I somehow got a totally unfair but also wholly deserved reputation for making spreadsheets of my enemies weaknesses. I’ve ended up in 1st or 2nd seed in several NYC Belles and Chimes series (‘series’ being MatchPlay’s word for “league”, or, more generally, “a collection of tournaments”). In our finals format, that means getting game choice. Which, for me, has traditionally meant picking games while staring at a wrinkled sheet of paper full of handwritten stats and facts. Facts like “don’t play against Jade on Robocop”, and “I’m not as good as I think I am at Robocop”.
I’ve decided to lean hard into that terrible reputation by making a tool to automate the process. I’m calling it Know Thy Enemies and I’ve decided to share it in case anyone else finds it useful or interesting. It’s designed for the use case of “it’s finals, you have game choice, and you have about 60 seconds to pick which game to play next”.
Right now it’s designed around matchplay-format tournaments (and series…es? comprised of matchplay tournaments). It will still work with some other formats (like 2 player rounds, albeit the colors will currently be off). It will not work at all for some others, but I will be adding support for more event types in the future.
Please do let me know if you have any suggestions, feedback, or notice any bugs.
All true! I’m by no means saying “if you don’t use this data as your only tool for picking games you’re doing it wrong”, more like “here’s another tool to use, if you want to”.
Another factor is people’s mindsets during tournaments — I’m staring at the standings the whole time, but I know people who do very well but find that even knowing how good they’re doing overall makes them play worse, let alone overthinking the minutiae of e.g. “if I want to advance past semifinals, i need player x to beat player y in the next game”.
That’s great! Twice this year I’ve driven the bus off a cliff in a tournament. Maybe next time I’ll at least be able to feel like I made a reasonably informed choice.
Since you asked for suggestions/feedback, it would be cool to plug in multiple series/tournaments that are hosted at the same location.
For my use case, in my league there is a new series every 6 weeks — so every year there are 8 series in matchplay, plus the monthly tournaments that occur at the same venue. That’s a lot more data and super useful to look at in aggregate!
Thanks for the feedback and this is a great idea. Since I already process a series as several tournaments, I have most of the logic parts in place already. The work involved in making this idea possible is mostly figuring out the UI of adding additional tournaments to the search (and then un/selecting some/all of them). will let you know if/when that gets added
Sorry for the late reply — I was thinking that my ideal approach to this would be just looking at a single player (or a group of players), and the system could automatically pull in all of that player’s played tournaments for the year. For me that’s more useful than a single tournament/series.
Thanks for the idea! Will keep this in mind for future revisions. Would need to figure out how to account for comparing matches from different tournament formats — e.g. if someone gets 2nd place in a head to head format, is that rated higher or lower for than someone getting 3rd place in a 4 player format?
The main technical hurdle for both this idea and the “show all tournaments at a location” / “show several leagues at once” one is rate limiting; currently limited to 120 requests per minute, and currently the tool won’t work for even single leagues that are large enough (someone wrote in about a series with 80 tournaments and hundreds of players).
Will try to find the time to work on some fixes and improvements for the tool, but no promises about timeline. Will post here if/when that happens.
