Exploring the relative importance of skill and character choice in Super Smash Bros.

Player skill plays an important role in contest outcomes. Players could, however, moderate the outcomes of contests through strategic choices prior to entering that contest. In most competitive systems, it is difficult to explicitly model the importance of a player’s strategic choice relative to skill. New Esports tournament data provides an opportunity to address this problem. The role of character choice, representing a clear strategic choice on the part of the player, presents a novel area for model development. Leveraging a Bradley-Terry model, our study analyzed a comprehensive dataset from the Ausmash website which records Super Smash Bros tournament results in Australia and New Zealand. Two models were developed: the first examining the influence of individual character choice, and the second exploring specific character matchups and their outcomes. Results indicated that while player skill remains the predominant factor in determining match outcomes, character choice also significantly influences these outcomes. We found no evidence of intransitivity in the results. Certain characters were found to have a higher correlation with winning, aligning broadly with the perceptions of character strengths within the Esports community. This analysis demonstrates the simultaneous importance of player skill along with player strategic choice. Esports tournament data represents a new opportunity for developing models and theory related to competitive outcomes.