Scrub has a number of meanings:

• to rub a surface hard, especially with a brush.

• low lying vegetation or an area containing this vegetation. This term is commonly used in New Zealand for the early stages of a regenerating forest (bush), sub-alpine scrub or low-land scrub.

See also: Shrub

• No Scrubs is the name of a song by TLC, from their 1999 album FanMail.

• A Deku Scrub is a fictional race in The Legend of Zelda.

In the terminology of fighting games a "scrub" is a player who loses because he refuses to use certain powerful characters or techniques because he feels that they make the game less fun overall or limit his choices necessarily as to which characters he can pick (the scrub would call the powerful techniques "cheap" and attempt to gather popular support for an honor system which avoids using said techniques or characters.) The term was later broadened to be a pejorative term for someone who is not good with a fighting game, although many top fighting game players constantly attempt to reign in the misuse of this word in this way.

This "scrub" vs. "expert player" dichotomy is very peculiar to fighting games. In most fighting games, despite efforts to balance the game, certain characters have empirical advantages over others in match play, making them "high tier." Scrubs will often decry this, citing it as unfair. Some groups of casual fighting game players will declare certain characters, moves, or techniques off-limits by calling them "cheap" or unfair. Oftentimes, the "scrubs" in question do not realize that the things they find "cheap" are easily avoided or circumvented in some fashion. For example, many scrubs will complain that repeatedly using fireball attacks (i.e. spamming fireballs) is a cheap technique that is not fair. What they may not realize, however, is that the other player can jump over the projectiles, or slowly walk forward and pausing to block only at the last moment. Most serious competitive players, rather than complain about something being unfair, will try to find these counter-techniques. This dichotomy between complaining about game mechanics vs. taking action to conquer them is often considered by competitive players to be the main qualifier for "scrubdom."