Smash has never been confined to just one region. 64’s top competition is in Peru. Some of Melee and Brawl’s best players have come from Europe and Japan, as well as the US. Smash 4’s top competitor Gonzalo “ZeRo” Barrios came all the way from Chile. And now two of Ultimate’s top ten players come from Mexico. The raw size of Ultimate’s playerbase alone can be disorienting. Add in entire countries and you can get scenarios where whole continents get slept on.

In an effort not to sleep on Smash’s international competitors, I’ve put together a list of some lesser-known competitors in Ultimate from around the world. Yep, it’s pretty much a mimic from of the article I made highlighting four regional players, but for international ones. By international I mean players from outside of the US and Japan, and that’s a trickier bit of language than “regional” is.

By making everyone but US and Japan the international competitors, I’m implying that US and Japan are the main regions for Smash Ultimate. It’s not a hard or controversial argument to make but one I should make out in the open. As of now, Japan and the US have the most notable, most frequently travelling, and most high ranking players. They’re the most represented on streams and the most well-known and studied regions in Smash.

So I won’t be covering any players from the US or Japan and instead looking at players from a mix of smaller national scenes. I’m also trying to look at players that most Ultimate viewers won’t know very well. I’ll go over their playstyles and competitive history and I’ll leave their twitter and twitch links next to their name (if I can find them).

OG Esports | Yei – Twitter

Latin America produces greats from entirely different places – ZeRo from Chile, MKLeo from Mexico, and now Yei from Costa Rica. Jason “Yei” Valverde Mora is a Meta Knight main from Costa Rica who continues the long tradition of patient but not defensive neutral that thrives in Central and South America.

Costa Rica is probably one of Smash’s smaller scenes so Yei got his earliest start in online tournaments like the Naifu Wars. From there, he moved onto farm Costa Rica’s locals like No Mercy and No Johns. Moving up to the nearest and next biggest scene, he had his Smash 4 breakout at Mexico’s Smash Factor 7 and has since quietly been an end boss in Latin America.

In Ultimate, he’s beaten Maister, Mr. E, Meme, and Joker. He’s also gotten very close to beating Hyuga and Abadango. He got 7th at Smash Factor 8 – one of Mexico’s biggest tournaments yet – and 2nd at Smash Vertex, which is essentially Mexico’s Smash Summit.

My favorite Yei set so far is his win on Mr. E. The set quickly encapsulates a lot of his strengths and what makes him an exciting player to watch. Yei opens the set with Chrom – he plays a lot of Lucina and Chrom on top of Meta Knight – and brings the set back from an oncoming two stock through nothing but an intense calm. He understands Lucina can’t kill very well, doesn’t get rattled by being put to nearly 200% percent and staying in disadvantage for nearly a minute straight, and then rallies, reads Mr. E several times in a row, and gets a stock lead.

He loses on Chrom and switches to Meta Knight, where you see his true versatility as a player. In an instant, he’s shifted gears from Chrom’s heavy spacing, heavy ledge trapping style to Meta Knight’s combo and edgeguard gameplay. Yei is that unique kind of aggressive you see in a lot of top Latin American players where he’s willing to play patiently and even sit in a corner to bait the opponent into the first move (you can see him do this a lot in game 3 when he has the lead). But he’s constantly scanning for openings and will take them.

The result is a very clean, refined style of aggression. Yei will go for deep edge guards, juggles, and early kills but he doesn’t fish for these openings, he’s just ready for when the opponent becomes impatient and gives them to him. A lot of that comes from a character mastery no other Meta Knight has. He uses Meta Knight’s multiple jumps to make Meta Knight’s landing look untouchable.

At 12:12, he hits Mr. E with a shuttle loop, grabs ledge, does a normal get up, and immediately hits a second shuttle loop that kills. That’s such a niche scenario but it’s clear Yei’s drilled and it and he’s ready for it. Similarly, Yei perfectly spaces a tornado so that its armor absorbs Lucina’s up special and prevents her from snapping to ledge at about 20:43 – which is probably the most innovative Meta Knight edge guard you’ll ever see. Yei is fun to watch on any of his swordies but he’s most exciting on the little round Kirby swordie because he pushes an underdeveloped character meta.

TeamOplon | Jesuischoq – Twitter

Speaking of Kirby, France might have the best one in the world. Thibauld “Jesuischoq” Martin put himself on the map when he beat Europe’s best player William “Glutonny” Belaid at a c-tier using Kirby. Like many european players, Choq hasn’t travelled much but he’s beaten a lot of Europe’s big names like Leon, Oryon, Whoophee, Homika, VinS and more.

Choq started his competitive career on the later end of Smash 4, also playing Kirby. He was the best Kirby in Europe in Smash 4 as well, though not many players compete for that award. Choq is a rare breed of low tier hero in that he has all the raw mechanical strength and mastery of movement to exceed with a high or top tier character that has more depth and higher skill ceiling. He just chooses to play a mostly honest, very sound game with Kirby instead.

In Ultimate, even a character as underpowered as Kirby often has a fighting chance, so Choq’s sets are pretty fun to watch. Unlike the Japanese Kirby Ferretkuma, Choq is pretty aggressive and aerial focused. He makes the character into a tiny pink tech chasing and spacing demon. Kirby wants for a lot of tools, but he does have a lot of good spacing tools with decent frame data and down tilt that trips pretty often, leading to tech chase scenarios.



In his set against “Oryon,” ranked 4th on France’s PR and probably one of of Europe’s top 10 players, Choq shows an insane amount of spatial awareness and reaction. The talent for spacing and reaction combine to give Choq insane forward smash reads. In his first set against Oryon’s Young Link, he catches Oryon trying to start up a boomerang just at the tip of his forward smash range and takes game 1 [2:12:05]. In an even more impressive exchange, he reacts to Young Link’s fire arrow, clanks it out with an up air, reacts to a missed forward air, and hits an f-smash [2:11:15].

Like Yei, Choq has optimized his main further than any other player and it shows in how he good he is at quickly selecting the perfect option for so many diverse situations. At around 2:24:53 he’s off stage at 105 percent as one of the most fragile characters in the game against one of the highest kill power characters (Wolf).

Instead of dying, he spends the next 20 seconds clawing all the way back and building 80 percent almost uninterrupted because he just knows what options to pick. He knows when back air out of shield can hit, he knows when down tilt’s trip leads to forward smash, he knows that his up b bounces someone off the ground so that he can hit them with a ledge drop forward air after.



Part of it is optimizing Kirby to an insane degree. Part of it is an intense spatial awareness and an ability to understand and react to microspaced hitboxes. A lot of low tier heroes tend to stagnate or even decline as other players learn their tricks and gimmicks. Choq has only done better as Ultimate has gone on and that’s his raw talent with spacing and reaction showing.

Team PHZ | Lancelot – Twitter– Twitch

Turning to Finland and to the high tier mains, Hugo “Lancelot” Hujala is another one of Europe’s best players. He’s the top ranked player in Finland and recently, he’s been giving Ramin “Mr. R” Delshad a run for the title of best Chrom in Europe. Lancelot is a hot and cold player that has beaten opponents Mr. R hasn’t – mainly quiK – and lost to players Mr. R normally beats.

At Valhalla 3, Lancelot ran hot and got 3rd place behind Glutonny and quiK, the 1st and 2nd best players in Europe. His battles against Marcel “quiK” Romagnuolo are particularly legendary and often go the full five rounds. At Valhalla 3 he actually beat the German Samus main, something very few European players have managed to do. He nearly managed to do it twice, but buffered an air dodge at Ultimate Fighting Arena 2019 and died last stock, game 5.

Lancelot sometimes seems like two players in one – a very patient, calculating one, and a very twitchy, aggressive one. He switches between styles pretty quickly, which sometimes leads him to getting punished for being too twitchy, but more often mixes up his opponents. They hit defensive panic options in order to predict and pre-empt his aggression and he slows down, waits out the panic buttons, and uses Chrom’s speed and hitboxes to punish.

In particular, Lancelot has a few key skills that make his Chrom fearsome. First, he doesn’t blow his jump very often and knows all of Chrom’s recovery mix ups and when to use them. This allows him to avoid gimps and early deaths and mount comebacks.

Second, he has very good movement, especially with his dashes. For Chrom, that really helps with reacting and getting kills with forward tilt. Lancelot is insanely precise with Chrom’s dash, pivot, forward tilt in particular. At 16:58, he baits quiK into a normal get up by whiffing a forward tilt, then dashes, pivots, and forward tilts again before quiK can pick an option. This looks easy enough but actually requires a lot of precision and very quick inputs because normal get up has a very small punish window.

Third, he’s very good at reading the defensive options players normally select to beat Chrom and reacting. He goes down a full two stocks against quiK at Valhalla in game 3 and brings it back to even basically by reading quiK over and over. Starting at 13:07, he knows players like to air dodge away from Chrom’s jab and shield afterwards since Chrom doesn’t get much off of a grab. So he pivot grabs, predicting quiK will shield. The pivot grab leads to a chase down forward tilt and kill.

At 13:44, he spams jab at the ledge, which conditions quiK to expect even more jabs. QuiK uses a drop down forward air to beat the move. Lancelot reads this and gets a kill with a dash back forward tilt. He eliminates two stocks while only taking 38 percent.

On top of Lancelot’s skills, he’s a pretty social and active player. He’s one of the few Europeans who regularly streams, he also enters local Melee tournaments, and he has a running google doc full of notes on the world’s notable Chrom mains – including himself! That does my big Chrom heart (and little Chrom brain) good!

Kanga Esports | Jdizzle – Twitter

Watch here.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that King K. Rool main Ben “Ben Gold” Gold is still the number one player in the land down under. However, Australia’s current best player is Jonathan “Jdizzle” Douglas, a Young Link main. Jdizzle rose up the ranks in Smash 4 and was one of the first Australian players to beat a PGR player back in Smash 4 (Charlie “Charliedaking” Antoun at Hyrule Saga).

You probably don’t know too much about Jdizzle because Australia is a small, lesser known region in Smash and because they’re over there doing whatever the hell they want. BigWin, the major streaming organization over there has no VODs of the major Jdizzle won – the BigWin Championships 2. However, if you’d like to catch a montage of their Smash 4 tournament set to classic digital sports songs like “Do the Mario,” “The DK Rap,” and also “Toxic” by Britney Spears then you’re in luck.

And you can catch their vods for Project M, where Zak “Coney” Zeeks got first and Ben “Ben Gold” Gold got 7th because why not? Trying to research Australian Smash was a punishment I didn’t know I was giving myself. In all seriousness, Australian Smash has a lot of unique character – and dance cams – which is pretty great.

Jdizzle, is a player who has run through his region and beat just about every other player on the Australian PR. He performs particularly well at Australia’s major events and hasn’t placed below 2nd at Australia’s B or C tiers since May 2019. Unfortunately for Jdizzle, many of his Grand Finals have been lost to the sands of time, perhaps hidden in the Great Barrier Reef, buried in the Outback, or placed atop Uluru.

However, you can watch his matches in Australia’s most recent major, Phantom 2020, on Beyond The Summit’s Twitch channel. You can also find random smatterings of his matches on Youtube. From his matches you can tell that Jdizzle is a very momentum based player.

When he’s landing hits and in a groove, he can routinely two stock the competition in Australia. When he’s disrupted, he makes mistakes and panics more than usual. In his set against Srikar “Sriks” Jha at Phantom 2020 – 5th on Australia’s PR – Jdizzle kept increasing the margin he’d win by. By the last game he two stocked Sriks.

Australia has a good deal of competent rushdown players so Jdizzle has naturally built a more projectile focused, wall-out kind of Young Link in response. However, Jdizzle is pretty consistent and solid with Young Link’s combos and turns a lot of stray hits into big damage and confirms. At 9:24:45, Jdizzle hits Sriks with an arrow, waits out a dodge, punishes with a boomerang, confirms into a drag down forward air, which confirms into down tilt, which confirms into an up special for the kill.

This is the Awakened Jdizzle that’s really fun to watch. When awakened, his movement becomes pretty sharp and he starts making deeper reads and call outs that are more unique to him, like dash dance up smash that catch rolls out of shields, tech situations, and from ledge. You can see him do it at 09:19:20 or so, where he hard reads Sriks rolling in.

In his awakened form, he’s a bomb innovator as well. He uses his bombs very cerebrally, covering spots by the ledge to discourage certain options, like Snake grenades. He knows the knockback of the bombs really well and gets some very impressive follow ups out of them as well. At about 9:20:30, he throws a bomb up and immediately links it into an up air for a kill.

Jdizzle hasn’t had a big PGR win yet and got 3-0’d twice by Dark Wizzy at Phantom. However, he had some flashes of brilliance against Rasheen “Dark Wizzy” Rose and kept things even with the Mario main and took leads in some matches. That’s pretty good given that Dark Wizzy has been playing very well recently and Jdizzle doesn’t have experience against a Mario of that caliber.

Jdizzle will probably need to travel and practice in more competitive regions to improve though. Some of the bad habits that lost him stocks against Dark Wizzy, like relying on down air to land, go unpunished in his regional matches. With more travel, or more players travelling to Australia, Jdizzle could awaken further!

If you’re looking to learn more about the world of Smash, these four players are all worth checking out. If you’re not looking to learn more about Smash’s international scene, I’m not quite sure why you read this far. But I won’t police your time. I’m not your boss or your father or God. And in all seriousness, thanks for reading and please feel free to point out any great hidden international talents or regions I’ve missed.