Eliminations this week so far are Checkered Demon and MadTheSwine with Cincinatti and Taber with Tennessee. Borchevsky, Petey, Varlos, and I all need San Diego.
I’m a little nervous about it. Antonio Gates is out. And Denver is… unpredictable. They either get beat by 50 or win by 50 lately.
Oh well, making it to week 10 was a marked improvement over last year.
Checkered Demon
Do I dare pick the Mighty Cleveland Browns against the Carolina Panthers in survival? The Browns can only beat the leagues top teams apparently.
Here’s where survival really gets tough. We all probably only have 2 or 3 good teams left at most to pick. So do you pick those good teams for the next 2-3 weeks and hope you’re able to survive while others don’t, or do you plan out the schedule for the rest of the year, take a riskier team now which increases your risks of busting early while preserving your good team for a better week?
Probably the best thing is just to follow the Panthers around like they’re the Grateful Dead.
Over time I’ve moved away from the strategy of preserving teams. You have to do it to some degree, but I find it’s hard to project more than a couple weeks ahead with much confidence. In the past I’ve made risky picks to preserve a team, but then when I get to the week I’m saving them for, there are other similarly good matchups due to injuries and whatnot.
Don’t forget to pick the 3 Thursday games.
Excellent - 100 up in the Pick’Em.
thankfully, a few weeks left to recover from last week’s picks :smack:
I decided to get all strategical and plan out my last picks, assuming I can last for the rest of the season if I save some good teams for a rainy day later even if it means picking a team with a lesser chance to win this week.
Otherwise I’d have gone with the relatively safe pick of Philly. Now I’m starting to wonder if I should’ve just done that…
Seattle is so unpredictable even against the crappy Panthers, and for whatever reason I’m not confident at all in Chicago beating Detroit.
Confidence league: What the hell? Prior to Thursday night’s game, I didn’t feel like making all of my picks, but I did lock in my pick for the Philly/Houston matchup: 13 points on Philly. But now I’m seeing that it says I didn’t make a pick and am getting 0 points for the game, even though it *does *have a crossed out 13 next to the game. Are others seeing the same thing? The only thing I can think of is maybe I selected 13 points but forgot to actually click on the Eagles. But then why would Yahoo let me do something like that?
Is there any way I can get those 13 points? Apparently there’s a record of the number of points I wanted, and if you look at my history I never pick big favorites to lose outright.
Everyone else seemed to work ok - if you go to the group score page, plenty of scores are registered. It looks like what happened is that you picked 13 as the score for the game, but forgot to check Philly or Houston, hence it removed 13 as an option but didn’t give you any score.
I can’t see any function that would allow me to manually correct your score. I guess we could account for it at the end of the year when I list our scores in the thread.
Nah, that’s ok. If you can’t change it on the page, I’ll just take it as a handicap. I expected to win by more than 13* anyway.
Oh, god damnit. I can’t even use 13 anymore. What, was I betting on a tie? Fuck.
Just forgetting a pick costs you somewhere between 1 and whatever the value you’d have assigned it would be. You don’t lose all those points because you get to bump every other game up by a notch, but you lose some of those points unless you’d planned to rate that game at a 1 anyway. I have no idea how to figure out on average how much you’re losing.
But in your case - 13 is wasted and you can’t select 13 for another game, right? In which case that really does cost you 13.
It is poor coding that they’d let you save a value but not a team - it should remind you in big red letters when you try to save that way.
Right, but there has to be more to it than that. As you forget more and more games, all the equity you saved by bumping up lower games has to eventually come due, since if you forget *every *game you wind up at zero. So you can’t say “Well, the equity cost of forgetting my 16 point game would be 10 points, the cost of forgetting my 15 point game would be 9.4…” and so on in that fashion, since, unless the equity cost of forgetting a game was eventually higher than the points you would have assigned, you’d wind up with a bunch of leftover equity that you can’t redeem, since you made no actual picks.
Maybe the percentage chance that you will get a given pick wrong comes into play somewhere.
Ok, no, I get it now (in principle). As you forget more and more games, your equity savings from forgetting previous games *retroactively *decreases, since with every game you forget you have less opportunity to do the bumping up that would have given you the equity savings.
Phew. The universe is rational again.
Yeah, well, if you’re looking at it in hindsight (ie “I meant to pick team X and they won”) then your starting equity is the point value you’d have assigned them, subtracting how many winning picks got bumped up in value due to every game below that confidence now being worth more. If you were trying to create a generalized model of the value of any given pick at a certain confidence rating (without assuming the pick is correct), your starting equity value would be confidence points * chance of winning - extra points assigned to winning picks below your confidence value (which in this style of analysis also have confidence points * chance of winning calculations to make up their value)
I’m … lazy at math nowadays though and I tend not to solve these sorts of problems for fun anymore, but you seem to be good at that kind of stuff.
It’s relatively easy to solve if you can honestly evaluate what you’d have picked in any given week and looked at the hindsight on any particular week, but more complex to come up with a generalized formula of how much any particular missed pick is worth without specifics/hindsight. Assuming your pick was right, you’d have (confidence value of pick) - (1 for every pick below that confidence value that was right and got bumped up) - (number of games you failed to pick, since you’ll always lose those points. First forgotten pick is 1, second is 2, etc).
I might’ve made a basic error in there somewhere or explained it badly since I haven’t slept more than 3 hours at a time in 4 days and it’s been a decent while since I even had one of those half ass attempts at sleep.
Ghost is lucky that the Bungles bungled, since he had New Orleans.
The other perfect survivors, Borchevsky and I, are safe.
Petey and Varlos are in danger of losing if Seattle doesn’t make up 14 points against Carolina. Glad I switched my pick away from Seattle.