It’s been a quiet time in Melee. Most of my weekly readers know this because I’ve used most of September to talk about doubles, attendance-trends, and viewership: three topics I typically bring up when I have no idea what else to talk about. I may as well use a fourth item in my bag of tricks during Melee downtime here; I am, of course, answering questions from Melee Stats Patrons.
For this part of the column, I’ll be doing that. If you want to be featured in this column in the future, simply become a Melee Stats Patron, directly message me on Discord (or the Melee Stats Twitter account) for a link, and you will have a chance to eventually ask me a question that will then get read in the column. At least if it’s good.
Who is on the Melee TikTok/insta/Youtube shorts grind the most? – vlerk
I don’t have TikTok and I never check Instagram. I do, however, watch a lot of Melee YouTube while sitting on my couch. Two channels in particular come to mind for me. The first one was Zain, whose various streaming shenanigans have made for very viral-friendly content. The second one was turndownforwalt, who has a neat blend of both Melee history and beginner-friendly content. After these two, I think I’d have to go with Hungrybox, moky, and Junebug – probably in that order.
We talk a lot about up and coming players, but who is up and coming for other community leader positions? could be TOs, commentators, stats nerds, content creators, developers, etc. – Anchor
This is a fun question. One of the reasons I like it so much is because there’s really so many different ways to be involved in the community. Playing is one thing, but the game and community have so many little details that go into them, whether it’s something as simple as streaming the game, recording the game, tracking stats or making a rule set. Together, all these have a huge cumulative impact on how the rest of us are able to have fun.
I’ll begin with Nicolet. She’s a longtime tournament organizer who created a Slippi Nintendont build that allows hotswapping between USB drives used for replays. In other words, this lets tournament organizers remotely stream recorded matches after they happen, which is what the Shuuten Tokyo series did for a while. It’s also very useful for set documentation, essentially making it a must-have for tournament organizers and data-heads. Midlane Melee, one of the biggest locals in the country, uses it on a weekly basis.
Speaking of Nicolet, now is the time to mention three other people who run Smash Sisters with her: st. nicholas, Jen pissgirl, and jess dang3r. This series came to prominence around the end of last decade, disappeared for a bit, and has now come back to the spotlight largely because of their efforts. Based on people I’ve talked to at the big events where it’s been present, Smash Sisters has drawn anywhere from 20 to 40 people, which is pretty good considering how recent the relaunch has been. Earlier this year, Smash Sisters also raised money to bring Salt to Collision. Doing full justice to this topic will require much more time for me to jump into – and I probably will dedicate a full column to this topic later this year.
I would be remiss if I did not mention Melee Stats’ newest contributor rainy. In the little time I’ve gotten to know her in this extremely specific sphere of our lives, I think she’s both been a really dedicated player and community member. Her Challengers series fills a good content need for audiences that love deeply personal, unique, and otherwise hidden stories in the scene. I’ve always thought highly of her Fox, but having talked to her about what makes good Melee content and what not, I really am quite excited to see anything she gives to the scene because it’s coming from the right place.
Another really critical person that comes to mind for me is Emerae. She works for Genesis in handling player conduct issues. All I’ll say here is that this is someone whose role for the event – and really the whole community – involves managing a lot of headache-inducing, demoralizing, extremely frustrating, and frankly dangerous situations. I’m nowhere near qualified to speak in depth about what she does for the scene, but it’s extremely important that people like her exist in our community. By virtue of the role she’s in, Emerae handles a lot of unpleasant conflict behind-the-scenes in exchange for making it better, and she has to out-navigate a lot of bad faith actors.
Lastly, I want to shout out this very cool website launched by the Lucky7 boys. You might recognize them for running Full House, but I’ve really enjoyed their new website, which is for tournament data and alternative rankings (though importantly, not in a way that threatens SSBMRank). My sense is that these exist for two purposes: as an administrative resource for TOs, and as a content avenue. In particular, the ‘win probability calculator’ section is like catnip for people like me who love to imagine what would happen if s-f somehow traveled to Japan to play Shunsuke in a best-of-five. I don’t always agree with the results of this calculator, but to my knowledge, the website is still a work in progress, so I’m excited to see how it shifts over time.
What would the list be for the top 5 winningest players of all time? I don’t mean just super majors , I mean literally any tournament, online or offline, local or other – Bitz
I’m not a hundred percent sure on what the best way to answer this question is. For now though, I’m going to try to take it as “who would your guess be for the five players with the highest number of wins in a significant number of sets?” That or “who has won the most tournaments ever?” Maybe it’s “who has the best head-to-head rate in significant sets in Melee history?” I guess I actually don’t know. It’s too tough to stick to one definition, so I’m going to go with a very vibes-based approach. Also, for argument’s sake, I’m going to exclude online, so that eliminates JSalt from the conversation.
With absolutely no research, my first thought was Lukademus. I am not entirely sure if he’s Top 100 or not because he’s isolated from the main region, but he’s been the best player in his area of Maryland for a pretty long time. He also was on the winning end of the most lopsided rivalry in Melee history for a while; that has to count for something. After him, it’s a tough call as to which of the ‘mercilessly dominant in-region Fox players” I wanted to pick between Kels, Professor Pro, Crush, and Colbol, but my guess is Kels probably has the count by pure volume and years in an active region.
Is that just the rest of this list? It might be, but because I want to talk about more players, I’m going to exclude each of those other three players. Instead, coming at third, let’s go with a familiar friend in Hanky Panky, whom I don’t need to explain. That leaves us two more names, the first of which on my list would be Stango. Yes; it’s that Stango, from Rivals. When he was an active Melee player, he ruled Philadelphia with an iron first. Around the time he did that, I was told that he won over 50 sets in a row over R2DLiu – a very good player who literally beat Axe before he beat Stango – before they both supposedly lost count of the head-to-head.
For my last guess, I’m going to take a cop out answer and say Armada. He always finds a way to make his way onto lists like these; my guess is he’s probably still at the top.
What do you look for when you’re trying to find a potential hidden boss/up-and-coming player? – Allison Poison
Speaking very broadly and based on my time in the scene, I think there’s two types of ‘hidden boss’ or ‘up-and-coming’ players: those who take hits on the chin at their locals versus strong players before scaring a Top 100 player at a regional and those who dominate a closed pool of very strong competitors in multiple attempts. Basically, if you envision notable power ranked players or potential up-and-comers on a continuum, one side has the 2024 DarkGenexs of the world, and the other side has the 2021 Voos of the world. Or basically all the power ranked 2025 Colorado Melee players.
In my time as a community member, there’s actually quite a few people on this continuum. The tricky part is calling out which of them actually have the desire to travel for Melee and obtain enough results to hit the spotlight. To summarize, I try to look for players who either look competitive and are making progress against established Top 100 talent or are dominating a closed pool of competitors, AND are each of the following: regionally active, open to travel, and demonstrating a desire to leave their region. Usually if you have two of those three, you’re a good bet to do well.
How do we stop attempting to grow smaller channels for established majors and convince people to use ones with larger viewership? – DarkGenex
On the surface, I think “money talks” applies here. Established majors are not consolidating their viewership (or significant resources, frankly) together because there is a widespread perception that it is, simply put, not worth the long-term investment to create a new ‘btssmash’ or get everyone on board with it. It’s also just a fact that our biggest tournaments do not technically have the broadcast rights to their own game. Most of them are quietly handed a license by Nintendo in exchange for not being annihilated (and as long as they don’t run visible mods or grow too big for Nintendo to lose control over its intellectual property). Consolidating multiple tournaments to use one stream requires legwork, convincing, time, and resources that most tournament organizers see as completely not worth it for a series that they don’t even own.
Those are, by far, the most undeniable reasons. But I’m going to suggest – at the risk of sounding like a dick – that there’s something more fundamental at play here too. Even if somehow Nintendo were to not be in the picture – if there was some type of feasible path for Melee consolidating under a structured, hierarchical events ecosystem – I think most tournament organizers would not want that. It’s not 2016 any more; in 2025, the vast majority of major TOs are too old, jaded, and too busy for dreams of running Smash events full-time.
Except for one major tournament organizer – maybe two major tournament organizers – that I’ve spoken to, I do not think there is a fundamental desire to ever work full-time in Smash or to create a greater professional ecosystem around Smash. The idea of a “new Beyond the Summit” or a “new VGBootCamp” presupposes a lot of conditions that aren’t really there right now, nor do I think there is a community will for it. Whether or not this is a good or bad thing, I would need more time to break it fully down. But, hey – as I brought up earlier, money does talk. If there are any billionaires out there who would love to hire a bunch of TOs to run events in Riyadh or some shit, I’m sure there are people who’d be willing to sell their soul for this future; I just think with Smash in particular, it would basically have no popular legitimacy.
How are you doing? – anakonda
Thank you so much for this question. It was a very pleasant surprise for this mailbag, so I’m going to do my best to answer it while striking a nice balance between oversharing and being too vague.
I’m doing pretty well, but I’ll start with what hasn’t been easy. I’m in the middle of a graduate program for sports analytics, and this semester has been quite difficult. I’m taking three classes, one of which is easy (I get to write about football analytics every week), and the other two, which have kicked my ass (machine learning and deep learning). For most of my life, I’ve had an up-and-down relationship with grades – usually beginning terrible before finishing strong – and yet I’m in a position now where I began on a high note and am now struggling.
The good news, however, is that my personal life is going great. Last weekend, I hosted a Survivor-themed 14-person get-together of my lifelong friend group outside of Melee, as well as my spouse’s lifelong friend group. I had spent quite some time designing challenges, planning props, and generally organizing the event itself for a home setting, and the end result was extremely rewarding. I even compiled stats for the game and will probably write a full blog post about it over on my portfolio website. If any of my Melee readers want to peel the curtain back on Edwin Budding a little bit, they can feel free to do so once it’s out.
I’ve lately become convinced that living is a choice that all of us make each day, and we should never take that choice for granted. Our choice is obviously not the only one that matters, and discussions about free will can complicate what I’m saying, but functionally, it’s important to hold ourselves accountable while giving ourselves grace. For a lot of my life, I struggled with trying to ensure that my actions, thoughts, and beliefs were all aligned, but in reality, there’s always going to be tension in between all three things. Learning how to reconcile that – and not necessarily eliminate it – is the beautiful part of being alive.
Recently, I’ve chosen to appreciate ‘unproductive’ time and mundane interactions with other people. These are the moments that have nothing to do with how you define yourself, but they’re also the vast majority of most people’s lives. It’s difficult to not take these moments for granted – and they can even be irritating or unpleasant – but if you stop to notice them, you’ll find a lot of beauty. In fact, you might realize they’re really not that different from the arbitrary goals and grander ‘purpose’ that we might set for ourselves. If anything, they’re what connects everyone together.
I guess that’s where I’m at right now. Challenged, but very grateful, feeling supported, and doing my best to be present every day.