2022 Players Championship

I started a poll thread to see if we can gauge anything beyond the few of us chatting here.

Back to over analyzing…

Top 36 get in, for three sets of 12 team semis. If top teams are demonstrating all this “extra” skill, shouldn’t beating just three other teams (and sometimes only two) in the semis be a good metric for being in the Finals?

I guess what I’m trying to resolve in my head is this:

A. I’m a Top ranked team

The Top Teams want free passes because finishing Top 6 or Top 9 had nothing to do with luck, it’s all Every Game Counts skill. So I shouldn’t be subject to a one time lucky lower-ranked team taking me out in the semis. They were just lucky to win one important league.

B. I’m not a Top ranked team

The Top teams just got a few more points than me in the qualifying leagues, but I apply Every Game Counts skill in the semis and knock them out. They were just lucky to be ranked slightly above me to begin with.

I guess it all depends on your perception of who is benefiting from the luck, and there may be no right answer to this.

***

The qualifying events remove two thirds of the field. What’s left are the Top 36 teams, sorted by finish and simply asked to beat two or three other teams to reach the Finals. What is so inherently unfair about that? Seems simple and straightforward.

What is the point of 4-5 qualifying events?

Is it to identify the individual Top Managers? Or is it to pare the field back to identify the Playoff Worthy Managers?

As I keep pinballing this thing around in my brain, I'm leaning toward identifying a playoff pool. I don’t think
Manager 1 > Manager 36. I think at most, Managers 1-36 > Managers 37-108 (with a lot of empathy for Manager 37).

It's 4-5 events. It should mean more than winnowing the number of participants simewhat when it samples how managers do in several different events. That's a good test of a manager's overall ability, isn't it? So giving some byes to players who have done exceptionally well is warranted.

And the top 36 are not basically the same at least in how they've done in the regular season in the tournament:

Jsanders (#1): 92-70 75-87 96-66 95-67 90-72

SteadyEddie (#36) 82-80 84-78 83-79 88-74

JSanders averaged 89.6 wins in the regular season in 5 events. SteadyEddie averaged 84 wins. And if you take out the 75 which of course is what happens Jsanders averaged 93 wins!.

So, no, that level of performance is not close to being the same where you could just say oh the top 36 did about the same. Maybe in actuality they're roughly the same but not how they did in the tournament. After that long qualifying tournament round to say that Jsanders and SteadyEddie should now be in the semi-finals with the same chance to win the tournament doesn't seem to be a particularly fair way to run a tournament.

I do see your point for 1 and 36, but I do not agree with the conclusion, and here’s why…

The difference between 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th is one point (or .25 pts x 4 best events). So 9 gets a pass and 10, 11, and 12 aren’t worthy??

There’s no getting around that the Tour Finals should simply be the Top 12 finishers (best 4 after 5 events). Having done it that way for a few years, it turned out that after one event you basically winnow the 100 manager field down to only two dozen guys who care enough to even go on for the rest of the events.

So, the question becomes encouraging the most overall participation, while still identifying the best managers. The Top 9 in Barnstormer’s works because 12 guys trade off being in the Top 9 every single year. They are the most vocal posters, and they all like it that way. 200x is way more fluid in who does well in a given year. I would even go so far to say the best managers in 200x trade off being in the Top 36 every year, and even then, we could both find very good (even elite) managers who DO NOT make the Top 36.

For argument’s sake, let’s say there are no qualifying events, that you or me (or you and me) hand select who we subjectively think are the Top 36 managers without one qualifying event. Any one of us could do that, and I have no doubt whoever won would be a deserving tour Champ. But NONE of us would know going in if it was going to be Manager 1 or Manager 36.

Instead of subjectively hand selecting the Top 36, we just objectively give 100+ managers a shot at it with qualifying events. For the most part, the same better managers generally make in. That, to me, seems pretty reasonable, regardless of the spread between 1 and 36.

As to the point about the differences between 9 and 12 being 1 point, we had 4 managers tie at 35th this year. 2 got to move forward based on tie breakers and 2 didn't. Managers 39 and 40 were 1 point behind them. So we had 6 managers in the running for 2 spots based on 1 point difference over 5 events. We already use minute differences in point totals to identify semifinalists, why not use them to identify finalists also.

I have probably spoken on this more than I should (drawback to having a long weekend at home without much else going on). I think the points should matter, and should matter a lot. As you said, 20XX is more fluid in who does well in a given year. I think that 20XX requires different strategies for different years, you have to identify different cards as values, and you need to identify cheap cards as subs because injuries are so much more prevalent. BS is largely the same cards year after year, you can identify 1 strategy at each cap and use the same concepts over and over. So, when it is "your year" in TPC to really do well with the card set, you should get the advantage of a direct ticket to the finals. You have shown over the course of 5 events that you are consistently good, so why should you have to prove it a 6th time. And since we don't have the problem here that BS does where the same people rotate around those top 12 spots each year, we shouldn't see the same managers snagging those top 6 spots every year.

If we only need to identify the top 36 managers in a season, why 5 events? Why not 3 or 4? We do lots of events to get as large a sample as realistically possible so we can find the top 36. And if its good enough to cut off the top 36, why not cut off the top 6 from that and give 6 more people a shot to be a Cinderella.

Anyway, I enjoy the tournament no matter what format it is in, so I am not going to boycott or be in a huff if I don't get my way. I just want to see it be the best format possible to really reward the person who deserves to be the champion.

I put on a diving helmet and went down 20,000 leagues under, also due to too much time left alone with my iPad!

What I asked myself is this. How do you determine a fair coin? I came up with more Bernoulli equations and parameters of p value than I care to think about any more. But eventually I found this:

To give you an idea about the sample size: If you don't have a very specific prior that the coin must be very fair and you want to detect a deviation of ±0.01 percent points with 95% confidence and conclude p(head)=0.5 also with 95% confidence, you would need data from at least 64964 tosses of that coin. With just 10 tosses you can say almost nothing concrete about p(head).

65,000 tosses equal points won, meaning a statistically relevant Players Championship would require us to play 1,000 qualifying events! So, I think no, points matter very little.

And, like our poll for next year’s tour format, you get a small dose of just about nothing that means nothing. Nothing that we do actually determines anything, other than measuring the first fifty feet of a 100 mile race. All the convoluted pretzel logic to make “fairness” of it is just us arguing with windmills.

I’m back to the simplest solutions are probably best.

ATG is roughly the same every year so you get a certain level of consistency. 20XX changes significantly every year with a whoe new set of cards and that tends to play to certain manager preferences, so there is going to be more variance in top managers in the 20XX tournament from year to year. What matters is how a manager does this year with this set of cards. And of course people that are close to the cut-off will have a level of performance similar to that of those who have byes (that's why in my proposal I gave an advantage to the next 12 as opposed to the 24 after after that). The real question is there a significant difference in performance between the top 6 and player #36 or player #24? And the answer is clearly yes. And so I don't think you should lump all 36 together and basically just start all over.

With regard to the top six: (a) 4 of the six had win totals of 90 or more four out of five events, (b) 1 had three win totals of 90 or more three times (and once at 89), and (c) one had two times they had 90 wins or more but they were 95 and 99.

Other numbers: top 6 had 20 combined >=90 seasons; the other 30 play-off teams had 40 combined ; the top 6 had 10>=95 seasons, the other 30 had 10. So the top 6 averaged 3.5 seasons>=90 and 1.67>=95; the other 30 averaged 1.33 seasons>=90 and .333>=95. That's a huge difference in performance in the tournament at the top and deserves more than just being thrown with the other 30, many of whom have done much less well.

The idea that placement in the top 36 deserves no reward is an absurd one, frankly put forward by someone who placed 35th after the 5th league was completed. The problem with the 3 person draft this year was there was no time limit to picks and some managers took advantage of that, sometimes taking days to make their pick. Have a time limit with penalties and the problem is solved.

AG,

I’ve been playing the tour for going on 20 years. Placing 35th for one year has no bearing whatsoever on anything I’ve put forward.

I don’t mind you throwing out the condescension, but at least make some attempt at an objective argument and not just repeating your own opinion of how this should all work. I already know how you feel. I don’t see any facts though.