Editing Tournament

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.

The western tournament scene for the ''Super Smash Bros.'' series was incepted when {{Sm|Matt Deezie}} established the [[Tournament Go]] series in April 2002 with ''[[Super Smash Bros. Melee]]''. The game had an active tournament scene in the years following its release, being featured at both grassroots tournaments and events ran by large e-sports groups, most notably [[Major League Gaming]]. Following the release of ''[[Super Smash Bros. Brawl]]'', the ''Melee'' scene experienced a recession as many players moved on to ''Brawl'' or stopped playing ''Smash'' altogether, though it would gradually rebound as many players, both old and new, returned to ''Melee'' after dissatisfaction with ''Brawl'', kickstarted by the success of {{Trn|Revival of Melee}} a year after ''Brawl''{{'}}s North American release. ''Melee'' would then see an explosive growth in popularity in 2013, fueled by the success of [[EVO 2013]] and the documentary, ''[[The Smash Brothers]]'', where ''Melee'' has since remained extremely popular among competitive players over a decade later, with a large and thriving tournament presence far exceeding that of its pre-''Brawl'' days.

Despite the severe dislike that most ''Melee'' players had for ''Super Smash Bros. Brawl'' and quickly abandoning the game after less than a year, ''Brawl'' would develop its own scene with a mostly distinct playerbase. For four years following ''Brawl''{{'}}s release, its tournament scene was on par with ''Melee''{{'}}s, if not even larger, with ''Brawl'' peaking at {{Trn|Apex 2012}} in January 2012, the tournament that set the record for largest ''Smash'' tournament ever at 400 entrants, a record it would hold until EVO 2013 in July 2013 shattered it with 709 entrants. ''Brawl'' would immediately experience significant decline following Apex 2012 however, due to division over the game's ruleset (most notoriously regarding the legality of {{SSBB|Meta Knight}}), the imminent release of ''Smash 4'', the rise of ''[[Project M]]'', and general growing dissatisfaction with the game; {{Trn|Apex 2013}} and {{Trn|Apex 2014}} would still attract well north of 300 entrants for ''Brawl'', but very few other big tournaments in this time period could break 100 entrants, and several regions had their ''Brawl'' scenes die out. The release of ''Smash 4'' would serve as a killing blow, with the vast majority of remaining ''Brawl'' players moving on to it, but a small group of loyal players would continue to play ''Brawl'', and by the later 2010s, they would establish 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 even exceeded the size of ''Melee''{{'}}s tournament scene, experiencing the same explosion in size that ''Melee'' did at the time due to the availability of well-developed streaming technology, improved social networking, and other improved tournament infrastructure, in addition to an already-existing ''Brawl'' fanbase that eagerly moved onto the newer game. It also attracted casual players into the competitive ''Smash'' scene to a much greater extent than any of the previous ''Smash'' games, due to the game being designed with a more competitive focus than its predecessor (through game design decisions like faster gameplay and better balancing, and adding competitive-focused [[online]] modes like [[For Glory]]), and competitive ''Smash'' in general being more mainstream than it was at the time of ''Brawl''{{'}}s release. ''Smash 4''{{'}}s tournament scene peaked in 2016, with the ''Smash 4'' bracket at {{Trn|EVO 2016}} setting the record for largest ''Smash'' tournament ever at 2662 entrants, and ''Smash 4'' would have several more tournaments after this that broke the 1000 entrants mark or came close. ''Smash 4'' would start experiencing decline in late 2017 however, with most recurring tournament series seeing substantial drops in their entrant totals from the previous year, due to stagnation and the game's balance being thoroughly upended by {{SSB4|Bayonetta}} and {{SSB4|Cloud}}. This decline would be accelerated once ''[[Super Smash Bros. Ultimate]]'' was revealed at [[E3 2018]] and announced to be releasing in December of that year, though ''Smash 4'' tournaments would still retain respectable entrant numbers to its end, with the ''Smash 4'' bracket at both {{Trn|EVO 2018}} and {{Trn|Super Smash Con 2018}} getting over 1300 entrants. Once ''Ultimate'' released, the tournament scene for ''Smash 4'' has become nearly non-existent as its playerbase near entirely transitioned to ''Ultimate'', with the only ''Smash 4'' tournaments remaining mostly taking place at events that explicitly hosts tournaments for all ''Smash'' games, such as [[Super Smash Con]].

In a similar vein to ''Smash 4'', the release of ''[[Super Smash Bros. Ultimate]]'' would see another explosion in the size of the competitive scene, due to the game being developed significantly more competitively-minded than ''Smash 4'', and ''Ultimate'' itself having a far larger pool of potential players, since it outsold all prior ''Smash'' games by a massive margin. Immediately in its first year, ''Ultimate'' established the largest competitive scene of any ''Smash'' game to date with over a half-dozen 1000+ entrant tournaments, including shattering the all-time record for largest ''Smash'' tournament, with {{Trn|EVO 2019}} having 3534 entrants for its ''Ultimate'' bracket. ''Ultimate'' would suffer a serious setback however with the 2020 [[COVID-19 pandemic]], that completely shutdown any large inperson ''Smash'' tournaments for over a year. As regulations regarding social events relaxed and inperson tournaments could start occurring again, ''Ultimate'' would start gradually rebounding, and by 2023, its tournament activity would come close to its 2019 peak, with forty tournaments that year reaching [[List of major tournaments (SSBU)#2023|major status]] and eight of them breaking 1000 entrants, while peaking post-Covid with 2607 entrants at {{Trn|Super Smash Con 2023}}.

Competitive ''[[Smash 64]]'' never had a time as the premier ''Smash'' game, due to the foundations for competitive ''Smash'' not being established until over a year into ''Melee''{{'}}s release. Nonetheless, with its unique gameplay that's very distinct from all other ''Smash'' games, ''Smash 64'' has maintained a small devoted following since the release of ''Melee'', establishing a niche tournament scene in the later 2000s that persists to this day. In addition to the traditional in-person tournaments, competitive play also frequently takes place online through services like [[Kaillera]].

Tournaments are held regularly in many regions all over the world, with the largest overall community centered in the United States, which has not only the largest and generally most talented playerbase, but also the largest tournaments, most notably {{Trn|GENESIS|series}} and {{Trn|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 the Scandinavian countries) also feature large, high level competitive ''Smash'' scenes, while Australia, Latin America, south Asia, 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 intent of a tournament. These include but are not limited to the following:

Some public venues like schools and places of worship consider gaming tournaments a form of gambling and ban it as such. All tournament directors 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.

*"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 farther 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 [[bracket manipulation|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.

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 farther 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.

Although each game since ''Melee'' has included a Tournament Mode for local play and ''Smash Ultimate'' features an online tournament mode, the in-game mode is rarely, if ever, 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 played in a best of 3 or 5 format, while Tournament Mode only allows single-game sets.

For this reason, 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.

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.