Tournament

Spectators at the Let's Make Big Moves Ultimate tournament hosted by Even Matchup Gaming in January 2020.

A tournament, or tourney for short, is a competition involving a group of players competing in a series of games amongst each other to determine who is the best player between them, with there often being some sort of prize for the highest placing players. The format of a tournament varies, though it typically takes the form of a structured bracket where players engage in individual matches to gradually eliminate each other from the tournament until only one player remains. Every game in the Super Smash Bros. series has had an active tournament scene, though the size of each game's scene can fluctuate greatly over the years.

Overview & history by game

The competitive Super Smash Bros. scene is currently centered around the long-running Super Smash Bros. Melee scene and the larger Super Smash Bros. Ultimate scene, while some of the other games in the series maintain smaller but distinct competitive communities.

Competitive Super Smash Bros. for the Nintendo 64 never had a period as the premier competitive Smash game, as the foundations of competitive Smash were not established until more than a year after Melee's release. Nonetheless, due to its unique gameplay, which is distinct from that of all other Smash games, Smash 64 has maintained a smaller but dedicated global competitive scene since the release of Melee. In addition to traditional in-person tournaments, competitive play also frequently takes place online through services such as Kaillera.

The Tournament Go series, first hosted by Matt Deezie in April 2002, is often credited with originating theSuper Smash Bros. Melee tournament scene and contributing to the establishment of the western Smash competitive scene as a whole. Melee maintained an active global tournament scene in the years following its release, being featured at both grassroots tournaments and events run by large e-sports organizations, most notably Major League Gaming. Following the release of Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the Melee scene experienced a decline as many players moved on to Brawl or exited the competitive scene altogether. However, the Melee scene gradually rebounded as many players, both old and new, returned to the game following dissatisfaction with Brawl, with the success of Revival of Melee in 2009 serving as a major catalyst. Melee then experienced explosive growth in popularity beginning in 2013, fueled by its inclusion at EVO 2013 and the release of the documentary series The Smash Brothers, which helped usher in a renaissance for the game throughout the rest of the 2010s. Despite a modest decline in the number of major tournaments and tournament attendance in recent years, Melee has retained a large competitive scene far exceeding that of its early years, with the release of rollback netcode by Project Slippi in 2020 contributing heavily to the scene's endurance during the COVID-19 pandemic and into the 2020s. The Melee scene has historically been more heavily centered in North America than those of other Smash games, with the United States and Canada hosting the vast majority of the game's major tournaments and most of its top players hailing from these two countries. Smaller Melee scenes have existed in other regions, most notably Europe.

Despite the strong dislike that many Melee players had for Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the game developed its own scene with a mostly distinct playerbase. For several years following Brawl's release, its tournament scene was on par with, and at times larger than, Melee's. Brawl peaked at Apex 2012 in January 2012, which set the record for the largest Smash tournament at the time with 400 entrants. Brawl experienced a significant decline following Apex 2012, however, due to divisions over the game's ruleset, most notably the legality of Meta Knight, the upcoming release of Smash 4, the rise of Project M, and growing dissatisfaction with the game. Apex 2013 and Apex 2014 still attracted well over 300 entrants for Brawl, but few other large tournaments during this period surpassed 100 entrants, and several regions saw their Brawl scenes disappear. The release of Smash 4 accelerated this decline, with the vast majority of remaining Brawl players moving on to the new game. A small group of dedicated players continued to play Brawl, however, and by the later 2010s had established a niche scene that continues to this day, with Brawl tournaments sometimes appearing alongside other Smash games at larger tournaments.

When it was the newest Smash game, Super Smash Bros. 4 similarly rivaled or exceeded the size of Melee's tournament scene. Its competitive scene experienced a rapid growth in size, facilitated by the availability of well-developed streaming technology, improved social networking, and other advances in tournament infrastructure, in addition to an existing Brawl playerbase that largely moved on to the newer game. Smash 4 also attracted casual players to the competitive Smash scene to a greater extent than previous games, due in part to its greater competitive focus compared to its predecessor, including faster gameplay, improved balancing, and the addition of competitive-focused online modes such as For Glory. The growing mainstream popularity of competitive Smash also contributed to its growth. Smash 4's tournament scene peaked in 2016, with the Smash 4 bracket at EVO 2016 setting the record for the largest Smash tournament ever with 2662 entrants. Several more Smash 4 tournaments subsequently surpassed 1000 entrants or came close to doing so. The scene began to decline in late 2017, however, with most recurring tournament series seeing substantial drops in entrant totals from the previous year, due in part to stagnation and the game's balance being heavily affected by Bayonetta and Cloud. This decline accelerated after Super Smash Bros. Ultimate was revealed at E3 2018 and announced for release in December of that year. Smash 4 tournaments nevertheless retained respectable entrant numbers through the end of the game's competitive lifespan, with the Smash 4 brackets at both EVO 2018 and Super Smash Con 2018 attracting over 1300 entrants. Following the release of Ultimate, the Smash 4 tournament scene became nearly non-existent as its playerbase almost entirely transitioned to Ultimate. Remaining Smash 4 tournaments have mostly taken place at events that explicitly host tournaments for all Smash games, such as Super Smash Con.

In a similar vein to Smash 4, the release of Ultimate resulted in another major expansion of the competitive scene. This growth was facilitated by the game's greater competitive focus compared to Smash 4 and its substantially larger potential playerbase, as Ultimate outsold all previous Smash games by a significant margin. Within its first year, Ultimate established the largest competitive scene of any Smash game to date, with more than half a dozen tournaments attracting over 1000 entrants. It also broke the all-time record for the largest Smash tournament, with the Ultimate bracket at EVO 2019 attracting 3534 entrants. Ultimate suffered a major setback in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which halted large in-person Smash tournaments for over a year. As restrictions on social events were relaxed and in-person tournaments resumed, the Ultimate scene gradually rebounded. By 2023, its tournament activity had approached its 2019 peak, with 40 tournaments reaching major status and eight attracting over 1000 entrants. The post-pandemic scene peaked that year at 2607 entrants at Super Smash Con 2023.

Project M, a Brawl mod featuring gameplay and design elements modeled after Melee's, has developed a distinct competitive scene of its own. First released in 2011, the game experienced a rapid rise in popularity beginning in 2013 and was increasingly featured at major Smash tournaments, including supermajors such as Apex 2014. Initially considered a side event at many tournaments, Project M eventually established its own dedicated tournament scene, including major tournaments devoted to the game. However, due to its ambigious legal status as an unofficial fan mod not endorsed by Nintendo, the game has struggled throughout its history to maintain a presence at large tournaments, streaming groups and e-sports organizations. The game saw a major decline in support from large tournaments following the end of official development on the mod in late 2015. However, it has retained a distinct competitive scene through successor mods, most notably Project +.

Locations and sizes

"Major tournament" redirects here. For a list of major tournaments, see List of major tournaments.

Tournaments are held regularly in many regions all over the world, with the largest overall community centered mainly in the United States, which has not only the largest and generally most talented player base, but also the largest tournaments, most notably GENESIS and EVO, which attract competition from all over the world. Japan also features a thriving competitive scene, and in recent years has become one of the largest competitive scenes for the most recent Smash titles. Canada, Mexico, and northern and western Europe (in particular France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands) also feature large, high-level competitive Smash scenes, while Australia, south Asia, and Central and South America have smaller but still notable scenes, and even smaller scattered scenes exist throughout the rest of the world.

Various terms exist for describing the size, frequency, and purpose of a tournament. These include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Local/Smashfest: A smaller event, often without an entry fee, that is generally more casual and social than competitive in nature. Local tournaments often feature several different games and allow players to compete in a more casual environment. Locals generally have a maximum entrant cap of around 50 players; events with higher attendance or larger entrant caps are often considered special events within the series, such as anniversaries, or are classified as regionals.
• STD: "Smash 'Til Dawn", An overnight tournament, often on a local scale, where the goal is to keep playing until the sun rises (or later). Smash the Record is a very large example of this. These events became less common as competitive-Smash became more mainstream.
• Weekly/Biweekly/Triweekly/Monthly: Recurring tournaments, often held on a local scale and usually at the same venue, that generally feature a regular group of players at each iteration. Depending on their size and the strength of their player pool, some monthly events may also be classified as regional tournaments or higher. Recurring tournaments at the local level are also often simply referred to as "locals".
• Regional: A mid-sized tournament that draws significant attendance from within its host region, and often at least some attendance from neighboring regions. On most global rankings, regional tournaments are tiered as C tier. Especially large regionals that attract significant out-of-region attendance or feature multiple top players are sometimes referred to as "superregionals", and are often tiered as B tiers on most global rankings.
• Pre-major local or Pre-local: A small-scale, low-stakes tournament held prior to a larger tournament, and therefore often featuring players from outside the region who are present for the purpose of attending the larger tournament.
• Major: A large tournament that draws significant attendance from a broad geographic area. In North America, these tournaments generally attract players from across the United States and Canada, while European majors may feature players from across the continent. Majors can also draw attendance from other continents; for example, European and Japanese players often travel to large American majors. Major tournaments are typically hosted at large, mainstream venues such as convention centers or hotel ballrooms and are often supported by sponsorships from outside companies and organizations. In the past, major tournaments were also referred to as national tournaments, although this terminology has since become antiquated, only being used to reference especially large superregionals that aren't large enough to be considered majors. Most global rankings tier majors as A tiers.
• Supermajor: The most prestigious tournaments in the Smash scene, featuring a large proportion of the world's top players. Supermajors are generally considered among the most important tournaments of the ranking period for players in the scene, and attract substantial viewership and publicity, both from within the Smash community and from the broader esports industry. Historical examples of Smash-centered supermajor series include MLG, EVO, The Big House, Apex, GENESIS and Supernova. Tournaments are generally considered supermajors primarily on the strength of the attending player base, regardless of the overall size of the tournament. For example, invitationals such as Smash Summit have often been considered supermajors because of the large proportion of top-ranked players in attendance, despite having much fewer entrants than an average major. For statistical purposes, supermajors are generally considered a subset of major tournaments. Most global rankings tier supermajors as S tiers, though some rankings have given other tierings for larger-than-normal supermajors.
• Circuit event: A tournament that forms part of a regional or international circuit, such as the 2GG Championship Series or Smash World Tour. Players are usually awarded points based on their placements, with the top point earners on the leaderboard invited to a finale tournament or the overall points winner receiving a prize at the end of the season.
• Invitational: A tournament in which a limited number of players are invited to compete, rather than allowing open registration. Players can be invited in a variety of ways, including receiving a direct invitation from the tournament organizers, qualifying through a predetermined tournament or being selected through fan voting. Invitationals often feature large prize pools rather than relying primarily on entry fees. The most prominent example of invitationals in the Smash scene have historically been the Smash Summit series.

Prices and fees

Most tournaments require an entry fee from participants to play. These prices vary by region and tournament size, and differ for each type of event being entered; a typical entry fee amount for smaller tournaments is $5, while larger tournaments run $10, with it being uncommon even for the largest supermajors to have a bracket entry fee over $10. Entry fees go into a "pot" for an event and are awarded to the winners of that event in pre-announced amounts, usually a percentage of the pot (for example a common payout split at small tournaments is 60% for first, 30% for second, and 10% for third, though the exact splits and how deep the payouts go vary greatly across tournaments). Tournament directors will usually charge an extra amount, usually referred to as a venue fee, to help pay for the costs to use the venue, equipment, paying others for various tourney-related services, and for their own time. Venue fees usually cost between $5 to $10, though larger tournaments will frequently charge more, especially for nationals that last multiple days, where venue fees can run potentially up to the $100+ range. Often TOs will offer discounts on the venue fee for doing things that help run the tourney, such as supplying a setup and volunteering to help the TO, and larger tournaments will often charge a lower venue fee to players that pre-register early, while charging a higher venue fee to those who register late.

Legal issues involving the exchange of money

Some public venues like schools and places of worship consider gaming tournaments a form of gambling and ban it as such. All tournament organizers are encouraged to check with potential venues to make sure they are tolerant of players paying to enter. Several well-known tournaments have had to cancel events when a public official discovered that money was changing hands between players at the event.

Smash Bros. tournaments are often thought to be illegal in Iowa under §725.7 of the Iowa Code, which states that it is unlawful for any one to "participate in a game for any sum of money or other property of any value" other than those outlined in subsection 2. However, nobody is known to have been arrested due to participating in an esports tournament. There have been several attempts to pass legislation to explicitly legalize fantasy sports in the state, which may have implications for esports as well. House Bill 165, introduced to the Iowa House of Representatives in January 2015 attempts to create a definition for "Bona Fide Contests", that among other additions, would legalize paying tournaments for games “by player-directed movement with a video or electronic gaming device”. The current law allows for video machine golf tournament games, but not necessarily any other type of video game.

Tournament formats

There are many bracket formats commonly used by modern Smash tournaments, the most popular being listed here. The exact details may vary between tournaments, and some may use a different format entirely, but these tournaments are few and far between.

Double elimination bracket

The winners' bracket portion of a double elimination event.

The losers' bracket, where a player is placed after losing in winners' bracket.

The double elimination format is by far the most common bracket type at tournaments. A double elimination bracket is derived from the single elimination format but is split into two sections, the winners' and losers' brackets (W and L for short). The W bracket is almost identical to a single elimination bracket; however, losing in the W bracket does not eliminate a player from the tournament. They instead drop into the L bracket at a position that reflects how far they advanced into the W bracket. Anyone who loses in the L bracket (their second loss of the event) is eliminated.

The first round of the L bracket pairs two players who just lost in the first round of the W bracket. The winner of this set then plays a player who drops from the second round of W bracket due to a loss there; the player is placed in the bracket at the letter/number corresponding to the set in W bracket where they lost. (In the images at right, Champ lost at W-A and dropped into L-A.) Further L bracket rounds alternate between these two set setups: two players who survived earlier L bracket rounds play, and the winner of that faces someone dropping from W bracket.

There are three sets in a double-elimination bracket that are of special importance to participants:

• Winners' Bracket Finals: occurs between two players who advance to the last set in W bracket without losing. The winner of this set is guaranteed at least a second place finish, while the loser will at worst finish third. The set in W bracket marked "C" is the winners finals set in the first image at right.
• Losers' Bracket Finals: the loser of the winners' bracket finals plays against the one player to advance through all the L bracket rounds. The loser of this set is awarded third place overall. The set labeled "C" in the second image at right is the losers' bracket finals.
• Championship Set (aka Grand Finals): the end-all set of the event. The winner of this set gets first place, the loser second. The wrinkle in this is that the player from the losers' bracket must win two consecutive sets to win the championship as opposed to the winners' bracket player only requiring one – this is due to the "players are eliminated upon losing two sets" philosophy and has the side effect of discouraging players from intentionally dropping a tough set to fall into the presumed-easier losers' bracket.

These three sets usually require a greater number of individual games to be played before determining a winner. Standard tournament rules have most sets being a set of "best two of three", while the three sets above are often sets of "best three of five".

Every player is guaranteed at least two sets in a double elimination bracket, making it a popular alternative to the single elimination format. The format also affords a player the chance to make a comeback after losing once in W bracket, as well as provide a greater difference in placing, to aid with ranking players' tournament performance.

The size of a double elimination bracket is determined in the same fashion as a single elimination bracket. Half the remaining players are eliminated every two rounds of the L bracket. The total number of sets for an n-size bracket is equal to 2(n−1); thus, a double elimination bracket takes exactly twice as long to complete as a single elimination bracket (assuming the bracket is not reset).

Placements guide

The following is the list of placements and which stage and round the player was eliminated. # refers to the maximum number of players who may share the placement. EVO uses a similar model for their events. This list is accurate for tournaments using double-elimination throughout, and lower placements would be inaccurate for tournaments using round robin pools or divisions, for example.

Place	Eliminated in	#	Round of
1st	N/A	1	N/A
2nd	Grand finals	1	Top 2
3rd	Losers finals	1	Top 3
4th	Losers semi-finals	1	Top 4
5th	Losers quarter-finals	2	Top 6
7th	Losers eighths	2	Top 8
9th	5 rounds before Grand Finals	4	Top 12
13th	6 rounds before Grand Finals	4	Top 16
17th	7 rounds before Grand Finals	8	Top 24
25th	8 rounds before Grand Finals	8	Top 32
33rd	9 rounds before Grand Finals	16	Top 48
49th	10 rounds before Grand Finals	16	Top 64
65th	11 rounds before Grand Finals	32	Top 96
97th	12 rounds before Grand Finals	32	Top 128
129th	13 rounds before Grand Finals	64	Top 192
193rd	14 rounds before Grand Finals	64	Top 256
257th	15 rounds before Grand Finals	128	Top 384
385th	16 rounds before Grand Finals	128	Top 512
513th	17 rounds before Grand Finals	256	Top 768
769th	18 rounds before Grand Finals	256	Top 1,024
1,025th	19 rounds before Grand Finals	512	Top 1,536
1,537th	20 rounds before Grand Finals	512	Top 2,048
2,049th	21 rounds before Grand Finals	1,024	Top 3,072
3,073rd	22 rounds before Grand Finals	1,024	Top 4,096
4,097th	23 rounds before Grand Finals	2,048	Top 6,144
6,145th	24 rounds before Grand Finals	2,048	Top 8,192

Round robin

Round robin is a tournament format where every player in the tournament plays every single other player. There are no brackets and no eliminations; everyone keeps playing until every matchup has been played. Round robin is most commonly used in major invitationals and is only occasionally used in open brackets, usually in events with a small entrants count.

Advantages

• They are perfectly fair, as every player plays the same people, thus preventing players from having an easier or more difficult tournament progression than other players (which is highly probable in a bracket type tournament, due to issues such as faulty seeding or being placed against players who play characters that counter theirs).
• Seeding does not matter, and as such, TOs do not have to spend time creating a bracket while making sure it's seeded properly and balanced, thus allowing the tournament to start sooner.
• They are optimally accurate, as they give the maximum amount of information to base placings on.
• They provide the most amount of games played, spread equally among all players.
• Relating to the point above, they are especially useful in creating more matches and a longer tournament in the event of small turnout, thus allowing small tournaments to feel larger.

Disadvantages

• Round robins take an infeasible amount of time to complete for more than a dozen or so players. The number of games that must be played increases quadratically as more players are added, meaning that round robins can only be used for small gatherings. For x players, the number of matches required is x(x−1)/2. To illustrate this problem, if a 256-person round robin was done, it would take approximately 6 days of consecutive around-the-clock smashing.

A 5-way tie in a 5-person round robin tournament.

• One rare but potential danger to round robin tournaments is the possibility of a tie. Round robins are not assured to have a clearly cut winner like brackets do. For example, let there be 3 players, A, B, and C. A beats B, B beats C, and C beats A. Then A, B, and C all beat everyone else in the tournament. A, B, and C are then each in a three-way tie for first place. This principle is not limited to 3 players, though; it is completely possible that everyone in the entire tournament ties for first and last simultaneously.
• Bracket manipulation is much more probable in a round robin, as it's significantly more feasible for a higher level player to afford intentionally losing a match or two to friends to boost their placing, while not harming their own placing.
• "Meaningless matches" will occur, when players are mathematically eliminated from a money placing, or in the case of round robin pools, mathematically eliminated from advancing to the next round of pools or bracket, before finishing all their matches. All remaining matches of theirs become "meaningless", as the match outcome will have no impact on their capability to win money or secure a spot to advance further in the tournament. As a result, these players may not care about their remaining matches if they do not care enough about bolstering their final placing, and either drop out (thus automatically forfeiting all remaining matches), or play their remaining matches with half-hearted effort (thus lose matches they would win otherwise). This in turn will inflate the placings of other players they were set to play after being knocked out of contention by essentially giving them "free wins", potentially disrupting the tournament by allowing an undeserving player to win money or advance over a better player, and overall undermining the advantages a round robin brings. Even in the case where no player's placing gets unfairly inflated in a tournament by this, players are generally less enthusiastic about playing "meaningless matches" than bracket matches with clear progression on the line.
• The lack of a clear Finals set can hurt spectatorship, as those sets are typically the mostly highly viewed sets during tournament streams, and lacking a clear Finals set can make the tournament feel less conclusive for both players and spectators, especially if one player wins enough to secure first place before all sets are played. To alleviate this issue, however, tournaments may instead have the two highest ranking players in the round robin play one more set at the end against each other to determine the winner, and can even emulate a Grand Finals set by requiring the second place player to win two sets to win the tournament. Alternatively, the round robin may be split into two separate groups to begin with, where then the highest finishing player of the two groups face off in a Finals set at the end.

Pools

Pools contain a subset of an entrant field, also informally known as "groups". Using this mechanism, players are split into appropriately-sized pools and do a "mini-tournament" with other participants in their pool using the pre-announced pool format, with the most common format pre-2013 being round-robin to yield perfectly accurate results and to give less skilled players more tournament matches, while post-2013 bracket pools have become predominant, as the explosion in the size of Smash tournaments necessitated a format that was more practical for the much larger tournaments. In round-robin pools, after all matches have finished, players are either seeded or eliminated in their pool based on their performance. Pools are usually used to narrow a large entrant field into a smaller subset for double elimination bracket play or for another round of pools, though they are occasionally just used to seed players in bracket without elimination. Examples of this method are:

• In a tournament with 160 participants, the tournament organizer might arrange it so that there are 32 pools of 5 players, and then the top 2 players of each pool would make the 64-man bracket.
• In a tournament with 48 participants, the tournament organizer might arrange it so that there are 8 pools of 6 players, and then the top 4 players of each pool would make the 32-man bracket.
• In a tournament with 224 participants, the tournament organizer might arrange it so that there are 32 pools of 7 players, and then the top 2 players of each pool would make the 64-man bracket.

In sufficiently large tournaments, 2 or more rounds of pools would be adequate to useful. Examples are:

• Apex 2012 Brawl singles – 400 participants
  • 80 pools of 5, top 2 players of each pool advanced to a second round of pools, yielding 160 participants.
  • 32 pools of 5, top 2 players of each pool advanced to the 64-man bracket.
• Zero Challenge 2 – 192 participants
  • 32 pools of 6, top 3 players of each pool advanced to a second round of pools, yielding 96 participants.
  • 16 pools of 6, top 4 players of each pool advanced to the 64-man bracket.

Pools are usually only employed at large tournaments. N number of entrants are split into P number of pools, and the top Y finishers in each pool are either placed into a second round of pools or seeded into a double elimination bracket, which proceeds normally. The number of entrants for the subsequent round or bracket is P × Y. Placing well in a pool gives a player a better position in a bracket or the next round of pools, giving extra incentive to strive for the top pool positions. Tournaments using round-robin pools will result in a significantly larger amount of games being played than without them. There are a total of B(B−1)/2 sets per pool, with B players per pool. Thus a round of round-robin pools with N participants total requires a grand total of N(B−1)/2 sets.

Bracket pools differ by employing the usual double-elimination format in pools, where pools essentially become mini-brackets where a certain amount of top placing players (typically between the top 2 to top 4) feed into a final bracket or further bracket pools. Usually a player that enters the loser bracket in bracket pools will remain in losers for the rest of their tourney run, with advancing to the final bracket or next round of pools not resetting their position to the winner side, so everyone can still only lose twice before being eliminated at most tourneys that run bracket pools, though occasionally tourneys running bracket pools may have a players reset back onto the winner's side upon advancing, such as at Apex 2013. Compared to round-robin pools, bracket pools lose the advantage of guaranteeing weaker players more than two sets, but they take considerably less time and effort to run, making them considerably more practical for large tournaments. Additionally, while a tournament with bracket pools may not seem to differ functionally from a normal double-elimination bracket, employing bracket pools makes large tournaments far easier to organize and run than just running a large normal double-elimination bracket would be.

Swiss system

The Swiss System, as used heavily in the professional chess world, guarantees each player the same number of matches and attempts to match players against others of similar skill throughout the tournament. Swiss system tournaments are rare in the Smash community due to their complexity and the large number of matches they create.

Players are assigned matches in the first round either randomly or based on some method of seeding (an attempt to rank players in order of skill before the tournament starts). Winning this set gives a player 1 "point", and losing does not give any points. Each successive round involves pairing two players with the same number of points (attempting to avoid repeat matchups), playing out those matches, assigning points, and repeating for the next round. Swiss systems generally run until only a single person has no losses; this will occur after R rounds, where R is the base-2 logarithm of the total number of entrants, rounded upwards. Swiss brackets are sometimes run for a pre-determined number of rounds, with the winner being the person with the most points overall. This format reaches similar results to a round robin, but with the potential for meaningless matches removed.

The Swiss format can also be run in pools instead of the traditional bracket and round-robin formats, such as was done at Smash 'N' Splash 5 and Ludwig Smash Invitational. Though like with running Swiss format tournaments, this format is rarely used in pools due to its complexity and large amount of matches created.

Single elimination bracket

An eight-player single elimination bracket. First-round matches are on the left.

Single elimination tournaments are the least common of the four formats for Super Smash Bros. and video games in general. Despite this, tournaments sometimes use them for side events like crew battles to save time. Despite single elimination's flaws, Japanese Smash 64 tournaments often use the single elimination format, even in large, national tournaments. Some early Melee tournaments used single elimination.

In a single elimination bracket, players are arranged into a hierarchical structure where matches are played between two entrants; the winner advances to play another player the next round, and the loser is eliminated from the tournament. The player who wins the very last match of the bracket, after all other entrants have been eliminated, is the winner of the event, and the person who loses the final match finishes in second place. Most sports tournaments (like the NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship) use a single elimination format.

Single elimination brackets are often described in terms of the number of entrants playing in the bracket. Because half the remaining players are eliminated during each round of the bracket, the total number of rounds is based on the binary logarithm of the entrant count (rounded upwards). A three-round bracket is used for 8 players, four rounds for 9 to 16 players, five rounds for 17 to 32 players, and so on. A bracket's size is usually defined as the smallest power of two that is greater than or equal to the number of entrants. Thus, a bracket with 47 entrants is referred to as a 64-man bracket, because 64 is the smallest power of two which is greater than 47. The size of the bracket also reflects the total number of matches throughout the entire bracket: for an n-size bracket, n-1 matches must be played in total.

Byes are used to fill positions in the bracket when the number of entrants is not a power of two. Any player facing a bye automatically advances to the next round. Byes are usually given to the top seeds in the bracket.

Single elimination brackets are rarely used at Smash tournaments for multiple reasons. One such reason players dislike single elimination is that half the players are eliminated having only played a single match (and every player overall gets to play significantly fewer matches). Another reason is that just having one bad match or encountering one bad matchup can result in a premature elimination for a player that would have placed better otherwise, thus giving less room for error, and overall less accuracy in the results. Single elimination also offers much less difference in placing, making them less useful for ranking players' performance.

Arcadian format

An Arcadian is a tournament format where all the ranked players from a specific region are banned from participating, therefore only allowing the unranked players to participate, giving the unranked players a chance at winning money and the glory of winning a tournament that they would typically have no realistic chance at. Arcadians still feature the same rulesets as other tournaments, however. Most Arcadians also disallow players from outside the tourney's region from participating, but TOs may screen out-of-region players to determine if they're eligible instead of banning OoR players wholesale. Arcadians may additionally have a clause to allow TOs to bar entry to any technically unranked player that would be deemed too good to enter, such as a player who was only unranked for failing to reach a PR's attendance requirement rather than from a lack of ability. Arcadians are most common at local and regional tournaments, and most regions periodically run Arcadians, typically once per a ranking season. Notably, 2GG: Breakthrough 2019 holds the record for the largest Arcadian tournament within the Smash series.

In-game Tournament Mode

Although Melee, Brawl and Ultimate each included a Tournament Mode for local play and Ultimate features an online tournament mode, the in-game mode is basically never used in actual competitive play, due to a variety of limitations of the mode relative to the rather complex structures that serious tournaments require:

• Tournament matches are often played in a best of 3 or 5 format, while Tournament Mode only allows single-game sets.
• Tournament matches allow players to switch characters between matches, while Tournament Mode forces players to remain a single character for the entire tournament.
• Tournaments almost never use a single-elimination bracket, which is the only bracket type available in Tournament Mode.
• Tournaments require their brackets to be properly seeded for reasonably accurate results, while Tournament Mode gives no control over seeding and forces a randomized bracket (outside of Ultimate).
• Tournaments don't often enforce a limit to the maximum number of players and can contain hundreds of participants, while Tournament Mode cannot handle more than a very limited 64 (in Melee) or 32 (in Brawl and Ultimate).
• Tournament Mode doesn’t support more than four players per match, Smashdown, doubles play or Squad Strike for any tournaments that use these settings.
• Tournaments require multiple setups to be run efficiently, while Tournament Mode can only exist on a single setup. Using Tournament Mode to simply keep track of brackets is additionally a very slow process given only one match can be edited at a time, any errors made cannot be corrected without redoing the whole tournament mode and each console used could instead be used as a setup players play on to progress the tournament.

For these reasons, external tournament management systems are the norm in competitive play. The in-game tournament modes are more frequently used for casual play, as these limitations are less impactful on lower-stakes games played quickly between casual players of varying skill levels, and because the in-game tournament modes offer a variety of quality-of-life features, such as in-game bracket management, in-game button-mapping, and dynamic controller assignment, that would otherwise be tedious or difficult to manage for the casual player.

Cheating

Due to the competitive nature of tournaments and the stakes involved with winning and losing, parties attempting to cheat is an inevitability. Cheating is defined as one or more individuals conspiring to break the agreed upon rules or finding loopholes in said rules to gain an unfair advantage or some other illicit benefit.

Cheating can take many forms, each varying in severity, subtlety, and goal. An obvious form of cheating is outright breaking the rules. This can include attempting to play in an environment outside of the typical structure without the consent of all other involved parties, intentionally performing actions that are explicitly banned, or hacking the game to play differently.

More subtle forms of cheating that reach a realm of ambiguity include intentionally playing worse than expected or convincing an opponent to play worse, often referred to as "sandbagging", as well as intentionally losing games to avoid certain players and having an overall easier time in a tournament, sometimes referred to as "match fixing" or "bracketology". While these do not necessarily break the rules, they are generally frowned upon and will lead to disciplinary action if proven to have occurred.

Cheating in the more literal form of altering gameplay (through gameplay modifications within the game itself) is extremely rare especially in the current day; this is due to tournament organizers usually being in charge of the systems the players use, and the prevalence of live streaming and recordings, both of which make any attempted gameplay modifications quick to spot. The inability for a normal copy of the game to play against modded characters online also make it a non-issue for online tournaments. The Super Pichu cheating scandal is the only recorded case of illegal character modifications in a tournament setting.

Cheating is usually punished if discovered, though not every situation is black and white. Not all cases of cheating are created equal, and punishments are often more or less severe because of it. Less consequential instances like pausing during a match may result in forfeiting a stock at most, while something more severe like fixing matches may result in disqualification from the tournament and a ban from all future events. There are also cases of genuine mistakes or "act of God" situations where no one party is at fault, which is usually dealt with on a case by case basis by the tournament organizer.

Some players go out of their way to argue over what is and isn't considered cheating, an action dubbed "rule lawyering." They will carefully comb through every applicable rule and use the exact words on paper to interpret said rules in a way that benefits them and usually harms the opponent. Players who attempt this are often not successful, as they would be arguing against tournament organizers who often made the rules and essentially have the "correct" interpretation of those rules. A more malicious variant of this philosophy is "rule sharking," where players attempt to bait their opponent into doing something that technically breaks the rules and raises an objection to get them punished in some fashion. Rule sharking is often looked down upon and seen as disrespectful, as the objections are made in bad faith and the rules that end up being broken are often obscure and inconsequential. If a TO believes the objection is ridiculous, they will sometimes wave it off and tell all parties to continue as normal.

See also

• Side events
• Tournament rulesets
• Advanced technique
• Tournament organizer
• List of major tournaments
• List of largest Smash tournaments
• Super Smash Bros. in competitive play
• Super Smash Bros. Melee in competitive play
• Super Smash Bros. Brawl in competitive play
• Super Smash Bros. 4 in competitive play
• Super Smash Bros. Ultimate in competitive play

External links

• Majors and regionals public calendars:
  • Smashbros subreddit event calendar - Public calendar of notable majors and regionals.
  • Melee majors - Website tracking upcoming majors.
• Local finders:
  • Start.gg - The primary website for organizing tournaments and to find tournaments nearby.
  • Smash map - Visual map showing the tournament in your region.
  • Smashcords - Contains lists of various regions Discord groups.
  • List of facebook groups of many regions.
• On Wikipedia:
  • Single-elimination tournament
  • Double-elimination tournament
  • Round-robin tournament
  • Swiss system tournament
• On Smashboards:
  • Ssbm compendium of knowledge - Collection of resources and notable guides.
  • The ABC's of Tournament Hosting
• Competitive resources:
  • The Melee Library - Extensive collection of resources and guides for competing in ssbm.
  • Smash 64 competive resources website
  • Smashbros subreddit resources
  • SSBM subreddit resources