How do you determine Seo Competition in Blackhat Niches?

So this might seem like a beginner question and it most likely is, but keep reading.
I have a list of keywords for which I want to generate traffic and I want to choose the easiest country by seo competition.
How do I determine that?

We can look at the number of results generated, even use advanced tools such as Semrush and use their algorithm to determine the seo competition, but this tools do not take into account PBN links. Most sites ranking in competitive niches are using this kind of links and since I'm out of the seo game for quite some time, I really don't know how to determine Competition difficulty anymore. Before people used to hide like 30 to 50% of their PBNs and you could still get an idea of your competition by using this kind of tools, but now, all people I know have their networks hidden completely from crawlers and the competition score is not relevant for me anymore.

How do you guys do it nowadays?

Backlinks, google knowledge graph

You are right; it is hard to get accurate competition analysis right now. It requires some human intervention and looking into the keywords from a human point of view. This is like an interpolation. It is using the known to find the hidden unknowns.