Improving Power Percentage

[quizbowlchamp1]

I am a pretty good player, but after looking at my stats, I've noticed the reason I underperform is my power percentage. Here are some stats from my most recent tournament.

https://hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/8 ... dividuals/

I got 1st place, but I ranked 2nd in powers. Here is another example.

https://www.naqt.com/stats/tournament/i ... t_id=13400

If scroll down to rising stars, you will find my name at 6th. I rank 2nd to last in powers, with only a 15.7% power rate.

My question is: Does anyone have any tips to improve power percentage? If so, please respond. Thank you.

[joshxu]

The most sure way to improve your power percentage is to never get a question correct outside of power—and anytime your teammates fear that your buzz occurred outside of power, they will remind you to neg on purpose to prevent you from getting a 10. This real statline and the true story behind it should sufficiently demonstrate that power percentage is a completely meaningless stat.

Less concretely—think about it this way: Power percentage is calculated as powers / (powers + 10s). It follows that a player with a high power percentage will simultaneously achieve 1) lots of powers; and 2) not a lot of 10s. In practice, such statlines are achieved by specialists who know one or a few categories very well, but who are weak at every other category. There is an extremely small echelon of elite generalists who know almost every category so well as to get consistent powers in every category—but chances are that anyone reading this forum will never approach, let alone attain, this level. So let's compare two types of players: 1) An elite specialist who can power consistently within their own categories, but who can't consistently get 10s at the giveaway in every other category; or 2) An elite specialist who can power consistently within their own categories, but who can also 10 every tossup at the giveaway in every category. The latter type of player will consistently attain a higher overall PPG and will win more games. The latter type of player will likely also have a much lower power percentage.

All this is to say that I don't believe improving power percentage is a desirable goal. You want to be improving your ability to answer questions correctly in general. This generally means learning a lot about your specialties to get powers in these categories, but also learning a little about every other category to get 10s in those categories. That last-line buzz on the penultimate word of the question might be the difference between a win and a loss!

Happy studying!

[quizzical1]

As Josh said, quiz bowl is not simply about power percentages, but points and your team. I also was this way, but I started to realize that bonuses was something they could not tag someone to, and that my team is really good and sometimes the teams I play are really good, so powers and power percentage and PPG or PP20TUH do not accurately reflect your quiz bowl skill. Do not be worried, because not having the best power percentage in the nation is not the end of the world, and 10's are not something to be frowned upon either. But if you do want more powers because it gives more points, go in-depth into many subjects and take up little bits of info. Consistent power are generally for specialists, and you could get a bit more studying, for example, quantum physics or the history of Europe.

[Subotai the Valiant, Final Dog of War]

I am a pretty good player, but after looking at my stats, I've noticed the reason I underperform is my power percentage. Here are some stats from my most recent tournament.

https://hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/8 ... dividuals/

I got 1st place, but I ranked 2nd in powers. Here is another example.

https://www.naqt.com/stats/tournament/i ... t_id=13400

If scroll down to rising stars, you will find my name at 6th. I rank 2nd to last in powers, with only a 15.7% power rate.

My question is: Does anyone have any tips to improve power percentage? If so, please respond. Thank you.

In addition to what has been said above (namely, that team power percentage is not a very critical stat and that the best way to improve it in any case is to keep getting better), on a purely statistical level, low power percentage also didn't lead to underperformance in either of the tournaments linked.

Looking at the stats, all the losses from nationals saw the other team get both more tens and more powers. Those weren't really a matter of power percentage, rather, a matter of getting tossups. All of those could have been converted to wins even if your team didn't get a single more power, in the hypothetical case that you took all the tens the other team ultimately got (which incidentally would raise their power percentage even while turning a win to a loss). The regional linked came down to a single 20-point loss where both teams had similar power percentages. If anything, that loss suggests that the thing with the most straightforward potential improvement is team PPB, since the MS regular difficulty canon is relatively small and improving PPB as a team can be quite rapid if you split up topics of interest to study.

Power percentage isn't a key stat; it's really only useful for distinguishing the most elite players from each other on difficulties well below their skill ceiling. If anything, the more important power stat is powers per game, since buzzing earlier is usually a better bet for getting questions. And the most important stat is of course the number of questions your team gets.

[Vainglorious yet Victorious]

I might be "beating a dead horse" on this one, but the fact that you got so many tossups simply skews your power percentage to lower than it "should be." I think the more important thing to do, if the concern is about number of powers, would to be to study and focus to a high level on a certain category of knowledge-i,e science, literature, history, etc. That will help you not only directly through knowing the subject matter, grasping an allusion to something that is related to a thing you know, or helping you learn about still more related topics, but will also help your team on bonus questions, where the bulk of the points in a quiz bowl match lie.

[the return of AHAN]

"Tens win championships."
- Kyle Hill of NAQT Live, during his interview with my team after winning the 2021 HSNCT

[dwd500]

Well, since someone in the future might have a similar question and search for a post with this title, let's stop the "beating of the dead horse" and generalize this so that we're not just parsing the details of this one kid's question.

What are some good ways for players that are already buzzing with confidence, albeit in the 10-point range, to work at getting even faster?

[InfinitePeng]

A very important thing for getting better at quizbowl (and as a consequence increasing powers) is increasing your depth of knowledge. For example: knowing who painted Olympia and Luncheon on the Grass will likely let you convert any question where Manet is the answerline. However, learning less surface-level information like specific details from A Bar at the Folies Bergiere or about his inspirations from Japanese prints will give you the knowledge needed to buzz in consistently before giveaways. A lot of the time this knowledge is built up by moving beyond packet study and towards resources such as textbooks. It will also make you much more competitive against top teams who most likely have at least the same base level knowledge that you have. I hope this helps!

[quizbowlchamp1]

What are some good ways for players that are already buzzing with confidence, albeit in the 10-point range, to work at getting even faster?

This is a more correct way of saying what I meant. As you can tell by the stats I posted, I am a pretty decent player. I think this will improve my team and my individual stats.

[Subotai the Valiant, Final Dog of War]

In addition to learning more, I would recommend practicing* buzzing more aggressively, or buzzing earlier on questions even when you don't completely know the answer. It's not something often mentioned in the list of things to practice but a crucial part of the game.

Thinking "what could this be" on every clue of a question until you arrive at a conclusion, learning when to buzz based on how sure you are, or winning buzzer races by correctly anticipating the next clue are very useful skills at all levels. They are especially useful on the middle school canon, where the total number of possible answers/things bring asked will be lower.

*The word "practicing" is key here, since it's not a great idea to suddenly play more aggressively than one is used to when playing tournament games with teammates. Ideally, first do this in low-stakes practice scenarios where negging doesn't cost your teammates an opportunity to play the question.