Upsets

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ryanrosenberg
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Upsets

Post by ryanrosenberg »

I've published a new blog post about upsets in quizbowl here: https://www.rrosenb.org/an-analysis-of- ... -quizbowl/. Interesting, I did not find any sort of variation in upset rates by difficulty, or between ACF Nationals and DI ICT.
Ryan Rosenberg
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Cheynem
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Re: Upsets

Post by Cheynem »

This is a good article; thanks for gathering the information.

I wonder if we could get even more anal (or random) and try to figure out if there's certain other factors that frequently go into upsets...I've always thought, perhaps incorrectly, that upsets are likely to happen at the beginning of sets of matches or round robins, i.e. the very first prelim round or the very first of the playoffs. A team still "waking up" or adjusting to the tournament can get jumped in the first round, and a team surging to the playoffs can remain hot perhaps. I, of course, do not know if any of this is true.
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Alejandro
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Re: Upsets

Post by Alejandro »

I really enjoyed this article, it's great to see the data challenge long-held assumptions about difficulty distinguishing better between teams. I guess the ICT/Nats comparison covers some of this, but I wonder if powers or 0-point negs affects the number of upsets.
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Father of the Ragdoll
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Re: Upsets

Post by Father of the Ragdoll »

I also really enjoy this piece, thanks for putting all of the time and effort needed to pull it together Ryan!

As a side note, I do wonder if there is any way of accounting for the fact that strong teams tend to not play easy sets, making potentially comparing the rates of upsets between easy and hard questions since the populations in those two samples are different in their strength.

I suppose strapping some solid second or third bracket team (someone like Northwestern or Columbia B) and some top bracket team (say Harvards or Stanfords) in and reading D2 SCT or ACF Fall would provide direct data on this but hopefully no one actually does that haha
Brad Maclaine, McLain
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ryanrosenberg
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Re: Upsets

Post by ryanrosenberg »

A quick note that I've updated the post with some examples of upsets at different levels of difference in team strength, as well as a link to the data I'm using. I've also added a graph at the end looking at Mike's question about round order -- I don't have data on prelims vs. playoffs, but upsets do seem to be slightly higher in Round 1.
Father of the Ragdoll wrote: Tue Apr 05, 2022 4:08 pmAs a side note, I do wonder if there is any way of accounting for the fact that strong teams tend to not play easy sets, making potentially comparing the rates of upsets between easy and hard questions since the populations in those two samples are different in their strength.
It seems potentially possible...you'd need some sort of team strength measure that accounted for which players were on the team. I haven't done a deep dive into ranking systems and have no idea if that exists or not.
Ryan Rosenberg
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liamstarnes27
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Re: Upsets

Post by liamstarnes27 »

This isn't very significant, but I noticed that for the 2021-22 Penn Bowl tournament at Chicago, you have University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) listed as one of the teams when it actually was University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) who was there.
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