I miss The Big House. Every October, this was one of the tournaments I used to look forward to the most. Since Cody Schwab made one of the greatest losers bracket runs of all-time to win The Big House 11, this series has gone on hiatus, and we have suffered greatly as a community for it. With due respect to the tournament organizers who are doing their best to step up to cumulatively fill the void left by Robin Harn’s departure, it is still a very big void.
While this series is not around any more, it still occupies a huge place in our community. Throughout its decade-long history, it has contributed to some of the most iconic moments in Melee, like aMSa’s historic victory at The Big House 10, or Mang0’s incredible win from the loser’s bracket at The Big House 9. The list certainly doesn’t end there either; practically every other year of the 2010s was filled with some historic event that happened at The Big House.
To recap all of them would take way too much time and effort. At the very least though, I can filter my attempt to celebrate this series through the lens of one topic I love to discuss quite a bit: upsets. In similar fashion to what I did for Genesis and even Supernova, I’ll be sharing what I believe to be the greatest upsets in Big House history.
Methodology
In preparation for this column, I went through every single available bracket of The Big House, whether it was hosted on Liquipedia, Challonge, or start.gg. While doing so, I took note of notable upsets by seed across each phase of a Big House tournament. I ended up with 76 upsets, which gives us enough information to ensure not missing out on anything essential.
Like I did with Supernova, I gathered the relevant information about both players involved in an upset, beginning with their seed. After collecting each player’s seed, I then calculated the relative Upset Factor of each set, which is just another way of measuring the normalized difference between each player’s expected placement by seed.
After this step, I classified the involved players for each of my upsets by placing them in a ‘ranking range’ estimated from the closest ranking around The Big House of a given year. Broadly speaking, there are ten categories of players, ranging from Top 5 to anyone who had notable enough results to warrant honorable mention status on a local PR or winning an Arcadian. For players that were nationally notable but not active enough to make the Top 100, I made my best educated guess as to where they ‘would’ have finished had they been active. And finally, as I mentioned, I subtracted the difference between the two player’s ranking ranges as “PNR.” if you’ll remember, I forgot what it stood for as an acronym, but that’s all part of the charm.
NOTE: For upsets that happened pre-SSBMRank, I made my best educated guess based on national-level results of the time, as well as using RetroSSBMRank as a loose guideline.
However, for this edition of my upsets list, I decided to take a different approach to upsets where head-to-head results would have realistically factored into my future analysis. In my Supernova piece, I factored in math, but for this one, I decided to just eliminate these sets entirely as they don’t exactly fit the spirit of what I’m looking for. I guess I may as well begin with my first ‘snub’ from this list: Silent Wolf’s third straight takedown of Mew2King at The Big House 6. In the end, I normalized the values of our two main columns – Upset Factor and PNR – by turning them into Z-Scores, then taking their averages together to make a final column: UpsetScore. This is a fancy way of measuring how far away from the median ‘notable upset’ they are within our sample.
Honorable Mentions
In this section, I’m going to talk about all the upsets that ranked in the positives for our final UpsetScore. These are the results that are all in the top half of our upsets list.
| Tournament | Upset | UpsetScore |
| The Big House 10 | Timebones over Eggy | 0.13 |
| The Big House | RaynEX over SFAT | 0.19 |
| The Big House 4 | Kels over Axe | 0.19 |
| The Big House 4 | Lucky over Hungrybox | 0.19 |
| The Big House 5 | Swedish Delight over Westballz | 0.19 |
| The Big House 6 | Nakamaman over DJ Nintendo | 0.19 |
| The Big House 6 | InfiniteNumbers over Westballz | 0.19 |
| The Big House 8 | Gahtzu over Zain | 0.19 |
| The Big House 9 | Fiction over Wizzrobe | 0.19 |
| The Big House 11 | Zasa over SDJ | 0.19 |
A lot of you who were around in the 2010s will recognize many of these, both as iconic for their time, but also as relative time capsules of that era. It’s funny to think of a time when Fiction looked invincible against every Captain Falcon player in the world (something that I think he will get right back to once he decides to travel to majors again), as well as a time when Gahtzu and broadly Captain Falcon were thorns in Zain’s side.
Out of these upsets, I think my favorite one is Lucky over Hungrybox. Although it would not be the only time that Lucky ever beat him, the implications were pretty massive. For about a decade after this set, Hungrybox made every single major top eight he entered, with this result being the last time for years in which he ever got eliminated before that phase of a major bracket. I remember watching it live and wondering if Hungrybox was ever going to win a major with so many deadly Fox players in attendance. Good times.
| Tournament | Result | UpsetScore |
| The Big House 11 | Zasa over Spark | 0.41 |
| The Big House 11 | Joka over TheRealThing | 0.41 |
| The Big House | Duck over SFAT | 0.48 |
| The Big House 11 | SpookedYa! over Joey Donuts | 0.48 |
| The Big House 5 | Abate over Axe | 0.48 |
| The Big House 5 | Fork over dizzkidboogie | 0.54 |
| The Big House 2 | Hanky Panky over Scar | 0.62 |
| The Big House 11 | Typhoon over Zamu | 0.69 |
| The Big House 11 | The Brig over Lunar Dusk | 0.69 |
| The Big House 11 | Fknsilver over Skerzo | 0.69 |
Here are the results that rank just beneath the Top 11 (with a two-way tie for 11 I’ll explain in the next segment). There’s many great ones here, as well as some surprises that I either forgot about or didn’t expect to see so high on our list, with our highest three of this segment particularly standing out. With respect to the players they beat, was Typhoon or fknsilver winning these sets really so surprising? I feel like they suffer from a methodology issue, likely in how I’m calculating ranking ranges.
The Top 11
Here’s the moment most of you have been waiting for: a breakdown of the eleven biggest upsets in Big House history. We may as well start by showcasing the tie that we have at our first spot on this list, because I think it’s pretty interesting.
| Tournament | Result | UpsetScore |
| The Big House 2 | Hanky Panky over Duck | 0.69 |
| The Big House 2 | Hanky Panky over Westballz | 0.69 |
Surprise – you’ve been ratio’d by Hanky Panky! For his third and final appearance in this column, our dear accounting expert and Melee Stats darling shows up with the two biggest upsets he had at the tournament that both forever changed his life and made absolutely no difference at the same time. One final fact about him here is that of the Top 15 upsets in Big House history, he appears on the list the most number of times.
| Tournament | Upset | UpsetScore |
| The Big House | Ryan Ford over S2J | 0.97 |
| The Big House 8 | Bananas over Plup | 1.04 |
| The Big House 6 | ycz6 over Colbol | 1.18 |
| The Big House 7 | L over Wizzrobe | 1.25 |
| The Big House 11 | Morsecode762 over Cody Schwab | 1.32 |
There’s so much to jump into from this list, but I want to start with something that’s just my personal opinion: I think Bananas was snubbed by a flaw with the methodology. This upset over Plup was truly shocking when it happened; because he ended up doing great later in the tournament and receiving a high rank, it appears as the equivalent of a Top 25 player defeating Plup, which doesn’t adequately capture the differences in their reputation heading into the event.
I love all of these results. L over Wizzrobe was the first of a few in the “not previously Top 100 Fox players randomly defeating the best Captain Falcon in the world” lineage. We have not only one Samus on this list, but a second one in Melee Stats’ very own ycz6 taking down Colbol. And lastly we have a huge set win for Ryan Ford, who had already been a rising star within Canada and done well at majors, but whose win over S2J was probably the biggest one of his career up until that point.
| Tournament | Upset | UpsetScore |
| The Big House 6 | Zain over Plup | 1.53 |
| The Big House 11 | Faust over Jmook | 1.53 |
Years before he became the player we know him as today, Zain had only been playing for a little over two years. Back in late 2016, if you knew about Zain, you were a serious hardcore fan – at that point, he had won the MD/VA Arcadian and been locally ranked, but before The Big House 6, he had yet to make the Top 100. Meanwhile, Plup was all but considered a contender to win majors and a member of Melee’s “Big Six” around that time. While most of Zain’s come up involved beating quite a few Fox players, it’s easy to forget the most mind boggling one of all happened against the best Sheik in the world.
Although I personally wouldn’t have had it this high on my personal list, Faust over Jmook has to be one of the most underrated upsets ever because I never see anyone say anything about it. I think that’s in large part because Jmook nowadays has a bit of a penchant for getting upset, but he had beaten Hungrybox in their last set and had started the year winning two majors. Faust was one of the most active online-era grinders, but this win was undeniably a huge step forward from previous major placements of 65th, 25th, and 33rd within that year. From losing to salami, Palpa, and Grab to defeating one of Crimson Blur’s three people he said had any real chance of winning The Big House. Pretty good.
| Tournament | Upset | UpsetScore |
| The Big House 6 | R2DLiu over Axe | 2.52 |
| The Big House 5 | Ginger over Druggedfox | 2.66 |
Heading into this article, I knew exactly which two upsets were going to be at the top of this list, and if you are a big Melee history aficionado, chances are that you knew also. What I didn’t know, however, was how to compare these two, because I think each of them have a great case to be considered the biggest upset in Big House history.
Let’s begin with the one that technically has a lower score, but by marginal value. If there was a Melee Hall of Fame, Axe would be a first-ballot member as someone that’s literally won a major in his career. But frankly even as far back as 2016, he was a professional Smash player that had spent the better part of his time competing as a superstar. R2DLiu was a really good player, but also one that had never achieved anything close to what Axe had done in the same game. As the legend goes, not too long before he literally beat Axe, R2Dliu had dropped a set to BonkCushy and then promised himself he would learn how to defeat Pikachu. Earlier that same year, he had finished in 65th place at Shine. Imagine going from that to beating Axe. R2DLiu was a strong player with regional achievements that go beyond this one set, but this is what he’s remembered for most.
Because of the players involved, you might be inclined to believe that Ginger over Druggedfox doesn’t look that crazy. Through a modern lens, it looks like a strong rising local player (at that time at least) defeating a Top 25 player – pretty crazy, but not something we haven’t seen before. That’s the thing though: in late 2015, we hadn’t really seen that happen at a big event, and as a result, Ginger went unaccounted for by the seeders, leading to a whopping 1201 over 17 seed result in Druggedfox’s first match of the entire tournament.
If you were to pick which result stands the test of time as a real upset, I think I’d go with R2DLiu over Axe. At the same time though, the sheer scale of Ginger over Druggedfox is really quite unmatched. In terms of seeding differential, the closest thing that’s happened to it since was when branted beat Khalid at Genesis X2, almost a decade later, which I dubbed the most shocking upset of 2025. With this much history, few peers, and frankly a complete shift in our communal understanding of just how many good players exist in our community, I think it has to have the title of greatest Big House upset of all-time.