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Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery
The #1 alliances DID NOT steamroll everyone.
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Uhmm. Yeah, they did. Everyone remembers the neat anecdote about the last seeded team that miraculously gets picked as a partner for the finals, and then goes all the way to win the tournament. But the reality is that we remember these instances because they are exceptions, and not the norm.
We went back and took an objective look at the records for the last several years. The simple reality is that the #1- and #2-seed alliances stomp the other alliances on a regular basis - on the order of 80% of the time.* If Las Vegas were running a sports book on FIRST regional competitions, we could all become very, very wealthy by just betting on the #1- or #2-seed alliances to win an event, without knowing anything else about them.
That does not make for an exciting game to watch, and it does not make for an exciting tournament in which to play. If you actually knew (and now you do) that as the #8 seed alliance in the finals you could be virtually certain that 4 times out of 5 you would be knocked out by the semi-finals, would you be quite as excited about the elimination competition? And if you knew that as the #8 seed alliance your probability of winning the tournament was not a realistic 1-in-8, but was actually 1-in-30, would it be nearly as much fun to play?
-dave
* just for the sake of completeness, it is interesting to note that the person who ran the numbers did it specifically to prove that the high-seed alliances did NOT consistently win. But when the analysis was complete, his only comment was "my own numbers argue against me."