(8)Ryu Hayabusa vs (9)Simon Belmont 2018

Ulti's Analysis
This match may look like it was a barn burner due to the final percentages and score, but it wasn't really a classic/great match. You know the phrase in sports "not as close as the final score"? That was this match. Simon Belmont took the early lead, and outside of a few speed bumps in the first hour, he was able to very consistently hold things at 52-53%. Ryu was able to cut the peak lead of 750 down to 450 or so, but it was never at a winning comeback pace.

We've seen Ryu in some weird matches in the past where he pulls off some astonishing feats, and I sort of include this match on that list, but he was a victim of two things. One was the 8pm poll start time killing our trends. I honestly think Ryu could have won this match had it started at midnight. Look at how well Ryu did after 2am. Shift this entire poll 4 hours and he may very well have won the day vote to win. I know that makes no sense, but we see weird things happen as polls get closer.

The other thing Ryu was a victim of is pretty obvious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8oCbGaAZTo

Just for fun, if you plug 2010 values into the stat calculator, you get Ryu winning this match with 55%. If you plug in 2013 numbers, you get 62%. If you plug in 2004 Ryu against 2002 Simon, you get 61%. And if you plug in 2007's numbers, you get a typical LOL x stats result of 75%. We can toss that one out as an outlier and just use the mean of the other 3, which is 59%.

Is a simple announcement of being in Smash Bros worth 10% in a GameFAQs contest? Nothing else happened that would have affected either character, and without Smash Ryu clearly wins this match. With it, Simon flips things 10%. If you use the lowest possible number, it's like a 6% flip. Any time someone tries denying Smash's influence on our site, just show them this PCA. Couldn't be more obvious.

And because I can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFMQ_wM80_c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVRJktHHiTM