An unlucky blue ball and a repeat winner in The Smily Fam's 'Pop Tic Tac Toe Battle!'
The family's latest round of its board game crossed a million views before its first day was out, and the comments split between cheering the winner and consoling the player who could not keep a ball on the board.
The Smily FamStory of Why this story? The video opened at a pace of 1,748,341 views a day, 67 times a normal first day on this channel (26,119).
Pop Tic Tac Toe Battle!
Nearly two million views in a little over a day: that is where "Pop Tic Tac Toe Battle!" stood, after passing the million mark before its first 24 hours were up. For The Smily Fam, whose new shorts usually open with a few tens of thousands of views, this was a very different kind of start.
The game is familiar to regular viewers. The family has played "Pop Tic Tac Toe" before, and this round is billed as a battle. It is played with balls on the board instead of pencil marks, and one commenter asks where to buy it, saying it looks a lot more fun than the paper kind.
The comment section was about four times busier than on a usual first day, and it has settled into two running threads. One celebrates the winner, and several viewers point out that the same player has done it again. The other is a small sympathy campaign for the player whose blue ball kept rolling out. One viewer notes that by the end, that player was only hoping to hold on to the center square. "Justice" is the word that keeps coming up, along with jokes about a villain arc for the player in blue.
The tic-tac-toe round was not the only short to take off that day. Three more, all posted the same day, opened many times above the channel's usual: a boys-versus-girls challenge where the fewest attempts wins, a finish-line rematch and a good-luck short. The boys-versus-girls round neared three-quarters of a million views in its first fourteen hours. By the next day the family had moved on to a tennis accuracy challenge.
Published on Trari
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What viewers say
The blue ball is very unlucky
@MichaelRandiPutraRiawijayaSee it on YouTubewhere can i buy that, it looks way funner than regular tic tac toe
@LexiAnnNemSee it on YouTubeBlue’s villain arc starts now
@quarentman5100See it on YouTube
Public comments from the video's page on YouTube
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- Channel
- The Smily Fam
- Subscribers
- 4,940,000 ▲ 120,000 this week
- Channel views, last 7 days
- 384,844,537
- Channel views, pace per day
- 71,788,108 (on a normal day: 42,623,258)
- Video published
- October 4, 2026
- Video views so far
- 1,954,875 (less than a day online)
- Video views, pace per day
- 1,889,574
The numbers
This was one of four shorts from the same day to open far above the channel's usual first day, and it is the one that went furthest.
💡 Test your knowledge
In Gomoku, the Japanese cousin of tic-tac-toe played on a Go board, how many stones in a row do you need to win?
Gomoku means "five pieces," and the winner is the first player to make an unbroken line of five stones.
