BuzzerBeater Forums

charles, thank you for your patience. to get to the rest of these questions...

b) Much of club level management involves building a roster, while at the national team level it's primarily about setting the correct game-day tactics. What do you think were your best couple of "tactical" wins at the club level, beating teams you shouldn't have been able to beat in games where everybody was trying their hardest? [This hopefully will get a good discussion going for less experienced users too, since it means you can explain what you were thinking and why it worked. The most common post we get in the help forums is seeking advice on how to beat a strong team with a weaker lineup.]

charles, to get to the rest of these questions.. my best win was here:(10538484)
i went 1-3-1, something i hadnt shown all year. i further started a pf at half of the salary of my typical starter at PF, because the player profile fit the defense better, and because i wanted the more diversified offensive skills. i was also up against US NT SG thad whittington, who was playing mostly pg (but playing it well), and knew that my own combo guard could not go at pg where he usually went. i also got slightly lucky, which you always need as well. If UHRojos win that game, they are a more favorable matchup for the great ThatsWhatSheSaid, and maybe Rojos stays inthe NBBA the last 3 seasons...


5) JuicePats in particular used a very different style of enthusiasm management than almost everybody else at Worlds. Was he doing something better or worse than the rest of BuzzerBeater? How would you have handled the tough group we were dealt?

I want to comment on what someone else said, that we were one result away. Technically yes, but beating spain by 46 on the road is no way to get there. If you need to win all of your games, your best approach is to try to keep the odds of winning each game similar to eachother if it's a linear relationship. So better to have a 50-50 chance in each game than 10-90 in one and 90-10 in the other (the odds of winning both games in the first scenario is 25%, the 2nd scenario it's only 9%). I feel Juice violated this rule, among countless other mistakes.

6) Part of the reason we seem to be in tough groups might be that we have a tendency to focus on minimally getting to the next stage and then conserving enthusiasm. At the U21 level, Brasil played crunch time against us and avoided Argentina, while we saved enthusiasm but lost in the semis anyway (so did Brasil). The situation was set up because we didn't put effort into a game against Argentina that decided which group we would be in for the second round. Should we have been willing to give up enthusiasm to end up with different opponents? Similarly, our tough group draws at Worlds have been in part because we tend to CT the semifinals (and qualify for Worlds) at the expense of trying to win the continental trophy. Is this a good policy? Should we care about winning the Americas?

Again this is relative. How much of a gain would it have been to play Peru vs Brasil in odds of winning? you can set up a fairly simple decision tree, and usually it will yield the best answer. In coco's partial defense, counting on the irrationality and complete misunderstanding of the rules by the brazilian coach would have been tough to predict.

THe continental trophy is a minimum requirement for our userbase. We should care about winning it.

you could sort of hide that guy somewhere

porzionato, gambino, fanesi, zanotti, romagnoli.
where in the world do you think you can hide a 11/8 defender?

ill give up my opponent shooting 7 for 9 (10 points above average) if i can extract 12 extra points of offense on aggregate.

would that work against italy? i am not sure. but it's a different approach

I want to comment on what someone else said, that we were one result away. Technically yes, but beating spain by 46 on the road is no way to get there. If you need to win all of your games, your best approach is to try to keep the odds of winning each game similar to eachother if it's a linear relationship. So better to have a 50-50 chance in each game than 10-90 in one and 90-10 in the other (the odds of winning both games in the first scenario is 25%, the 2nd scenario it's only 9%). I feel Juice violated this rule, among countless other mistakes.

... snip ...

Again this is relative. How much of a gain would it have been to play Peru vs Brasil in odds of winning? you can set up a fairly simple decision tree, and usually it will yield the best answer.

Can you walk us through the decision trees as you saw them at the time (or as you would see them "at that time" now)? What sort of "level of trying to win" would you have put into the various games in our final Worlds group last time through? If you knew ahead of time that Brazil would CT us, would you have counter-CT'd and actively tried to win the game? Would you have intentionally TIEd and thrown it (again, knowing ahead of time they're going to CT)?

Granted, it's Monday Morning Quarterbacking, but I'm interested to hear your opinion a posteri, since you seem pretty adamantly opposed to the methods that were used at the time.

I want to comment on what someone else said, that we were one result away. Technically yes, but beating spain by 46 on the road is no way to get there. If you need to win all of your games, your best approach is to try to keep the odds of winning each game similar to eachother if it's a linear relationship. So better to have a 50-50 chance in each game than 10-90 in one and 90-10 in the other (the odds of winning both games in the first scenario is 25%, the 2nd scenario it's only 9%). I feel Juice violated this rule, among countless other mistakes.

... snip ...

Again this is relative. How much of a gain would it have been to play Peru vs Brasil in odds of winning? you can set up a fairly simple decision tree, and usually it will yield the best answer.

Can you walk us through the decision trees as you saw them at the time (or as you would see them "at that time" now)? What sort of "level of trying to win" would you have put into the various games in our final Worlds group last time through? If you knew ahead of time that Brazil would CT us, would you have counter-CT'd and actively tried to win the game? Would you have intentionally TIEd and thrown it (again, knowing ahead of time they're going to CT)?

Granted, it's Monday Morning Quarterbacking, but I'm interested to hear your opinion a posteri, since you seem pretty adamantly opposed to the methods that were used at the time.

So lets take a look back at the start of season 10.

ok, so lets mmqb, which is unfair to coco because predicting a brazil crunch time is unreaspnable, but for academic purposes lets pretend instead of brazil CT'ing its italy or spain or something.

Argentina had initially beaten us by 14, with what i am going to say was possibly better enthusiasm the first time and putting more into the game.

In the semi finals, argentina clearly had a rather sizable enhtusiasm edge, only peru in their three games leading to the semifinals might have been a normal.

so they are still probably favorites because we know they took it easy last game and likely have an enthusiasm edge.

so lets put our odds at beating argentina at 30% if we normal the game against brazil, 50% if we TIE, and 5% if we CT and lose



we also know that peru had taken it easy the game before, but were a beatable, albeit good team. lets give ourselves a

70% chance if we tie the game before and face them, 50% chance if we normal, and 20% chance if we ct the game before and lose


so now all we need are the odds of beating brazil, knowing they are CT'ing. as it stands we only lost by 7. this seems about right. we beat them earlier that season.

lets put the odds at 70% of winning if we ct, 40% if we normal, 10% if we tie



so now.


if we ct, there's a 70% chance we face peru with wasted enthusiasm, and 30% we face argentina

i count our odds of winning the semis on aggregate at 15.5%


if we normal, there's a 40% chance of peru, and a 60% chance of argentina

our aggregate odds are now 38% of winning the semis game

if we tie we face argentina 90% of the time and peru 10% of the time

i put our odds that way at 52% of advancing


the #'s could be slightly off, so there may be a situation where normaling was the right call or close to it, but generally speaking, ct would be a fiasco, and TIE is probably best against brazil if we know they are shooting their load

and as promised, i am not talking about juice's failures anymore this campaign, so i will discuss those after the election, preferably over email, but you can see my general thinking in the u21 discussion. all told coco didnt know brazil would CT, so i find his decision to normal the game defensible

At the risk of sounding impertinent... what do you base your percentages on? Can you at least somewhat justify the 50/30/5% chances against Argentina? To me, your post pretty much looks like randomly chosen numbers... I'd like to have an idea of the basis from which you're generating them.

At the risk of sounding impertinent... what do you base your percentages on? Can you at least somewhat justify the 50/30/5% chances against Argentina? To me, your post pretty much looks like randomly chosen numbers... I'd like to have an idea of the basis from which you're generating them.

Despite being beaten down constantly URP is consistently showing in depth his thought process (rightly or wrongly)... this debate seems to be stacked against him (maybe a lot of his own doing initially) but if you look beyond this his tactical arguments seem far more convincing than others who have opted to perhaps rely on the fact they've devoted more man hours to the cause previously.

I'm curious to see how many votes URP takes down in the end... I feel he is fighting a losing battle unless interestingly the votes for yourself and wozzvt come out pretty even.

As a neutral I would be coming around more to this campaign and feel that this guy has to be worth a shot. You can almost forgive his worryingly poor club record as with NT you just get handed some top players to go out and play with.

EDIT: fixed crap spelling



not random.

Warning: this is wonky, so if you're not at least competent with introductory level college statistics, this probably won't make sense.

-----------------------------

if you play the same tactics against the same team 10000 times, your expected score might not fall ina perfectly normal distribution, but it isnt super far off

more importantly, your points per possession number should be very close to normally distributed

your opponents points per possession number should also be normally distributed, though again their score is not fully independent of your score, but the two are less correlated tan you would think (the issues come at the end of the game when the computer coach starts "adjusting" with occasionally sub-optimal strategies)

All of that is fairly obtuse anyway, so let's oversimplify because the oversimplification is more or less true enough to apply here.

With normal paces and adjusting for talent of opposition, the standard deviation for most decent teams is +/-10 points. (10 isnt the exact number but it's close enough that this explanation should make sense, without being so close that I would feel uncomfortable about some of the work i've done (brute forcing alot of games to find standard deviations no less))

This matters. With this information, and a normal distribution, and a similar deviation from the opponent, we know that, using basic math, that the standard deviations in score between the two games is:

10 squared + 10 squared = 200, but take the square root for lets call it 14.


So if you are a 14 point favorite, you are going to win that game 84% of the time. That doesnt sound like much and sounds like you are very prone to upsets but thats reallly a dominant number, and even a slight underestimation.

So if you think argentina on a neutral court was 7 points better than us in a normal, and the decision to ct vs tie moves the needle say 5 points, you can plot where you are on the normal curve, calculate the number of sigmas away you are and calculate your odds of victory.

you can also facto in enthusiasm for future games, and how many points that impacts things. these are things you can estimate pretty damn good through observation.

so while i didnt do the math to the n;th degree, i have a feel for whre things might be on the curve and adjust.

some of this is intuitive. If you were a 20 point underdog and a ct saves you 7 points, then ct'ing moves yor odds of victory from like 5% to 20%, in other words its still a huge freaking reach. but if you were in a cointoss if you normal, that ct is going to be pretty freaking sweet in tiltin the odds in your favor.

again, i personally might have missed slightly on the curve and estimated to the nearest 10% to keep my math easy, but the math my thinking is based in is rock solid.

Last edited by TheUnrepentantGunner at 12/17/2009 9:27:34 PM