Player One vs Player Two: Smash Data Analysis
You probably have that one friend, who insists on being Player One everytime you play a video game. Why is that? Do they know something you don't know?
Is there an advantage to being Player One?
We realized that we have a large collection of Set data, so we crunched the numbers to find out.
At the time of this analysis, there was 41,735 sets of Smash 4 uploaded to the SSB World database. There are actually a bit more than that if we include bracket resets, where there are two sets in a single VOD, but the reset data was not included in this analysis.
Here is what we found.
Sets won
Wow. That's quite a noticeable difference. Player one wins with a much higher frequency than player two.
Win percentage
Here is what this looks like in win percentages.
Demonstrating significance
Using a statistical significance calculator shows that this test is valid. The dataset is large enough and the descrepency between the two players achieves 99.9% certainty that Player One is better than Player Two.
Conclusions
- Player one has a definitive advantage over player two
- Your best strategy to avoid going 0-2 is to get to the set-up early and be ready to get the Player one slot
- Will this data hold up for Smash Ultimate? We will have to wait and see.
Community insights
Just to add onto this because I ran out of space, another reason to make P1 the higher seed player logistically is for YT video viewership. The first name will pop the most while browsing, so you generally want to have the name most known on that spot.
— UR | Xyless (@Xyless) November 20, 2018
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