Quant this

Thinking about Jonathan Weinstein's line of work (see previous post) and team trials, I decided to do some quant work on the Canadian open team trials, with the round robin ending today. The quant theory I used was that teams in bad/awful/impossible playoff position tend to care less about their final day bridge, while teams in the hunt tend to bear down (the careless/bear theory). Factoring in the positions, that gives us these 8 playoff teams (in team number order, not placing order):

1 Carruthers
7 Ballantyne
13 Marcinski
15 Gamble
16 Bart
17 Steinberg
20 Rayner
21 Todd

These are the quant Pendicton predictions after day 3, without considering the day 4 results here:

http://www.cbf.ca/BWeek/09files/BWeek09_CNTCArr4.html

I'll update this post tomorrow with the playoff picture, and I hope the quant results are not perfect, as there are some teams I would like to see playing Wednesday.

Update:

The teams, in finishing order, with VPs given:
1 Carruthers - 395
2 Rayner - 391
3 Bart - 389
4 Todd - 387
5 L'Ecuyer - 384
6/7 Thurston - 375
6/7 Janicki - 375
8/9 Marcinski - 363
8/9 Gamble - 363
The 10th team had 362 VPs

Since Gamble had beat Marcinski 25-5 in VPs in the round robin it would be Gamble in the playoffs?

No, the first tie breaker is on wins - here's the two-way tie-breaking forumula:

a) All matches played will be scored on the basis of:
WIN - 1 point; TIE - .5 points; LOSS - 0 points.
b) The result of the match between the tied teams.
c) A playoff between the tied teams. The playoff must be five boards. If still tied after five boards, continuing sets of five boards will be played until the tie is broken

This put Marcinski is the playoffs, and now the top team could pick any of the bottom 4 to play against, and then the 2nd team could pick any of the bottom 4 still left for their match. When a team is picked, they want to say, at the bridge table, "picked us, eh?" (use google Canadian translation), "well think again eh!", and then they bid a toonie of Canadian slams.

Let's go with the teams running hot for the quarterfinals:

Carruthers to beat Janicki (final: 142-129)
Thurston to beat Rayner (final: 142-154)
Marcinski to beat Bart (final: 167-102)
L'Ecuyer to beat Todd (final: 138-111)

Update: I posted the final scores above - it was 3 out of 4 in the quarterfinals - Linda was also 3 out of 4, and I'm sorry her team is out in the CWTC.

In the open semis:

Carruthers takes out Rayner
L'Ecuyer takes out Marcinski

Yes, this is picking against our IMP league teammates, but a blog has to pick the team with the blogger (Daniel Korbel), correct? Except yesterday the Bart team with a blogger (Michael Yuen) was picked against, but the blog was overruled there.