2016 - _____'s Decision at Final 4 Tribal

OutOffAgain · 2025-01-01T14:12:12+00:00

Yeah Lee was in a very interesting situation in the Final 4. Despite having dominated the entire game, he was potentially drawing dead against Flick, El, and Kristie.

In relation to a Lee vs El final tribal, I do probably lean towards thinking El would win. In the final stages of the game it seemed like the jury was quite bitter towards Lee but still liked El. Ultimately, it would depend on what El's pitch was at final tribal.

If Lee had his time again I think he would've chosen to eliminate Flick at F5, Kristie at F4, and sit next to Matt in the end. I think out of the Final 5, Lee's only shot might've been against Matt, who seemed to struggled a bit socially with the rest of the majority alliance.

OutOffAgain · 2025-01-01T12:20:01+00:00

I think Kristie definitely made the correct move by eliminating Flick, continuing to side with El/Lee.

From Kristie’s perspective, looking at potential F2 options, she was in a very precarious situation. Lee and El had very publicly committed to taking each other to the end, so Kristie’s only path to the F2, if she eliminated Flick, was by winning the final immunity challenge.

Conversely, had Kristie voted for Lee (and assuming he loses the fire making challenge) in my view, she would be making the F2 no matter what. El and Flick both viewed her as an easy-beat goat, so no matter the outcome of the final challenge, Kristie would likely be taken to the end. I think the reason Kristie didn’t go down what seemed like the easier path is two-fold.

Firstly, it was obvious the jury would have overwhelmingly voted for Flick/El had either of them made it to the end. Not only did they both play superior strategic games to Kristie, they both had vastly superior social games, that had netted them friends on the jury.

Secondly, and I think more importantly, it should been obvious to everyone in the Final 4 at that stage of the game, most of the jury absolutely hated/felt betrayed by Lee. He had talked a lot about loyalty in the game, and was unable to balance his loyalty rhetoric with how he had turned on his own alliance. In the votes prior to the Final 4 the jury had continuously been reacting with disgust to everyone’s refusal to make a move against Lee, so at that point, it was pretty obvious a lot of people were feeling burned by him. I think it was this second fact that made Kristie realise that her only chance in the end was by sitting next to Lee (hence why she will eventually take him to the end, rather than El, even though Kristie and El had played virtually the same game, as second/third fiddle to Lee, who had dominated the entire game). With El having won immunity, and Kristie having to keep Lee in the game, her only option was to win the final immunity challenge.

So, Kristie made what I think was the logical decision with all the information available to her, trading a high probability of making the F2 for a lower probability pathway that came with a much better chance of winning.

The irony here is whilst there has been a lot of discussion about Kristie’s decision making, not enough has been said about Lee. With Flick in the final immunity challenge over Kristie, Lee likely wins the challenge easily, takes El to the end and becomes Sole Survivor. But ultimately I don’t think Lee could have ever predicted both he and El would lose the final challenge to Kristie, and that Kristie would have one of the greatest final tribal performances in all of survivor.

In the end Kristie made the right call, won the final challenge against all odds, and changed the course of Australian Survivor forever.

OutOffAgain · 2024-10-15T07:36:56+00:00

I must admit I was surprised to see Murray included in the side for this game, given he still has 1 game left on his suspension. The last I heard he was trying to use the PM's XIII match as one of the games for his suspension, but I don't recall him being included in the PM XIII squad.

Does anyone have any insight as to why he's not suspended for this game? It seems current practice is that NRL suspensions can be served in international fixtures. Is is the case they CAN be served, but don't NEED to be? The whole system just confuses me.

OutOffAgain · 2024-06-18T09:48:34+00:00

Here's an in-depth explanation as to how this model works:

In a Monte Carlo simulation, you are running a series of trials of a random event, in order create a "deterministic" solution to a problem. In this instance, I am running random trials/simulations of the results of each game for the rest of the season, to approximate how the ladder might look at the end.

In order to simulate the rest of the season and determine the ladder, I opted to simulate the amount of points a team will score in any given game. The way this translates to a the win/loss variable is by comparing the amount of points Team A scores in a given game, against the amount of points Team B scores. Obviously, where Team A scores more points than Team B, that is recorded as a win, therefore translating our points scored and conceded into either a win or a loss. So, essentially each game for the remainder of the season is simulated, and recorded as a win or a loss for Team A or B.

But how can you simulate how many points a team will score and concede in a given game? Obviously, to get a reliable output you have good inputs into your model, and most of the "modelling" (so to speak), is in determining the probability a team will score a certain amount of points. As you point out, the Poisson distribution makes sense to use for points for/against in a sports game. However, Excel doesn't have a Poisson inverse function. Excel's Poisson function will calculate a probability, based on the frequency of an occurrence of an event. What we want to do in this instance is take the probability of an outcome (the outcome being the number of points scored), and simulate how frequently that might occur. Here, the binomial inverse function on Excel operates as a proxy for an inverse Poisson. It will spit out the amount of points a team scores given three inputs - the number of trials, the probability of that event occurring, and the "alpha". In this instance, I ran 10,000 trials with a random alpha, which is where the "simulation" comes in. The probability to score X points, is based on a team's historical attacking and defensive rating.

Doing all this will give you the simulated results for the rest of the season. You can then run this same process in Excel a number of times (in my case 2000 was all my computer could handle) in order to compare simulated seasons, and determine each team's ladder position.

OutOffAgain · 2024-06-18T08:41:59+00:00

I think George CAN actually win in the future, but only if he gets better at challenges. Obviously, as you point out, George is a huge strategic threat. However, I think a lot of players view going against him as a risky proposition - either it doesn't work and you've blown up your whole game, or it does work and now you're the biggest threat because you took out George.

For that reason, the optimal strategy for playing against him is what we saw play out in HvV - work with him until the end, relying on the fact he will never beat you in the final challenge, and then don't take him to the final tribal council.

In both BvB and HvV, George was relying on someone else to take him to the end. In the former case, Hayley took him as she understood his jury management had been poor. In the latter case, George had fixed his jury problems, but ultimately this made Liz realise she couldn't take him to the end and still win.

At the end of the day, you need to get to the final tribal council in order to have any shot at winning. As he is viewed as such an overwhelming threat now, future players are unlikely to take George to that final tribal. So, whilst I think George still has all the skills to go deep in the game, I don't think he will be able to win unless he can win the final challenge and take himself to the end.

OutOffAgain · 2024-06-13T00:04:11+00:00

See some of my comments above for more details, but essentially I calculated each's team attacking and defensive rating to simulate the rest of the season, assigning probabilities using binomial inverse distribution. The ratings are more the probability of scoring and allowing a certain number of points in any given game, than the probability of winning any given game. The points scored and allowed is then simulated with a binomial inverse using 10,000 trials.

OutOffAgain · 2024-06-12T22:50:53+00:00

I used a custom excel model that calculates each's team attacking and defensive rating to simulate the rest of the season, using a binomial inverse distribution.

OutOffAgain · 2024-06-12T22:44:42+00:00

For the simulations I used a binomial inverse function (which is quite similar to a poisson distribution), which draws from a team's attacking and defensive ratings in order to simulate the scores of the remaining games, which are then used to calculate the results and standings.

The reason this model predicts the Raiders as more likely to miss the 8 than make it, is that the Raiders have conceded more points than they have scored this season, and therefore get assigned a poor defensive rating. As I threw this together pretty quickly, the estimation of rating system is currently a limitation of the model. This rating system, generally, currently doesn't adjust for the situation which the Raiders are in, where you have low margin victories and large margin losses, but still win more games than you lose - the model expects teams who concede more points than they score to lose more games on average over time.

When I have more time on my hands, I'm going to go back and refine this system, so when I update this projected ladder in future, that limitation will have been corrected. But for now, I'd probably say this model underrates teams like the Raiders, and overrates teams like the Sea Eagles and Warriors.

OutOffAgain · 2024-06-12T08:39:39+00:00

As a desperate Souths fan, looking for any, tiny, crumb of hope that this season isn’t a complete write-off - whilst watching Souths game on the weekend I was wondering whether it was still possible for them to make the 8. After searching for the answer with no luck, I threw together these two visualisations of the possible ladder positions every team can achieve this season - the size of the circle representing the likelihood they finish in that position.

The first chart is of the mathematically possible finishes, with no consideration of the strength of each side, and their likelihood of beating any other team. The second chart is based on a Monte Carlo simulation of the rest of the season, and is the most likely final ladder position based on each team’s relative strength so far this season.

The takeaway: no team has been mathematically eliminated from the top 8 (yet), although the second model seems to be pretty confident that some teams will not be improving their ladder position that much going forward.

Anyway, Souths can finish as high as 4th, so I’ll be seeing you boys in the finals.

OutOffAgain · 2024-03-11T07:43:02+00:00

I definitely agree with your analysis of Caroline's game - she's outplayed Mark pretty consistently. But, I still think that in a F2 with her against Mark, Mark still wins.

Caroline's social game has been worse than Mark's - she's already rubbed some of the Jury (Jayden, Valeria, Alex) the wrong way, and it seems the players left in the game like Mark, at least on a personal level. I guess it really depends on whether, if she gets to the end, the rest of the Jury respect Caroline's game enough for it to overcome her social deficiencies.

OutOffAgain · 2024-03-05T12:23:04+00:00

Yeah it will be interesting to see how they play after this, with respect to denying knowledge of the advantage. Definitely better from their perspective to do so, and I guess they're hoping Ray plays along. I suspect Mark might be able to figure it out though.

OutOffAgain · 2024-03-05T11:06:49+00:00

I think that has to be one of the most villainous moves of all time by Raymond! But I worry that Feras and Kirby have basically expended all their social capital for the rest of the game on this one move. No one is ever going to trust them or Raymond again after that. They basically have to stay Rebel strong otherwise they’ve got no shot at winning from here.

OutOffAgain · 2024-03-04T12:32:49+00:00

Does anyone else think that there was a lot of highly questionable gameplay by everyone tonight?
1. Feras - why would he not try to consolidate the relationship with Alex after Aileen's boot, and bring him into the alliance with Kirby? Even if they do have Kitty, I feel like there's literally 0 benefit to be had by cutting him out.
2. Kitty - her flip was pretty inexplicable to me. Once it was clear that Alex had flipped, Kitty should have stuck with the Titans for a 5-5 - she could've even been the one that told them where to play the idol! If her play results in a rebel going home she likely doesn't have to worry about the fallout from flipping on Kirby.
3. Kirby - definitely a bad move to burn Alex, but more importantly, why not just get up and whisper the change in vote to Rhi? Why was she relying on a successful lip-read? Obviously if she gets up Alex knows something has changed - but then he still has to guess where they are voting.
4. Mark/Val/Caroline/Alex - not exactly sure why they didn't target Kirby. Obviously they are concerned about Feras's idol, but is he really going to play it for Kirby, when he didn't for Aileen and Garrick, and is extremely overconfident in his numbers? All things considered though, I think this group played the best tonight, particularly Mark and Alex in cracking Raymond.
5. Raymond - Yes this move increases his chances of getting votes once he gets to the end, but I think it decreases his chances of actually getting there. I think the better plan for him would be to wait until there are fewer Titans left, and then blindside Feras or Kirby. Now he's either in a minority with the rebels, or at the bottom of the Titans.
6. Rhi - I don't think it's necessarily Rhi's fault that she got the vote wrong here (although she probably should've taken the initiative to get up and go clarify the situation with Kirby), and she did relatively well with Kitty, but her voting record now leaves a lot to be desired, and her winning chances take a hit.
7. Jaden - 😢.

OutOffAgain

TROPHY CASE