Spam
Spam is a colloquial phrase that refers to the repeated use of a certain move during play. While a player can spam certain attacks for various reasons, the most common reason is that said move is low risk and high reward with no reason to change strategy. Spamming is most effective for moves with a combination of low lag and long range (such as a fair amount of forward tilts), as well as those with fast repeating hit rate (such as Fox's Blaster from Melee onward). While the term "spam" usually refers to attacks, it can also refer to any repeated action at all, such as dodging, edge grabbing, or taunting.
Most forms of spamming tend to be the result of a player's inexperience with their character or the game's mechanics, and thus gravitating towards what seems to work the most consistently. While this strategy can be effective to an extent, hence why attacks are spammed in the first place, spamming often ends up making a player's attack pattern very predictable and easy to counter. Examples of these moves include Kirby's Stone and Pikachu's Thunder. Characters that possess counterattacks, reflectors, or other powerful punish options can usually deal with this type of playstyle, often by spamming said moves right back.
In a competitive sense, there is technically nothing wrong with spam, so there are very few rules on the subject. Spam is usually considered cheap when the strategy is exploited and players have difficulty countering and punishing it, though that is typically the extent of the controversy. Some forms of spam are considered important to a character's game plan; juggling an opponent involves spamming the up tilt, up aerial, or up smash of a character (in most cases, the former two). That being said, some techniques used in high-level play, such as chaingrabbing and planking, are also occasionally considered a form of spam, some of which have been banned in tournaments in certain situations, such as wobbling. Some moves, like Sheik's forward tilt in Brawl, are ironically easier to spam over time due to stale-move negation drastically reducing their knockback. Using spam as an excuse for losing is usually considered a John.
