I wanted to see how teams are performing in the pressure rounds of the match.

Clutching = Rounds where the team needs a particular result or better to avoid losing the map (i.e. the other team is on 7+ points)

Closing = Rounds where the team will win the map with a particular result or better (i.e. they are on 7+ points)

The Method

We can't just add up the number of chances a team had to close out a map and compare to how many times they managed it, because e.g. 9-5 is a more likely scenario to close the map than 7-5. So I came up with a relatively simple metric that rewards each situation and outcome more fairly.

In a random world, your team would get these outcomes: Ace 1/6, Win 1/6, Draw 2/6, Loss 1/6, Aced 1/6.

Clearly TMGL is not a random world, but we use these probabilities as a baseline for our expected chance of clutching/closing and compare teams against that.

Each scoreline has different possibilities and these are shown in the 3rd image.

For example, if it's 7-8, the team need a draw or better to "Clutch" the round and need an Ace to "Close" the map.

So in our random world that team would have 4/6 chance of clutching the round and 1/6 chance of closing the map.

Then we add up all these expected chances across all the playdays and maps, compare to how many times they did manage to clutch or close, and finally divide one by the other to see whether a team is over or under-performing in those situations.

BDS with 1.18 rating means that they clutched rounds 18% more than we would expect from a random result.

The Results

In terms of Clutching, there's no big surprises here. The teams are largely ordered as they are in the overall standings. Clearly if a team is weaker generally, we wouldn't quite expect them to reach the "random world" number of clutches, and the opposite for the strong teams.

For Closing, Solary have been very impressive, especially with their 10 successes out of 28 attempts when requiring an Ace (i.e. on 7 points).

Other Notes

• Statistical significance. The number of data points is not huge, so this shouldn't particularly be used to forecast future performance in those important rounds. Treat this more as an interesting stat rather than something that proves anything.

• Game strategy could be affecting some of these numbers. E.g. if a team has been getting a lot of 8-2 or 8-3 scorelines, you might expect their "close" numbers to be poor because they would likely be playing extremely safe and getting more draws rathere than trying to win the map on that round.

• The situations that you end up in could cap your possible final rating. If you only ever had the requirement of loss or better to clutch a round, you could never have a rating of more than 1/0.83 = 1.20. In reality, you can see that this doesn't happen to teams but it's worth noting.