The most fun way to play when it comes to following the Club Championships.
October 27, 2022 by in Fantasy with 0 comments
Ultiworld’s club National Championship #thegame is back and presented by Breakmark!
The dust has settled on the tournament and the results are in. It was a wild year with some teams coming from lower seeded positions to have successful tournaments, so that yielded some fun outcomes in our contest. Let’s take a look at the winners, the most popular teams to pick, and the optimal responses.
Please see our entry article for the full rules.
The Winners
11 different entries hit this year’s highest score of 330! That means we had to go to tiebreakers. No top scorer was bang on when it came to tiebreaker #1, but the closest to the correct answer was Nick Kwan, our first place winner.1
D. Miller and Zach Wolfe tied for the next closest answers, sending us to tiebreaker #2, where Zach Wolfe’s answer earned second place.
Shout out to Rikke Kjær, Jack Stuart, DJ, Ben Reith, Paige Kercher, Sam A, Camaron Phillips, and Cameron D., who all also scored 330.
Two different lineups achieved these scores. All of them included Johnny Bravo, Red Flag, and Mixtape. Then either the duo of Fury and 6ixers or Molly Brown and Revolver filled in the final two slots.
Our prizes this year:
1st Place wins an Ultiworld Greatest Bag, a free month of Full Subscription from Ultiworld, and a custom designed one-of-one jersey from Breakmark
2nd Place wins a free month of Full Subscription from Ultiworld, and a Breakmark hat.
3rd Place wins a Breakmark hat.
Selection Stats
Top 5 Women’s Teams
- #1 Fury (31.8%)
- #6 Brute Squad (23.7%)
- #7 6ixers (14.9%)
- #4 Phoenix (12.8%)
- #3 Molly Brown (12.4%)
The top-seeded teams in the women’s division were the most popular picks, as folks didn’t see a lot of upset potential. All four semifinalists made the list, although champion Molly Brown was well under the marks set by Fury and Brute Squad. The no.2 and no.5 seeds, Flipside and Scandal, the only top seven seeds left out of this top five, both came in with under 5% selection rate, so the fade was on for them.
This type of top-heavy list has become par for the course in the women’s division. In the four years we have tracked, only two top teams from outside of the top seven seeds have made this list: no.16 Parcha led last season and Wildfire was top five in 2019 as a no.14 seed.
Top 5 Men’s Teams
- #4 PoNY (40.3%)
- #8 Bravo (27.6%)
- #11 Revolver (24.9%)
- #6 Chain Lightning (13.3%)
- #7 Rhino (10.7%)
Bravo may have shocked the world, but there were some real believers in their potential in #TheGame, while looks quite prescient now. Finalist no.1 Truck Stop weighed in with 7.7% selection rate, and while Revolver delivered just a single win, they actually appeared in some of the first place lineups, so they didn’t tank entries despite failing to reach the bracket.
Top 5 Mixed Teams
- #5 Mixtape (54.5%)
- #15 Red Flag (42.1%)
- #10 Shame (15%)
- #7 Polar Bears (9.9%)
- #9 NOISE (7.2%)
Since so many entries spent a lot of their points (in a manner of speaking) on women’s division teams, entrants were eager to find some bigger seeding numbers, and why not look to the famously chaotic mixed division? Despite that, the mixed division has hosted the most popular team in three of the past four years, and this year’s Mixtape team racked up a monstrous record-setting selection rate, the first team ever to eclipse 50%. Obviously, the chalk smashed, as they say, with the help of fellow Northwest club, Red Flag, who notched a pair of wins.
Honestly, all five of these picks performed well for the massive swath of entries who put faith in them. For all the wild results the mixed division turned in, they delivered for #TheGame.
The Perfect Lineup
- #8 Johnny Bravo
- #3 Molly Brown
- #5 Mixtape
- #7 6ixers
- #15 Red Flag or #14 Love Tractor
This lineup netted 355 points, exceeding the first place lineups by 25. The three champions are a must, especially since two of them come at affordable prices. The two lowest seeded teams to deliver 20 points, Red Flag and Love Tractor, were in the mixed division, so while XIST and NOISE both scored as many points as 6ixers, they would each make for a third mixed division team.
Just for fun, the lowest scoring lineups tallied 90 total points, often featuring Ring of Fire and either Toro or Hybrid. Some even had Revolver, who was in the top scoring lineups, too!
The Tiebreakers
The first: how many break scores would occur across all semifinals? The answer was 43, an average of seven per game. The average guess came in at just under 26, so folks expected much cleaner offensive performances than we got! Nick Amendolare was the only entry to nail it.
The second: how many combined goals would the no.10 seeds (Riot, Temper, and Shame) score in pool play? Shame poured in 43, Temper added 35, and Riot managed just 27, for a total of 105. Shame scoring an extra win than expected from their seed, and Riot getting blown out 15-4 by Brute Squad, tilted those numbers. The average guess was just under 93, so shame on you all for guessing so low. Quite a few entries landed on 105, the highest scoring being from Matthew Bristol, whose 320 points was just short of the winning total score.
The third: in how many games would the losing team score 11 goals? I believe this number was 25 in 2021, but it dropped to 18 this year. The average was 16, which was very close. As you can imagine based on that small margin between the two, quite a few folks hit it on the head.
Feedback Welcome!
Did you play? Did you not play? Why or why not? What rules would be fun to play with? What tweaks can be made?
We want #thegame and to be fun and have different strategies be viable without being too complicated for lots of people to enter. You can contact me by emailing [email protected] or on Twitter @FullFieldHammer.
A tweet incorrectly identified the wrong winner, which was 100% this author’s fault, not passing the buck. ↩