Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Project Die Roll

Wizards has recently decided to extend the implementation of the Pro Tour play/draw rule (for those of you who don't know what this is, in the T8 the higher seeded player gets to decide to play or draw without a die roll) to GPs and PTQs.  This naturally brings up the question (or should):  "How important is winning the die roll?" (more formally:  What is P(winning the match|winning the die roll)).  In order to find the answer to this question (unless @mtgonline or @lee_sharpe decides to perform a divine intervention and just tell us) I'm going to start a little research project.  I'm asking for volunteers to fill out the following Excel Sheet for various daily events:


Put the following expression in column B to save time:  =IF(A7=1,2,IF(A7=0,2," "))

The most efficient way to fill out the sheet:
1)  Wait for the round of the DE to be over.
2)  Record the records of the round, as you can see above I just recorded each match as it appears in the DE results.
3)  Open a match to watch the replay.  If the player on the top of the screen wins the roll, assign a B in the third column.  If the player on the bottom of the screen wins the role assign an A.  Repeat for each match



4)  Repeat for the other three rounds.

So I'm looking for volunteers to help collect this data, if you're interested (and can commit to doing one whole DE) e-mail me at chrism315 at gmail dot com.

Chris Mascioli
@dieplstks on twitter





3 comments:

  1. Surely the better way to do this is to see how many game ones are won by the player who won the roll and gets to decide, then how many post-board games are won by the player who gets to decide.

    By doing a whole match, you're allowing all of the times someone wins the roll, loses game one, then wins the next two, which doesn't actually help you.

    Should also separate it by format. Definitely important.

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  2. http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/askwizards/0403 Read the April 18th entry.

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    Replies
    1. That is one tournament, in a VERY different format, and from the distant past.

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