{"id":9702,"date":"2024-06-06T05:18:09","date_gmt":"2024-06-06T04:18:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/?p=9702"},"modified":"2024-06-16T10:16:07","modified_gmt":"2024-06-16T09:16:07","slug":"the-inaugural-ghf-predictathon-in-five-easy-charts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/?p=9702","title":{"rendered":"The inaugural GHF Predictathon in five easy charts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

First of all, congratulations again to Pangloss for a remarkable, resounding and relentless victory in the inaugural GHF Predictathon. He first hit the front in Match Week 5 and established his lead from Match Week 8. From Match Week 18, no one could come even close to catching his coattails. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019ll get to the secrets of his success, but congratulations are also in order for Poosker and BtM for taking silver and bronze. BtM just pipped GSD, who had burst out of the mid-table pack with a strong run from Match Week 33 onwards. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sancho Panza rounded out the above-average quintet that beat the Crowd, the consensus predictions of this fine establishment. Sacking his donkey of a manager early clearly paid dividends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let us also applaud our other winners:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tin Tack: Dr F. Jnr
League Cup winners: TTG and Uply
FA Cup winners: CER and GSD<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BtM gets a special mention in dispatches for for making the most correct predictions: seven, two more than Pangloss and one more than Poosker. That trio topped the Princes of Precision index, calculated under the tiebreaker rules (number of exact predictions, then predictions one place off, and so on). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rounding out the elite eight, with four exact predictions, were 21st Century Gooner, Uply, bath and Sancho Panza. bath would have ended up far from the relegation zone were it not for two wildly misjudged predictions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The competition was fierce. All but two players scored low enough to have beaten TTG\u2019s title-winning effort in last season\u2019s Afficionadoes league, the tournament that inspired this one. The bottom pair\u2019s scores were low enough to have taken second. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is a very high standard of prognostication. Or if it was dumb luck, someone should bottle it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We tracked the scores match week by match week, but here are the ones that count: those at the end of Match Week 38.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Here is how the rankings ebbed and flowed. Thirty-eight match weeks are a lot to cram into one chart and still be legible, but this gives a sense of how the season went.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The secret of Pangloss\u2019s success was not so much a matter of getting a lot of things right \u2014 although he did \u2014 but of avoiding getting anything badly wrong. The difference squared scoring system is far more punitive of erroneous predictions than it is rewarding of more accurate ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This chart shows the count of each player\u2019s predictions grouped by the number of positions they were off from the final Premier League placings. You will see that Pangloss\u2019s bars skew heavily to the left, towards the lower scores. None of his predictions were more than four places off. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Potsticker was the Nearly Man. Fully half of his predictions were only one place awry. Only GSD came close to matching that with nine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Compare that to the several players with at least one prediction that was a punishing nine places off\u2014your correspondent included. You will not be surprised at the correlation between that and a place in the bottom half of the rankings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At least the company was as estimable as it was seasoned, with C100 to lead us in song and Trev to keep us amused.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Yet there was more to Pangloss\u2019s success than avoiding howlers. We tracked the bad boys who messed up players\u2019 predictions throughout the season. Our fourth chart shows how each team under or overperformed expectations based on the average of their predicted position compared to where they finished. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Three teams most confounded their start-of-season expectations, offering the savvy player the most opportunity to steal a march on rivals: Bournemouth, Burnley and Brentford. What a load of Bs. They were followed by Man U and West Ham, much the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Burnley was widely tipped for a mid-table finish but went straight back down to the Championship, ending in 19th place, and punishing its manager by exiling him to Munich to coach Harry Kane \u2014 cruel and unusual punishment, by any measure. However, Pangloss, as he surmised in an earlier drink, got the Clarets spot on when no one else did. Potsticker and Scruz were close, but that was about it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Burnley was also rooted in 19th place from Match Week 14 onwards. That embedded an average 36-point advantage in Pangloss\u2019s score every match week from then on. Until its late slide down the table, Wolves gave him a similar built-in boost each week. That comfortable cushion over most everyone else easily kept him at the top of the rankings. Wolves\u2019 late slide turned it into one of his worst picks in the end, along with Bournemouth, Brentford and Brighton. Yet he was no more than four places off with any of them; on average, everyone else did worse. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fifth and final chart sums that all up, showing Pangloss\u2019s performance against the consensus prediction for each team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

If you\u2019d like to see how you fared against the consensus predictions, leave a note in the drinks or email ghfpredict@yahoo.com<\/a>. The monks will e-quill you a copy of the chart of you vs. the Crowd. Beautifully hand-illuminated on vellum, it won\u2019t be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We plan to rerun the GHF Predictathon next season. We hope to increase the number of players and so up our donation to Willow. We shall post details on the blog in the first half of August about how to get your entry blank. The entry deadline will be an hour before the start of the new season on August 17. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We plan to keep the same format. Let us know in the drinks if you have suggestions for improvements or any new tiebreaker-style predictions that would help keep up the interest throughout the season. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thank you for playing this season\u2014and if you didn\u2019t, join in next time. Thanks especially to Scruz and bath for posting the leaderboards week in, and week out. [Thanks most especially to Ned and his monks for the hard graft weekly in getting everything totted, sorted, and drawn. They earned their tonic wine! –eds.] Most of all, thanks for supporting Willow. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A final note of thanks to Bob Wilson for graciously writing to congratulate Pangloss on his 2023-24 success at winning the bragging rights to be the bar’s biggest know-it-all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First of all, congratulations again to Pangloss for a remarkable, resounding and relentless victory in the inaugural GHF Predictathon. He first hit the front in Match Week 5 and established his lead from Match Week 8. From Match Week 18, no one could come even close to catching his coattails.  We\u2019ll get to the secrets […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[25,10,16],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9702"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9702"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9702\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9731,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9702\/revisions\/9731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}