Where are you taking me?

Good stages for Samus to missile cancel on.

Neutral Stages:

• Battlefield (BF)
• Yoshi's Story (YS)
• Fountain of Dreams (FoD)
• Dreamland (DL)
• Final Destination (FD)

Counterpick Stages:

• all of the neutral stages +
• Pokemon Stadium (PS)

Striking
The first stage played on in a set is decided in a 1-2-1 stage striking method. The player striking first can be decided through RPS, or by both players using GW's sideB aiming for the highest number.
The first player then strikes one of the 5 neutrals. The second player strikes two more, then the first player chooses the stage from the two remaining stages.


Counterpicking
The counterpicking process works as follows:
1. The winner bans one of the six counterpick stages.
2. The loser chooses the stage.
3. The winner chooses his character.
4. The loser chooses his character.

Note: Best of 3 sets usually allow the winner to ban one stage, but best of 5 sets usually do not allow banning.

Note: "Banning" a stage just means eliminating it as a counterpick option for just that 1 game; ex, P1 bans YS for game 2, so if there's a game 3, YS can still be selected unless the counterpicker already won there OR it gets banned again for game 3.

Note: There used to be a counterpicking process some tournaments used with a slightly different method for choosing characters: if the loser changes characters, the winner was allowed to choose the stage, unless he also changed character, which would give the loser back the stage counterpick. There also used to be a lot more stages that were legal (Pokefloats, etc).

Note: In doubles, FoD is banned b/c it lags with 4 players, but PS is considered neutral in doubles, while Kongo Jungle (64) is included in the counterpick stages for doubles.


Modified Dave's Stupid Rule (DSR)
The counterpicker cannot choose the stage that he last won on in that set.
Ex, P1 wins game 1 on FD, and P2 wins game 2 on DL. For game 3, P2 bans BF, and P1 can choose from only the following: YS, FoD, DL, PS (BF is banned and P1's last win was on FD, so they are not available).

Note: In grand finals, DSR should reset for the second set.

Note: The original DSR was that you can't counterpick a stage if you had ever won on it in that set, it's better modified for best of 5 sets.


Gentleman's Agreement
Tournaments will usually have set rulesets that YOU SHOULD NOT ATTEMPT TO CHANGE without permission (which the TO's should not approve).
However, players are given the option of mutually agreeing to use any stage, legal or not.
This is the only situation in which players are allowed to override the rules through mutual agreement (you can't mutually decide to make a best of 3 into a best of 5, etc).


Double Blind
There is often a situation in which a person's character selection is heavily based on their opponent's character selection. In this situation, the person who sits down to play and selects their character last has a pseudo-counterpick advantage for the first game.
To avoid this situation, players have the option of each privately informing a 3rd party of their character selections, and having that 3rd party select the characters for them.


Port Priority/Neutral Start
A neutral start is when both players spawn symmetrically on the stage, preventing one player from starting the game with positional advantage.
There are 2 methods of dealing with this:

1. Neutral Start: Both players agree to move to the neutral starting positions before beginning the fight.
2. Port Priority: Since starting positions are determined by port, players can RPS for their ports. The official ruleset listed on Smashboards says that the winner of the initial RPS can choose to either strike first or have port priority. So if you want port priority, you can force each player to have their controller in two ports which would result in a neutral start, but you can choose the one with port priority.

Note: Port Priority for stage positions can be quite different from other kinds of port priority. Priority for simultaneous events is always whoever is closest to P1. There are some really obscure situations where you might want P4 (ex, a P4 Marth can chain grab a spacies to a higher percent safely b/c there's an extra frame of freedom after the throw).

Doubles
In melee doubles, you can steal one of your partner's stocks if you run out by hitting start. There are a couple of courtesy rules about this. If your opponent has 2 stocks and they're at high % right now, just leave it unless they want you to be the last leg (or in friendlies by the ultimate scumbag and take it while they're getting star KO'd. On that note, another courtesy rule is that when you are star KO'd, don't hit start to share stock until after you're all the way dead - otherwise you'll pause and mess up the game. This can be solved by turning pause off.
In PM, share stock is done with A and B together, so no need to worry about pausing by accident.
Team attack should be on.