Friday, July 25, 2014

WBC: Team Tournament Tournament

Each year at the World Boardgaming Championships they hold a team tournament where you can sign up in a group of 4 players who each pick a game and try to earn points by winning that prechosen game. Surrounding that team tournament is another tournament of sorts where you can pick 10 teams that you think will do well in the team tournament. Whoever ends up picking the most teams that end up finishing in the top 10 wins a free entry into the next WBC.

The deadline for entering the team tournament has passed and they've posted up the odds for each team. My old teammates have slotted in at 18th position with 49-1 odds. My new team is ranked 55th of 81 with 223-1 odds to win the team tournament. Now, this is because my three teammates have never been to WBC before so the algorithm for estimating how well a team will do assumes all three of them are terrible. This is not the case so I suspect if we were to run WBC in 223 alternate universes we'd end up winning more than once. They do explain a bit of their formula and there's a pretty heavy weighting for alltime laurels earned which really deflates the value of people newer to WBC.

Anyway, the teams are all listed, so it's worth spending some time thinking about who you'd pick in the team tournament tournament. I'm not sure if I should put my own team on my entry (if I get around to making one this year) or not. I do think we have a decent chance of making top 10... But I also feel like if we do make top 10 I'll be pretty happy as it is. So do I really want to double down on being happy for making top 10? Choices... Choices...

2 comments:

Sky said...

Who is your team?

Ziggyny said...

Andrew, Duncan, and Sara.