The World Championships are nigh! I’ve been posting stats to Twitter recently but haven’t done a good job cataloging them here. My apologies… it’s easy to feel like I’m done after I’ve fired off the tweets, but I should really do a better job cataloging my statistics projects in this space for people who aren’t following me there. (Having said this, I do feel like the percentage of stuff I produce that is of a quality to appear here is not 100%, so if you want to see some half-baked numbers you might try following @ajlvi on Twitter.)

You can find the following information on the twenty-four Worlds participants: a lifetime head-to-head grid (Reid Duke’s 45-32 record against the other 23 players is pretty impressive), a breakdown of each player’s sesaon (basically what you’d hope to see on the back of each player’s baseball card in the “2017-18” row), elo-based metrics for each player (Brad Nelson’s 2222 average Elo throughout the year is quite eye-popping), and the ever-controversial, just-for-funzies, have-I-ever-told-you-Elo-is-a-crude-tool results of simulating the tournament 2.5 million times using either Elo or average Elo as the only determiner of wins and losses. Of course the probability of winning will line up with the list of everyone’s Elo in descending order, but the interesting thing to pay attention to here is the margins — it gives you some idea as to little a deal one rating point is. If I were a bookmaker I wouldn’t set betting lines based on these simulations, but I would use it to remind myself that the margins are going to be very thin this weekend. Good luck to all!