2021 is over and we can now look back on this latest year of Smash Brothers Ultimate. This year we saw the return of offline smash after over a year of online-only tournaments. We also saw multiple updates with new characters and the final balance update. The game’s meta is starting to settle, but who are the 10 best players in the world?
The list I’m going to present is based on data collected from https://www.pgstats.com/ and interpreted by myself. I used a list of A tier and S tier tournaments, as categorized by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_Super_Smash_Bros._Ultimate_tournaments to know which tournaments counted the most. I would have used PG stat’s data on what was an A tier/S tier, but since they aren’t tracking tournaments for a theoretical PGRU (Panda Global Rankings Ultimate), they haven’t been categorizing tournaments.
I’ll warn, while I have confidence in the final list, my methods weren’t perfect. I’ll go into detail on the process after the list for anyone interested in how I came up with the results I did. I’ve created Power Rankings for my local scenes and guessed PGR results before, but I’ve never tackled something as big as this, and with the scope/scale of this project, I had to cut corners in some places.
#10 Shuton
Shuton makes top 10. The Olimar expert has a solid record at majors. His lowest placement was at the A tier Kagaribi#4 at 13th. His other placements are all single digits with a win at Kagaribi#5 and 9th at the Smash World Tour. Shuton’s record is impressive, but what holds him back is a lack of tournaments attended, especially outside of Japan. The single result he has outside of Japan this year is impressive, but he could have been much higher if he had more results like that outside of Japan.
#9 Maister
Maister started off the “return to offline” era looking incredibly strong. 2nd at the Smash World Tour Central American Finals, 5th at Riptide and Lowtide, 4th at Glitch 8.5, and 3rd at SmashCon Fall Fest. Those impressive placing sadly didn’t last and he ended the season with two 13th placements at Mainstage and the Smash World Tour Championship. Not horrible, but without a big win or a better record against the players above him, Maister finds himself at 9th.
#8 Light
Light just barely qualified to even be considered on this list. He only attended 3 majors but got single-digit placings at all of them. He even won Super Smash Con Fall fest, beating Spargo in a bracket reset. If this list only consisted of players’ placements, Light would be much higher, but we need to take into context his low data pool and his records with everyone else. Light is no slouch in his head-to-heads, but with fewer tournaments attended, it’s only natural that he wouldn’t have as many wins as others on the list. 8th in the world is still an impressive accomplishment with only 3 majors under your belt for the entire year.
#7 Protobanham
Protobanham hasn’t attended many tournaments, but he’s still in contention for being the best player in Japan. With two A tier wins in Japan, and 7th at the Smash World Tour Championships, people should be afraid if he does start to show up more. Proto picked up Min min in 2020 and has been dominating Japan since. He still has his Lucina as well which has become more relevant with Min Min’s recent nerfs. Proto only came to the US once in 2021, but if he chooses to travel more this year, I can see him taking even more names and rising higher in the ranks.
#6 Kola
I won’t lie. I thought Kola would have been much higher, but consistency is super important, and this list is based on 2021 as a whole. Kola has one super outlier placement. 65th at Riptide. If that didn’t exist, Kola would be in contention for the top 4, maybe even 3rd. Kola has wins on so many players. Kola was basically the Japan slayer at the Smash World Tour Championships, where he got 5th and beat Proto and Shuton, and who can forget his win at CEO 2021. Kola started to establish a level of consistency towards the end of 2021 that will lead to him being ranked 3rd in the world if he keeps it up in 2022.
#5 Zackray
Zackray’s results heavily consist of tournaments early in the year and mostly in Japan. He has one international tournament in Summit 3 where he performed amazingly. He got 5th, losing to Spargo and Mkleo, the 2 other young progenies of smash. Sporting the biggest character pool of anyone in the top 10, Zackray is still one of the strongest Smash Ultimate players in the world.
#4 Tea
The most traveled and accomplished Japanese player outside of Japan this year has to be Tea. With not only a trip to the US where he got 4th at Mainstage, but a trip to Europe where he won Temple: Hermes addition, he’s the most traveled top player in the world this year. He’s still a major force in Japan as well, getting 1st at Kagaribi#3 and 3rd at Kagaribi#4. Tea’s worst placements at a major are two 7th’s, meaning he’s never missed out on a top 8 the entire year. That’s damn impressive. Many top Ultimate players have said that they fear fighting Tea’s Pacman, and with those results, they should be.
#3 Tweek
Tweek started his return to offline Smash with a dominant performance. 1st at Smash Ultimate Summit 3 with a double 3-0 on MkLeo. It’s a surprise that he didn’t end up being 2nd at least after that dominating performance but 3rd isn’t bad at all. Just a week after Summit, Leo found the answer to Tweek’s Diddykong at Riptide but Tweek still got 2nd. It was clear Leo wasn’t ready to give up number 1 in the world. Tweek would then start dropping sets to other players, and aside from 3rd at Port Priority, Tweek wouldn’t see another top 3 for the entire year and even had a 17th place finish at the Smash World Tour Championships. An even record with MKleo and 1st at Summit make Tweek the 3rd best player in the world.
#2 Spargo
Spargo is nuts. We haven’t seen dominance like his since MkLeo. Spargo hasn’t gotten a win at a major, but he also hasn’t gotten lower than 3rd since Ultimate Summit 3. Spargo has dropped sets to players below him, but he still finds his way into the top 3, out placing those people. Spargo dominated the online era of Smash Ultimate and when offline came back, many people doubted how he’d do. Well, he kept it up. Using a combination of Pyra/Mythra and Cloud, Spargo has torn through offline brackets. Spargo seemed to move from consistently 3rd place to 2nd as the year proceeded but at Smash World Tour, he found another 3rd place after losing to Cosmos in losers finals. Still, when getting 3rd is a suboptimal placing for you, you’re good. There’s literally only one player as consistent as Spargo, but instead of fluctuating between 3rd and 2nd, he fluctuates between 2nd and 1st.
#1 MkLeo
There’s no question. There’s no debate. Nobody in good faith will tell you anything different. MkLeo is the best Smash Ultimate player in the world. Leo has dominated the game from day 1. People have challenged his dominance, like Tweek at Summit, but Leo always finds the answer. With only one losing record this season to Esam, and one even record, to Tweek, Leo’s record is impressive as hell. It’s no surprise to anyone, the Smash World Tour Champion is the best player in the world.
That’s the top 10. If you came to a different conclusion, I’d love to hear why. You can tweet me @ICYoyoDaBlack. I’ll explain my method now so you can understand how I came to the conclusions I did, but feel free to skip this if you don’t care. Thanks for reading!
How the sausage was made
So when first approaching this idea, I knew one thing. MkLeo and Spargo were obviously number 1 and 2 in the world. That is obvious to anyone who keeps up with Smash Ultimate, but why? Well, they place higher than everyone else and they do it consistently. Placements plus consistency. I needed to find a way to rank every player in contention for the top 10 by their placements and consistency. First, I’d need a list of players. I thought maybe analyzing every player who’s gotten top 8 at an A tier or S tier tournament, but that would have taken a ton of time. I settled on creating a list of players myself. I took a look at all the top 8s but I hand-selected 19 players to look further into. That was my first mistake because I obviously left out a few who might have been better than the players I did consider. Nobody in the top 10, but I needed an accurate list of players around that area to be more accurate later on in my process.
So I had my list of players, next was recording their placements. I went through their PG stats profiles and collected all their placements and put them in a google sheet. After I compiled all the data, I added all their placements up and then divided the final number by the number of tournaments they went to to get their average placement. This lead to a very different list than what I settled on, but it was a start. I figured placements are the only concrete number we can judge players by, although context, individual wins, and head-to-head with the other players considered are just as, if not more important.
So with that base list, I needed to find a way to use it to determine the value of each player as a win for other players on the list. So with 19 players, I made number 1 (MkLeo) worth 19 points, number 2 (Spargo) worth 18 points, and so on. I knew this wasn’t perfect for a final list at all, but it would help show who has really good wins. I did the math and got a second list.
I had two lists that aside from the top 2, were extremely different.
The player’s considered and their average placements.
- Mkleo (1.14)
- Spargo (2.5)
- Zackray(3)
- Protobanham(3.5)
- Tea (3.83)
- Light(4.3)
- Gluttony(4.83)
- Tweek(6.16)
- Shuton(7)
- Cosmos (7.28)
- Lui$ (7.4)
- Maister (7.42)
- Dabuz (8.57)
- Esam(9.5)
- Elegant (9)
- Marss (12.57)
- Fatality (14.16)
- Kola (14.33)
- Chag (18.66)
The player’s scores against each other.
- Mkleo (297)
- Spargo(189)
- Kola(133)
- Tweek(130)
- Shuton(129)
- Chag (108)
- Protobanham (87)
- Light (78)
- Tea (72)
- Maister (70)
- Dabuz (68)
- Zackray (65)
- Esam (54)
- Elegant (45)
- Cosmos(35)
- Marss (28)
- Lui$ (19)
- Gluttony (13)
- Fatality (12)
I decided I should combine the two lists together somehow. I decided to add up the number each player was on both lists and divide it by 2. This would combine their placements and their records and leave me with another list to consider.
- MKleo (1)
- Spargo (2)
- Protobanham(5.5)
- Tweek (6)
- Shuton(7)
- Light(7)
- Zackray(7.5)
- Tea(9.5)
- Kola(10.5)
- Maister(11)
- Dabuz(12)
- Gluttony(12.5)
- Cosmos(12.5)
- Chag(12.5)
- Esam(13.5)
- Lui$ (14)
- Elegant(14.5)
- Marss(16)
- Fatality (18)
This list is closest to the final product by far but it wasn’t perfect at all. This final list lacked context and favored players who had not attended much. While not attending much isn’t bad inherently, a player like Kola who attended a ton of tournaments and even won CEO, is going to be heavily affected by his 65th at Riptide. It works in the favor of other players like Protobanham. Proto went to 4 majors, 3 of which were in Japan. With the combined lists, he is 3rd. Proto is good, but not 3rd in the world.
So what did I do to combat the inherent bias of the list? Well, I couldn’t think of a mathematical way to do it, so I decided to move people around based on my opinion. For the Japanese players and Gluttony (I was going to say European players but let’s be honest, it’s just Gluttony) I valued travel a lot more because the majority of the competition is in America. Tea may have been to America a single time, but he also went to Europe and won one of their largest tournaments, so he shot up past his other Japanese brethren once I considered that. He may not be as consistent as Zackray and Proto, but he traveled more and racked up more wins on international players. It was easily the hardest to rank Gluttony and the Japanese players. They all performed very well when they traveled, but they traveled so rarely that it was hard to judge them against the players who did play a lot.
I feel like the hardest person to rank aside from the Japanese and Gluttony was Kola. As I said, Kola is starting to look like 3rd in the world right now. His recent consistency and peaks are astounding, and from a record perspective, he is 3rd best in the world at the moment. I’m rather confident that unless Tweek comes back from his current break with a new dominance, Kola will easily surpass him. So why not put him at 4th? His consistency for the whole year is the second-worst of all the players I considered. His peaks are insane, but his valleys are deep, and players with high peaks but no valleys like Zackray and Tea are just going to edge out Kola for now. Having bad performances isn’t the worst thing especially when you have super high, highs, hence why Kola is still so high in my opinion, but that 65th will keep him where he is.
I feel like a missing player that is surprising to me as well is Esam. Esam has a win and 2 sets off Leo under his belt, so how the hell is he not top 10? Well aside from 7th at the Smash World Tour Championships, which is very impressive, he has an underwhelming record with a 17th and 13th finish at the other two majors he attended. Those aren’t horrible placements but combined with his record against everyone else, he doesn’t make the cut. I think this is where my system might have failed a bit though. On both lists and subsequently the combined list, Esam isn’t in the top 10. I feel like my method might have failed me here, but honestly, I can’t justify putting Esam ahead of any of the other players on the list.
How can I improve on this method? I think if I do this again, I’ll take more time to compile a list of everyone who went to at least 3 majors and got top 8 at least at one of them. That will give a better pool to compare wins and losses. I should also come up with a good mathematical way to determine the value of placements and wins. I hope my first attempt wasn’t too bad and I hope you enjoyed hearing about my method. Again, any suggestions I’ll gladly hear. You can Tweet me @ICYoyoDaBlack. Thanks for reading!
Bernard Lamar Rice 