and OC was a member of the pre-show Casino Battle Royal, and have remained active members of the AEW roster ever since.

Have any members of the faction won a championship? No, not in AEW at least; though OC wrestled for multiple titles across his AEW run, including versus Kenny Omega for the AEW World Championship and Will Ospreay for the IWGP United States Heavyweight Championship as a solo performer, the team has never even wrestled for the AEW Tag Team Championship belts, let alone won them.

Will the AEW World Trios Championship Tournament prove more fruitful for Cassidy, Chuck Taylor, and Trent Beretta, an OG AEW trio who have somehow only shared an AEW ring in 10 official matches together? Or will their inexperience as a team prove too much to overcome against a unit like Dark Order or House of Black, who are finely-tuned pinning machines? Well, after taking care of the Trustbusters, the Best Friends are just one win away from the tournament finale at All Out in September and one more win away from leaving Chicago with some new championship gold around their collective waists, which isn't very useful with drawstring joggers but hey, I digress.

Fortunately, if the trio of OC and Best Friends with Danhausen in their corner like Paulie Pennino in Rockey, it will be because of their extensive experience in Chikara, where the team's Ant Hill finisher was originated by the Orange man who once liked to play with fire.

Best Friends can count on their indie experience in AEW's Trios Tournament.

The Best Friends might just be the most varied trio in the AEW World Trios Championship Tournament. They have an ex-WWE guy in Beretta, who was once offered and turned down an extension with NJPW that would have made him a top guy to instead kick it as part of a comedy tag-team, an indie darling in “Sexy Chuckie T” who is very weird, very eccentric, and very well traveled with dozens of promotions across the world, and quite possibly the most enigmatic wrestler of all time in OC – the man of a million angry tweets who does his best work with his hands in his pockets.

And yet, as you probably know by this point, Cassidy isn't just some aloof dude with one set of clothes and an occasional desire to wrestle. No, before OC was OC, he was known as Fire Ant, a fixture of the Chikara's Colony stable that also featured performers now known as Tracy Williams and Drew Gulak. 58.5 percent of Cassidy's 803 professional wrestling contests to date have been under the Fire Ant name, according to Cagematch, and his in-ring abilities were so prolific that Mike Quackenbush, the founder of the promotion, hired the Stewartsville, New Jersey native to be one of his trainers at the Chikara Wrestle Factory, a school that has also featured Hallowicked, Claudio Castagnoli, Marty Jannetty, Terry Funk, and CM Punk in the same role.

During his Fire Ant run, Cassidy wrested everyone from A.J. Styles, to Drew Gulak, Tony Deppen, Nick Gage, Wheeler Yuta, John Silver, Jonathan Gresham, and The Young Bucks and established himself as one of the more underrated workers in the professional wrestling world. While folks weren't exactly beating down the doors of Chikara to make massive stars out of the promotion's very singular vision of what wrestling could be, more than a few alumni of the company have since gone on to huge careers once they left their goofy gimmicks in the past.

Cassidy clearly falls into that category.

Like Beretta and Taylor, Cassidy is an incredibly experienced performer who has been honing his craft for decades in the indies to prepare himself for this moment. He worked for small companies, massive promotions, legacy outfits, and plucky upstarts, and on more than a few occasions, was paid to show up and not really wrestle at all, instead opting to stand in the ring, but his hands in his pockets, and deliver his kicks of fury while the crowd went wild. While the Best Friends' collective style may not be universally popular, and may even rub a few, more traditionally-minded WWE-converted fans the wrong way, their embrace of what makes them unique has consistently given the people what they want and kept folks coming back to AEW for more.