The Highest Levels of Play

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Kevin Leonard

But I think that's part of the problem for me: I'm trying to look too deeply into a game that we don't have that much time to play. The game isn't going to evolve the way other sports do over years, it's going to evolve over 8 weeks of competition (and evolve immensely), and will be limited by size restrictions, power restrictions, etc, not just by player skill and ingenuity.

Bingo. Teams get better, but overall they start out pretty bad. So, when I make my spreadsheets I also do run through a "what's likely" analysis too. My general rule? If I think an action will take 3 seconds I multiply it by pi because I'm an idiot and tend to overestimate skill. (Or teams just generally suck)

I also do what I call sensitivity analysis: at what point do strategies become worthless because you're taking too long to do them?