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Best SPRs at S-Tiers, Featuring Wizzrobe, Raito, & Zackray

By Jack "Jackie Peanuts" Moore | 03/18/21

Yesterday, we revealed the top five Smash Ultimate tournament performances of all-time by Seed Performance Rating. Today, we dive deeper into the data to present the best SPRs ever at S-Tiers other than the Evo events, including some of the most legendary tournament runs of Ultimate's short competitive history.

Players are ordered by SPR, then by placing.

1. Raito, Umebura Japan Major 2019: +8 (Seed: 40, Placing: 3)

As we'll see down this list, Umebura Japan Major 2019 was pure chaos, a 1,015-entrant S-Tier tournament held May 1-2, 2019 in Tokyo just as PGRU Season 1 was winding down.
had originally struggled to adapt to Duck Hunt's new style in Ultimate. He finished with a rough -5 SPR at his first American major, the pre-PGRU v1 Midwest Mayhem Ultimate in Chicago, as he lost to Wisconsin Dr. Mario main
and Kentucky Inkling main
(then known as JDB!) for 13th despite entering as the third seed.
Raito figured it out quickly, though, taking ninth as the 21st seed (+2 SPR) at his first PGR event in April, Umebura SP3. Then, at another trip to the states, he went off at Come To Papa 3 in Florida, running all the way to Grand Finals, beating
,
and
before falling to
.
Despite all that, Raito was just the 40th seed at Umebura Japan Major. While top seeds like
and
dropped to shocking upsets against
and
respectively, Raito cruised through winners. His path included wins over
,
, Ri-Ma and
, all of whom he dispatched without dropping a game, before he was finally stopped by
and
(more on him in a bit). His third place finish remains the best performance we've seen from a Duck Hunt player at a tournament of this size, and it's hard to imagine anybody usurping that claim anytime soon.

2. Wizzrobe, Smash'N'Splash 5: +8 (Seed :97, Placing: 7)

has made many claims to the title of "best cross-game Smash player," and his Smash 'N' Splash 5* performances just might be his strongest yet. A top contender in Melee at SNS5, Wizzrobe had entered just seven Ultimate events, with his most notable performance being a 17th place finish as the 47th seed (+2 SPR) at B-Tier Come To Papa 3. Wizzrobe's 97th seed at SNS5 for Ultimate was as much a nod towards his clear general Smash skill as it was about his Ultimate results.
Wizzrobe steamrolled through his Swiss pool, going 6-0 including a win over the pool's top seed,
. That set him for his legendary Day 2 meeting with
, the tournament's top seed, a set that remains the largest upset in Ultimate history according to our new statistic Upset Factor: Tweek, as the tournament favorite, was seeded to finish 13 rounds farther in bracket than Wizzrobe. Instead, this happened:
This set deserves a full analysis, which will be coming to PGstats.com in the coming weeks. Wizzrobe would go on to pick up wins over
and
before bowing out to
for seventh place.
And oh, by the way, he did all of this while winning the Melee bracket over
.
*We are working on adding Smash 'N' Splash 5 to our database. The waterfall format does not play well with our current setup.

3. Arc, Umebura Japan Major 2019: +8 (Seed: 560, Placing: 33)

, "Arc," formerly "Aruku," was one of the best Japanese Falco players in Smash 4, but he only entered tournaments sporadically, and Ultimate has been no different for him. Umebura Japan Major 2019 was just his second major event, and his first, a non-PGRU event won by Zackray, saw him finish just 33rd out of 83 entrants. Arc shifted spacies between Smash 4 and Ultimate, gravitating towards Wolf instead, and perhaps was suffering some growing pains from the shift. Understandably, he was stuck with a random seed for Umebura Japan Major.
Despite being just the fifth seed in his round robin pool, Arc swept all seven sets, with all of his sets against the top three seeds going the distance to game three. The biggest win came over
, generally considered to be the best solo Jiggylpuff main in Japan. In bracket phase, Arc benefitted from a huge upset as
(Ginko), possibly the best non-
Pac-Man in Japan, removed Shogun from Arc's path. After taking out Ginko, Arc was smacked out of the tournament by Ri-Ma and
(data also here,
), one of Japan's top Mega Man players, but not before showing he still had a bit of the sauce that made him a feared player back in the Smash 4 days.

4. Zackray, The Big House 9: +7 (Seed: 13, Placing: 1)

By The Big House 9, we were all pretty sure that Zackray was the future of Smash. He made Top 8 at Ultimate's first S-Tier, Genesis 6, won four sets against the PGRU v1 Top 10 to earn seventh on the ranking himself, and was constantly proving his ability to master new characters. Still, Zackray was coming off a disappointing 33rd/273 as the ninth seed (-4 SPR) at his last American tournament, S-Tier Mainstage, so he was understandably stuck with the 13th seed when he returned to the States for Big House.
That 13th seed meant there wasn't much of a warmup for Zackray: Top 64 opened with Cosmos (3-0) into Tweek (3-2) into
(RFang) (3-0). Even after all those wins, Zackray had only reached Winners Semis, where he was rudely introduced to the experience that is
's Mr. Game & Watch as a swift 3-0 sent him down to losers.
The losers run that followed was the stuff of legends. Expertly swapping between his ROB, Wolf and Joker (with a couple of data-gathering games as Sonic thrown in), Zackray was able to win the runback against Tweek (3-2), defeat
(3-2), figure it out against Maister (3-2), and finally reset the bracket and defeat
(3-0, 3-1) to take the Big House title. Zackray remains the lowest seed to ever win an S-Tier, and the difficulty of his run should show why that's not likely to change anytime soon.

5. ProtoBanham, Umebura Japan Major 2019: +7 (S: 21, P: 2)

The other beneficiary of (and cause of) the chaos that was Umebura Japan Major 2019, ProtoBanham was already starting to stake his claim as Japan's best Lucina at smaller locals. Umebura Japan Major 2019 let him show the world. After defeating
and
in winners, ProtoBanham opted to try the Inkling ditto against Cosmos and dropped a tight pair of games to fall into losers. From there, he relied on his Lucina, a decision that paid off in spades. He defeated
(Choco, PGRUv2 #26, 2-0), Ri-Ma (3-0), Tea (PGRUv2 #12, 3-1), won the run-back against Cosmos (PGRUv2 #23, 3-1) and Raito (PGRUv1 #17, 3-2) before finally falling to Kameme in Grand Finals by a 3-2 score, and not before forcing Kameme to cycle through Mega Man, Sheik, Wario, and finally back to Mega Man.
ProtoBanham ranked 23rd on the PGRU v1, largely due to this performance. He proved it was no fluke just months later at Evo 2019, where he finished 5th/3535 as the 15th seed (+3 SPR), defeating
, Kameme and
among others, the major driver behind his 19th ranking on the PGRUv2.
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