Monday Morning Marth: December 16

Last week, I wrote about the biggest Melee upsets of the year. Lo and behold, last weekend, we saw yet another contender for the list appear in Preeminent shocking Hungrybox. Where would this rank on my list? I’m not quite sure it would even qualify given that it happened at a regional, but for what it’s worth, Preeminent went on to defeat MOF and make the top eight at the same event. On a broader level, it was a very good underdog run. Longtime readers of mine, even before the Monday Morning Marth days, will know there’s a special place in my heart for the biggest underdog runs of Melee history. For today’s piece, I’ve decided to revisit this idea. Obviously, a lot has changed since I made this list, and I wanted to see if I could add anything concrete to what was initially just a fun excuse to share some of the best stories in Melee.

Anyway, for this column, I looked at every single major top eight that’s happened since Pound 3 – specifically choosing this cutoff date because I think it broadly summarizes the “Five Gods” and “post-Five Gods” periods of Melee. Why was my focus these periods? Well, frankly, they’re the ones I’m most interested in and personally find comparable enough to assess. Once I did that, I took note of all the players who made major top eights and singled out the ones with significantly lower seeds or seemed out of place.

Keep in mind that the way we seed tournaments today is very different from the past. There’s subtle differences in the actual structure of older brackets that led to it being difficult to determine a player’s actual seed. For instance, it was common for majors to manually reseed their final Top 64 or Top 32 brackets following round two or prior phases. Throw in round-robin pools, as well as how those impact final brackets, and you have a problem several years later (though one that TOs, understandably, had no way of anticipating) for nerds like me.

With that said, I did my best to combine a mix of educated guessing, as well as talking to TOs from back then, to estimate what a player’s ‘seed’ heading into the tournament was before incorporating them onto my list. In the rare instance where I simply could not work my way backwards, I simply didn’t include them. Once I had my list of about 100 major top eight ‘underdog’ runs, their placements, and their seeds, I then created a big list organizing each of these runs by largest difference between their placements and seed (or at least my estimation to their seed).

I want to be clear: this is not one-to-one with a top ten greatest underdogs list run; I am only sharing this because I find it interesting. By no means do I think seed and placement should even have this relationship; I’m merely pointing out one possible metric for evaluating an underdog run – not saying it’s the only one.

Top Underdog Runs By Placement/Seed Difference

We’ll begin with Nicki, whose placement on this list I think has a lot more to do with the key metric’s inadequacy as the sole determinant. Still – Nicki entered Don’t Park on the Grass as the 25th seed and left it at third place. What makes this run special is clearly less so the seeding and placement difference and more about whom he beat and the character he played. Beating Jmook was one thing; it’s another to then go on to defeat each of Aura, Swedish Delight, Axe, Joshman, Cody Schwab, and Zain.

We now get into a fun duo of “sub-30” underdog runs that I must confess I totally forgot about. We’ll begin with DoH’s loser’s run to seventh place at Zenith 2012 – as the 30 seed, he entered loser’s bracket after getting upset by Stric9, only to then go on a wild top eight run where he beat The Lake, a then-Falco player Swedish Delight, Lambchops, old school Fox Winston, and PC Chris. Ginger’s first top eight is also interesting to see. With all due respect, this run came as a result of incredibly fortunate circumstances. To recap, Ginger played Chango, because Chango beat ChuDat. He played Azel, instead of Leffen, because Leffen dropped out of the Melee bracket to focus on Smash Ultimate. Rather than playing AbsentPage, who DQ’d in Top 64, he played Eddy Mexico, beat him, and then, after being sent to losers bracket, defeated Zoey, who upset 2saint. If there was a Melee Hall of Fame, Ginger would make it, but he clearly has way better achievements than a Mickey Mouse supermajor top eight.

There’s two showings that are pretty interesting to revisit: one of them being 2saint’s run at Genesis 9 and Abate’s legendary performance at The Big House 5. Coming into the tournament as the 32 seed, 2saint proceeded to upset aMSa in one of the biggest upsets of the decade, as well as slay Soonsay and KoDoRiN in subsequent sets. Abate’s run is more well-known; he notoriously broke the game against S2J, but his other wins over Axe and Duck shouldn’t be discarded either, having done them as the 33 seed.

The next three runs are two outlier runs in each respective player’s career and, in my mind, the second biggest story of The Big House 10. We’ll start with the set that officially killed Sunday morning Top 64 matches at Big House: when Bananas upset Plup. It’s worth noting that before this shocking turn of events, Bananas had already defeated a younger version of Cody Schwab; he’d then slay each of HugS and Fiction on the way to fifth place as the 35th seed. Laudandus had something more lowkey, but still pretty wild to revisit in his own fifth place performance at Pound 2016, when he beat Ryan Ford, Westballz, Bladewise, S2J, and Nintendude. Meanwhile, you have Soonsay’s Big House 10 run, which is honestly pretty insane when you consider how it seemingly, overnight, became the new reality for modern expectations we have for Soonsay. As the 37 seed, he beat Leffen, S2J, and Pipsqueak en route to fifth place. Taking a step back, there’s not that many performances that are literally so convincing that they instantly changed how we saw the player afterward.

On that note, I’ll quickly summarize Javi’s run at Apex 2012: after years of effectively only playing other top players of Mexico, he came to America and had his huge breakout showing, beating Cactuar, Weon-X, KoreanDJ, VanZ, Lovage, Hax, and PPMD in a monstrous breakout run. In fact, I have a whole article about it. Unsurprisingly, Javi is right here at No. 2 on our list, exactly where he was when I first wrote about underdog runs at all. 

We now get into the funny part: how the hell was ChuDat at Evo number one on this list? It turns out that ChuDat signed up for Evo fairly late and didn’t get seeded. Before the event, he had actually received a sponsorship from Melee Hell, an old Facebook Melee memes page, to go to Evo after he had barely attended anything. Obviously, he went on to defeat KirbyKaze in Top 128, then, in no order, Laudandus twice, Swedish Delight, Silent Wolf, HugS, and Westballz. His presence on this list speaks more to the way Evo used to run Melee events than it does his actual status as an underdog. The run itself is undeniably impressive, but yeah – while it’s a surprise, it speaks more to the scuffed nature of Melee majors back in the day.

Remember: I do not think this is the definitive Top 10 Underdog Runs list. It was only an early attempt to find one metric that could get us in any direction at all. In next week’s column, I’m going to see if there are any better ways of assessing this by the numbers – I’ll see what I can do to normalize placements into scores, as well as expected placements by seed, and try to find how to adjust for quality of wins.