The ninth Smash Summit has taken place in the middle of February. The tournament has managed to update the series' records, which means it became the most viewed one across the series. We'll expand on this in our report.

First of all we should state that the ninth competition of the series had a slightly different format than usual, with the number of participants being expanded from 16 to 18 players due to the decision of organizers. In turn, this has caused the change in the rules of the group stage.

From now on, each group had to include nine members, but the worst one out of 9 (based on the group part results) had to leave the championship right away – as opposed to having one more chance for a comeback via the loser grid.

The extra formats have also undergone a change, with the ninth championship having only two of them. The viewers have voted for the coolest player from the each pair presented to fill the "Swag Bracket", eventually causing Axe to win this rather interesting competition.

Druggedfox came up with another interesting activity: after selecting their opponent's main character, the players were engaged in a series of 1 minute-long matches set exclusively on the Yoshi's Island: Yoshi's Story map until one side scores a total of five victories. The Japanese participant known as aMSa became the best when it comes to this format.

As it has turned out, Smash Summit 9 became extremely successful, gathering a total of 64 thousand peak viewers. This mark exceeds its counterpart from the previous tournament by only 128 viewers – which is something quite unusual, given that one usually sees much larger gaps between the two last tournaments of any kind.

Such a situation was not repeated by the average viewers indicator, which amounted to 22 thousand viewers, exceeding Smash Summit 8 by 16% (mostly thanks to the number of viewers attracted by the final day of the championship).

The Smash Summit series has other interesting aspects as well: its organizers hold their own championship for Super Smash Bros. Melee, which is SSB's previous version that Nintendo no longer supports (as it favors the more recent Super Smash Bros. Ultimate). The cyberathletes tend to disagree with such state of things, given the incredibly large following of Melee. This was especially emphasized by the competition's winner, who has paid particular attention to this problem as he was concluding his speech.

All in all, we can safely state that Beyond the Summit continues to surprise everyone. The ninth tournament in the series has managed to overtake its predecessors. On the other hand, the minimal gap in peak viewers adds extra uncertainty when it comes to the series' future events.