how to smash

I see a lot of guides on how to play smash bros, guides about how to use a certain character, guides for useless techs, guides for nearly useless techs, and guides for some obvious shit that you could’ve figured out by looking at gameplay footage.  I see good players tell the new players looking for advice things like, “work on your spacing,” or “try and roll less.”  Those things might be true, but they really aren’t going to help you in practice.  It’s basically just a way of telling you that you need to figure things out on your own.  This guide is not about making you a perfect player, but instead will teach you the essence of this game and how to abuse it.  It’s dirty and it’s cheap, but it’s a strong way to play.  If you can’t win more than 10% of your games in For Glory, if you can’t beat your friend, your older brother, your rival, and you want to do whatever it takes to win or if you just want to break into any kind of competitive level then this guide is for you.

For quick reference, Smash 4 runs at 60 frames per second.  That means that 1/60 of a second is the smallest unit of game time.  K?


The Shield in Smash 4 and in its close cousin Brawl is the most overpowered mechanic in the entire game.  If you look at the frame data for the move, that is to say the speed of technique, you can see why it’s so strong.  In Brawl (which seems identical to Smash 4) the shield appears on frame 2 after the R button is pressed, or in layman’s terms, 1/30 of a second.  It blocks every attack in the game that isn’t a grab or very select moves, and can be dropped within only 7/60 of a second to allow for free movement again.  

Now we are going to practice the Out of Shield game, or oos for short.  Pick Little Mac (for ease of demonstration I’m not telling you to main him lol) and go into training mode for a little bit.  

Use Shield, let go of R, then use forward tilt (Mac’s one-two punch, also called ftilt).  You want to use ftilt on the earliest possible frame when the shield drops down.  Did you notice how you can input ftilt while the shield is still dropping down?  This is something called a buffer window.  In Brawl (which seems similar to Smash 4 in this respect though I’m not sure of the exact specifics for the new game) you have a 10 frame window to input commands in the end lag of whatever previous action you had just committed.  This means that if you press forward and A in the end lag of the shield dropping, (7 frames) ftilt will always come out in the earliest possible frame.  Keep practicing it for a few minutes.  It’s not particularly difficult, but you want to get it in your muscle memory.  

Next try it against an opponent or a cpu.  Just shield, and whenever an attack touches your shield, instantly shield drop then buffer a ftilt.  If they’re too close to you need to buffer a jab instead because ftilt whiffs at close range.  It isn’t too obvious against a computer, but against a bad opponent it becomes readily apparent just how powerful this is.  It’s as simple as shielding on reaction to laggy attacks, and buffering the ftilt or down smash for the kill.  For characters whose ground games aren’t as good as little mac, you probably aren’t able to punish as many things that hit your shield, but every character has some tool to use oos to hit any character that does an unsafe attack.  Metaknight might use oos dash grab, Captain Falcon might use oos Dash Attack.  Shield Grabbing in an option for any character.  You can also jump oos to hit with an aerial which skips the lag from shield dropping.  Practice with your character of choice to learn what their strongest options are out of shield and in which scenarios.  


There are many situations in a match where one character takes advantage of the other’s position to land a free hit.  When they’re offstage, hanging on the ledge, or trying to avoid a projectile, there any many situations you can take advantage of.  By far the most common however, is when your opponent is above you and trying to land safely on the ground.  The correct way to juggle people is incredibly simple and ties in to the oos punishes.  

If someone is trying to land, get under where they will land, and shield.

If they attack your shield, oos punish.  If they air dodge, oos punish.  The only way they can avoid being juggled is if they land outside of your oos range without using an attack or air dodging at all (which isn’t intuitive for any beginning player), use one of their specials, or have an incredible airspeed that makes it difficult to get under them.  If they just jump away from you when you shield, it does nothing except reset the situation, and you can just run under them and shield once more.  

It sounds easy but its actually very difficult to continuously pull off in a match.  Nonetheless it’s definitely the most common advantageous situation you’ll find yourself in during a match, and you should practice the intricacies of pulling it off against any character.  



There is a time and a place for running and walking.  You run when you want to get into a certain zone as fast as possible, and you want to walk when you are in that zone, and are carefully waiting for a reaction you can punish.

Now what does that mean?

Lets say for example that you start a match as Little Mac vs Samus.  Little Mac wants to shut down her annoying projectiles, but if he just runs up and dash attacks hes gonna get punished for it.  If he stays back, hes gonna get spammed and there's nothing he can do to punish it.  What Little Mac wants to do here is be in the zone where there’s an actual risk every time Samus starts up her Side B missiles.  He wants to stand at a distance where if Mac correctly predicts Samus’s Side B and dashes in at that moment, he will be able to land a dash attack.  By standing at this distance, you can repeatedly shield Samus’s Side B and if she continues to go for it, run in and punish if she gets too predictable.  This “Zoning” is a way of shutting down projectile users by creating a risk every time they use their weapon.  

Now that you’re in the zone that you want to be in vs a specific character, you want to walk.  Walking is useful for the reason that you can use any action immediately at any time.  When you walk, be prepared for your opponent to run up an attack you.  Picture their fastest means of attacking you, and be ready at any time when you are walking to shield, and oos punish.  If an opponent has that mental preparation set-up, its extremely difficult to approach someone who just shuffles back and forth in the appropriate zone vs your character while throwing out safe tilts or projectiles.  This is the least intuitive and hardest concept to grasp and put into practice for any new player, so if it really confuses you just stick to the two topics above.


Well the guide has covered how to beat someone who blindly attacks you, and someone who spams a projectile, but how will you beat someone who’s just standing there?  He’s just chillin, and he’s waiting for you to attack his shield or do something dumb so he can punish you.  Well the answer lies in getting to the appropriate zone that I talked about in the last paragraph, and the fastest way into that zone is to dash shield.  

What is dash shielding?  It’s going into a dash and halting your momentum by shielding.  Now why is this so strong?  It’s because normally when you dash at someone it provokes a panic button or set response.  But when you shield it allows you to be safe and react to most common panic button responses fairly easily.  Some common reflexes people have when you run at them are
1)  Rolling behind you.  Punish oos should be simple for any character.
2)  Jumping away.  They’re in a bad position now.  Juggle them.
3)  Attacking.  Well the shield beats this, just punish oos with your best option.
4)  Shielding themselves.  It depends on how close to the opponent you were when you started shielding, but you might be able to shield grab if you’re close.  If you aren’t you can just shield drop and space a safe tilt on shield or safe aerial.

A strong advantage to Dash Shielding is that it’s the quickest way to use your ground game such as ftilts and jabs out of a run.  Not every character has access to good approach tools, but all of them can do this.  

The other way to approach isn’t truly approaching, but it will force a reaction that you can punish most of the time.  What you want to do, is walk back and forth in the appropriate zone that I talked about in the last section.  You should be in the range where you can hit your opponent just by dashing at them and hitting them whenever they perform an attack, or the range where extending your walking shuffle slightly toward them allows you to hit with a safe ftilt.  This makes your opponent incredibly jumpy and nervous.  If they continue to remain calm and patient, try and break out of your shuffle with a dash shield toward them.  That should provoke a response you can punish.  While you shuffle back and forth in the zone, be ready to shield and oos punish at all times.

Basically, you need to become a shark.


You know rolling a lot is bad, you know charging a smash randomly is stupid, and you know using projectiles even when its unsafe is obnoxious, but damn, no matter what you do you just can’t seem to punish them in time when it actually happens. Now when top Brawl players tell new players to wait and be patient in order to punish, it’s sort of inaccurate. What you really want to do, is wait-WITH an expectation. The difference between waiting, and waiting with an expectation is enormous.

The first step, take note of how your opponent moves. Is he walking toward you? Running toward you? ...Rolling toward you (lol)? By seeing what type of player he is, you get a good feel of how he would react if you dash shield at him. By far the most common bad habit i see is rolling behind or away from an opponent. So this next section is going to be about punishing someone with a roll habit just for sake of an example.

Remember when I said be prepared to shield and oos punish whenever someone started running at you while you were shuffling around? What you want to do, is create a new reflex for yourself. Something that you constantly expect to happen. Every time that you’re in the zone vs this opponent, you should CONSTANTLY expect a roll. It should be on the tip of your mind, always. There’s a world of difference in reaction time between something that you’re so sure will happen that its a certainty, and something that you think might happen eventually. It’s in this way that I can punish bad habits with some regularity. The proper mindset is very machine-like, and it’s like I’m playing with 2 objectives in mind.

1) Play as I regularly would.
2) Look for back-roll. If he backrolls right at this very moment, can I punish it?

Now if you play like this, it’s going to let some punishable things get past you. You won’t be able to react to every bad habit if you look for only one, but you should be able to react to that one habit inhumanly fast. You can also update or switchup what you are looking for if you feel its not working or the situation has changed. Let’s say your opponent is on the ledge. You should

1) Be prepared to play regularly, whatever happens.
2) Look for ledge roll.

Let’s say your opponent is standing just on the tip of your range for a fast dash attack. You should

1) Be prepared to play regularly.
2) Look for projectile pull.

If you play this way, you aren’t going to catch everything, but if you are smart in your updates for what you are currently looking for, it allows you to play with superhuman reactions in all sorts of situations. If you’re really good, you can search for and play with multiple expectations in mind, though even I can’t do this very well. It’s extremely difficult not to get messed up when several expectations are on the tip of your mind. Just try and play regularly with an expectation of something you can punish. Make sure that when something you expect actually happens that its possible to punish, for example trying to punish mac’s roll away from jigglypuff just isn’t possible lol. That is what separates the good characters from the bad.

Thank you, you saved my life.

tl;dr:

Thank you, based Gonda.