Smash Summit voting season. Whether it’s eating a raw onion or rapping in a diss track, top Super Smash Bros. players will do just about anything to get voted into Beyond the Summit’s premier Melee invitational. At least, it’s usually just top players.
Smash Summit 11 is different. While the likes of Johnny “S2J” Kim and Avery “Ginger” Wilson failed to get in, a player with no offline top 100 wins to his name received more than 176,000 votes. That’s the most in Smash Summit history. This unexpected result left many in the Melee community asking one question.
Who is Nick Yingling?
Nick “yingling” Yingling is a full-time insurance salesman for State Farm. He also loves architecture and basketball. And, in his spare time, he’s one of the linchpins of the Arizona Super Smash Bros. Melee community.
Yingling is a “doc kid,” or someone who got into competitive Melee after watching Travis “Samox” Beauchamp’s “The Smash Brothers” documentary. Since moving to Arizona and joining their Smash scene in 2015, the Falco main has steadily improved, peaking at No. 7 on Arizona’s fall 2019 power rankings.
“I would describe myself as what every other person wants to be in the Melee scene,” yingling said. “I just want the excitement of beating people and playing on the stage.”
In addition to competing, yingling helps organize tournaments. He hosted his own event, Nick Yingling’s Dave & Buster’s Melee Experience, and he is one of the TOs for Smash Camp, Arizona’s biggest Melee tournament series. According to Mikey “The Cheat” Iosue, yingling’s friend and fellow Smash Camp TO, he has a knack for working with people and convincing them to come to events.
“There’s something about him that people just gravitate towards in a weird way,” The Cheat said. “He’s the kind of guy that’s going to have an impact on an individual level with people, to the point where they will want to be on board with what he’s doing. He’s the guy that’s on Facebook individually tagging people and being like, ‘Hey, are you coming to this thing?’”
Yet, even as a successful TO and a regionally-ranked competitor, yingling wants more. He’s been taking Melee lessons with William “Leffen” Hjelte in order to grow as a player. Even so, Smash Summit 11 presented yingling with his best potential improvement opportunity yet.
Taking Twitter by force
Yingling was eligible for Smash Summit 11 thanks to his 17th place finish at the Galint Melee Open. From the outset, he was confident that he could rally enough support to get into Summit.
“It wasn’t just a pipe dream,” yingling said. “I always felt like there was a chance. I felt like I had support from all of Arizona.”
It also helps that yingling is friends with Ludwig “Ludwig” Ahgren, a streamer with plenty of money to spend on votes. Still, yingling opted not to lean solely on Ludwig. Instead, he pursued a campaign strategy that would attract attention from all over the Melee community.
He brought on The Cheat as his campaign manager, along with a team consisting of Eric “Violence” Lee, Jack “Jackzilla” Harmening and Jake “Chroma” Robins. They gave away spots to the next Smash Camp, partnered with Frame1 to raffle off box-style controllers and orchestrated “spirit bombs,” or large numbers of votes submitted at once.
However, the most effective method was, perhaps, the meme campaign they ran on social media.
“The strategy was to take the timeline of Twitter by force and just shove Nick Yingling down everyone’s throat as much as possible,” yingling said.
They filmed a video of yingling dunking on The Cheat on an eight-foot basketball goal. The Cheat then added a voiceover saying, “You just got ratioed by air yingling.” The final product was used in response to any yingling dissidents, as well as to ratio a 2007 tweet from United States president Joe Biden.
trying my best pic.twitter.com/FHfhD7bcBJ
— Mikey (@thecheat) July 5, 2021
In addition, yingling and The Cheat took advantage of other Smashers’ platforms to spread the gospel of Nick Yingling. Both of them talked to Kevin “PPMD” Nanney and Kris “Toph” Aldenderfer for the “Radio Melee” podcast. Meanwhile, The Cheat went on Jesse “cyfer003” Wall’s “Bottom of the Smash Mountain” and talked to Hugo “HugS” Gonzalez for a YouTube video on his channel.
The pair would then search for yingling’s name on Twitter to find Smashers asking who he was. In response, they would share links to the podcasts they had visited. This opened up opportunities for them to encourage people who had never heard of yingling to vote him into Summit.
