Winning a Major: Just how good do you have to be? (Part 1)

I had originally started this project to put numbers to what we see in fighting game tournaments.  Sure we know top players are really good,  sure we know advantages matter, but the question is "How much do they matter?" or "Just how good are the top players?"

If you read my previous blog post you saw I looked at how advantages effect 2 out of 3 sets as well as 3 out 5 since these were related to tournament success; however, I quickly found the math behind the problem grew too large too fast. So in order to actually get a result I wrote a computer code to simulate multiple tournaments and collect statistics.   The math behind it is a little bulky, but the general idea is straight forward.  Set up a bracket (size chosen by user), run each match, and record the results. Just like a real tournament except this one is controlled through probability.  As I also stated in the last article, I don't want to get too technical because this is meant for a general audience. More technical explanations can be given upon demand (It includes words like Monte Carlo).  I am also planning on releasing the code at a later date, but as of right now it is not the most user friendly.

With this code we can simulate a wide variety of tournaments by adjusting the individual match ups.  By averaging over different tournament brackets it is possible to obtain the probability of winning for a scenario.

Introductory Data

So one of the first cases we can study is a very simple example.  Let's say we have a tournament where every player has the same chance of beating any other player with one exception: You are the one player whose has different odds of beating the other players.  This is actually a rather simple set up, but it gives a great deal of information.

For this data, I took player 1's match up probabilities against everyone else in the tournament and scaled them up incrementally from 5% up to 95%.  Obvious at 0% the result is easy to predict since if you have no chance of winning a match you have no chance of winning a tournament and likewise at 100% if you always win every match up you will never lose a tournament.

I also changed the number of players to look at the effect of the bracket size.  The numbers you see are in powers of 2 since new player slots are introduced when the bracket doubles in size.    The size of a typical major is above 128 while local tournaments are around 8-32.

The data is presented in two ways.  The table contains the raw data and the plot shows a color plot of the same data. The bracket size is on the top.  The bolded percentages is player 1's win rate against the other tournament players (IE for 60% if I played 10 games against any other player I would expect to win 6 out of 10).   The percentages listed are the number of first place finishes out of 100,000 samples.

The contour plot shows the lowest win tournament percentages in blue while the highest are displayed in yellow.  The x axis is the number of players in the bracket and the y axis is the match upwin percentage. 

One of the first ways we can check the data for accuracy is to look for values which we can easily calculate own our own.  The easiest case is when the match win rate is set to 50%.  With the way the bracket was designed,  if player 1 has a 50% win rate then every player has the same chance of winning.   Thus the expected win rate is equal to 1/(# of players).  If you calculate this for each bracket you see the simulation data matches this. So the simulation matches perfectly with the expected value for the easily calculable case.

The first trend of interest is that for any given win rate, as the bracket increases in size the win rate also declines.  This is actually to be expected.  If you have more players you would expect there to be more chances to for you to lose.  While this is obvious, one of the things that was not entirely obvious was large this effect was.   For values less than 50% the result does not change much (Obviously since you lose most of your matches), but for values above 50% there is a very interesting trend.  Smaller win rates drop off much much faster than larger win rates!   

 If you notice at 60% for a small local you have a very reasonable chance of winning, but by the time you scale it up to the size of a major a 60% match win rate you will win roughly 1 out of every 20.  This means that even if you are the best player if you are only slightly better you will still lose more majors than you win.  A 60% advantage is not nearly enough to be a consistent winner because odds are you will get randomed out in a bracket that size.   In fact only match win rates of 85% or higher actually translate to winning over half of your tournaments consistently. It actually speaks to the skill level of many of the top players when they are able to consistently win or place at majors. They aren't just slightly better,  they have an enormous edge.

This brief examination actually shows us quite a bit of insight.  In order to be a consistent winner you not only need to be just better, you need to be much better than your opponents.   In addition you can actually see for a given bracket size that every little bit helps.  Every advantage you gain over your opponents gives you a much greater chance of coming out in first place and it becomes really pronounced for large brackets.  I graphed the data for the 512 man bracket so it is easy to see.  After 50% the probability of winning a tournament beings to rise a little, but after about 65% it shoots up fast and at that point every additional percentage dramatically increases the chance of winning a major. 


  
I will be going into much more detail in my upcoming posts.  I will be going over probability of placing in the top 8,  how first round byes effect your chances of winning,  what happens when a top player is in your bracket,  and other related topics.  Hope to see you guys again.

 

 Q&A

Q: But what if (Insert Player Here) has a bad day and gets knocked out early?

A:  This method actually takes that into account.  When we talk about win rates that includes fluke losses.  I mean if a player like Daigo had a 96% win rate against other players that 4% are the rounds where Daigo had an off game and there is a small chance that he could have two bad games in a set resulting in getting knocked into losers early.    This is all accounted for by the numbers.

Q:  Well in a real bracket I'm going to have a lot of varying win rates.  So why is this any good?

A: Yes in a real bracket you do, but the thing is the tournament win rate is still related to what you see.  For instance if half your match win rates are 60% and the other half are 50% then your tournament rate is in between 50% and 60%, but you would expect a higher deviation.  In other words it becomes bracket dependent.   You could have all your advantaged match ups on your side of the bracket and like wise you can have all your even match ups.   But at worst you will have the 50% probability and at best you will have the 60%.

More detailed situational data will be presented in the later additions.  Right now this is still very general.  

Q: But what about character advantages?  How does that factor into this

A:  That is also taken care of by the numbers.   If I am equal skill to my opponent and we are playing a match up that is bad for his character it will be reflected by my win rate vs his win rate.