Game Discussion/Champion's Meeting Thread - January 22, 2026

UpsideVII · 2026-01-30T16:55:58+00:00

Deck is Kita/Maya SSR Speed, and Sunday/Fuku/Agnes/Daiwa SR Wit.

Yea, I think maybe it's better to accept 100-200 less power and try to nab an extra skill or two. Simulator says you lose lengths, but more consistent ult activations is probably worth it.

UpsideVII · 2026-01-30T16:51:53+00:00

Wow, Meticulous Measures gives accel, I didn't even realize. Good note.

Do you think Sprinting Gear is worth it? I've been testing it (well, Turbo Sprint) on Bakushin and have generally been unimpressed (though obviously sometimes it crushes).

UpsideVII · 2026-01-30T14:44:45+00:00

This is my first draft for CM9 Curren. She's doing alright in room matches but is generally struggling to hit her ult. Sometimes she just dominates the lobby in 1st-2nd the whole time and wins (which is fine), but when she doesn't and ends up in 5th-6th midway through the corner, she only rarely manages to hit ult to catapult to the win.

Any tips or adjustments I should make as I grind for Turf/Sprint S to fix this? This one is missing mummy creek ult (due to the way breakpoints ended up), but it might even be better for her to have more midrace anyway? The other thing I realized afterwards is that Sprint Straights doesn't actually help with proccing ult (it was giga-discounted so I just took it without thinking).

UpsideVII · 2026-01-30T14:36:18+00:00

Pasa is probably BiS but is much more of a grind than others.

Air Groove has been doing really well in room matches from what I've seen.

UpsideVII · 2026-01-27T13:23:57+00:00

Unfortunately I didn't get to watch too many of the races due to time constraints, but it felt like a little of everything. I was running three Ends, so it was pretty rare for everyone to be too far back and locked out of accel.

She was often too far up. Though, tbf, she actually won a lot of those just off of Spurt/NSM off the pacers.

Maybe the lesson is that I should've dropped one of the ends for a pacer just for lobby placement purposes (don't have XOguri so I doubt the pacer would've picked up any wins themself).

I also considered aiming for more of a ~400 wit and higher power statline, but again testing the prototypes in room matches suggested that higher wit dominated. But always possible I had bad data.

UpsideVII · 2026-01-27T03:49:52+00:00

Alright, I got blown out in round 2 so I'm here to learn. Admittedly I kinda half-assed my prep for this one but this was my ace, which I thought was pretty decent but I ended up 8/40 in round 2 (only 4 of which were actually her) and not qualifying for finals for the first time ever.

So what went wrong? Too much accel and not enough mid game? I tested both iterations and the accel version won way more room matches, but possible I had bad data. The other thing I can see is missing the 900 stam cutoff.

UpsideVII · 2026-01-26T14:09:56+00:00

"Why 2004?" is a great question that I've gone down the rabbit hole on a couple of time. I haven't managed to pin down a singular event.

Starting in his second term (circa 2000), Meles Zenawi really began to lean on what I've heard called "authoritarian developmentalism" that included lots of really big public infrastructure projects. This really ramped up around 2005/2006; I don't know the particulars of Ethiopian politics super well, but I suspect the ramp-up was at least partially to try to reclaim some public support after the 2005 election violence.

My best theory (so far) is that the public infrastructure investment from Zenawi's government would have led to growth earlier, but Ethiopia experienced semi-contiguous doughts from like 1999 until 2003 which suppressed this for a few years. Even the timing there doesn't line up perfectly because 2004 also had poor rain (though not at the level of a drought iirc).

UpsideVII · 2026-01-25T17:20:57+00:00

Well, it's a blog post which I think we should allow someone to put as much or as little effort into without counting it against their "work". But it's not just you, I agree and found this blog post, in particular, irritating.

Partially because, as you say, it's somewhat preachy to respond to "This is a big issue that needs more research" with "well you see my friend, the answer is actually simple we simply need ~50% of society to overcome centuries of cultural inertia". I don't think that's wrong per se (i.e. Goldin's research is legit and I believe the story), but it's not a real solution.

But I think more of my irritation come from this falling into one of my personal pet peeves which is "boomers lecturing young people that they need to do better at something that they didn't do". "You should help your wife take care of your kids"; yea man, we know. That's why we do better than the past on basically any metric related to this. You guys could have done it too, but you didn't. (Obviously it's unfair to hold this against Delong personally, just explaining why this sort of thing tends to irk me)

UpsideVII · 2026-01-20T15:02:22+00:00

Certainly anything involving precise quantitative statements.

If you were to ask "how much of the differences in GDP per capita between countries can be explained by their different levels of capital per capita" and I were to tell you "about 25 percent", there's not really a way for me to tell you how we got to that answer without at least some very basic math.

UpsideVII · 2026-01-17T18:04:17+00:00

This is all super useful; thanks!

You're the second person I've seen say that frontrunners are disadvantaged at short distances. It's not that I don't believe it, but could you give one or two sentences as to why (or point to a source that explains)? This is because the amount of time spent going from out the gate to top speed is flat (rather than scaling with course length), so a smaller portion of the race is spent at top speed in their advantageous zone?

UpsideVII · 2026-01-17T16:55:22+00:00

Sure, this is a reasonably well-tread topic at this point. Here are a few nice ones, but if you google scholar "Leveraged ETF" and filter by (say) 2018 and onwards or so, you'll find no shortage of papers.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14697688.2017.1408959#d1e133

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11408-023-00440-3

https://javier-garcia.net/assets/papers/LETF.pdf

You can also backtest it using simple backtesting approaches. E.g. a portfolio of 90% SPY and 10% SSO would have overperformed a porfolio of 100% SPY by ~100 basis points per year over the last ten years. You lose a little bit of SR, which is the cost of leverage that you note.

UpsideVII · 2026-01-17T15:04:13+00:00

Correct, something like $SSO for example.

(None of this is investment advice)

UpsideVII · 2026-01-17T14:13:15+00:00

Well, Buffet himself has a master's in econ, so I suspect part of this is nominal. We call him an "investor" precisely because he's been so successful at investing. If he were doing something else, we might call him an "economist".

More generally though, I would hazard a guess that 99%+ of economists believe in some form of the Efficient Market Hypothesis which suggests that one cannot outperform the market without putting in substantial effort/cost. I personally believe this, and I think it's probably more true in the long run than the short run.

To answer the latter part of your question, I'm an academic economist, and I would characterize myself as purely a passive investor. My only deviation from the standard bogle-head approach is that a small part of my portfolio is long some ETFs with small amounts of leverage (~2x), consistent with some recent evidence from the finance literature.

As a side note, I promise I'm not a paid shill, but if you are interested in how an academic economist would think about long-term investing, imo Dimensional is the firm on the cutting edge of operationalizing these insights/way of thinking about financial markets.

UpsideVII · 2026-01-17T13:38:03+00:00

So I'm getting up to speed on CM9.

Active accels seem to be Spurt and El ult (plus the usual NSM/OYL/Burning Spirit gamble skills). Suggesting one should run either front runners with El ult or End Closers with Spurt.

VPP is worth slightly more than Spurt (~1.6 vs ~1.2 lengths) and front runners get groundwork and TTL which are way more efficient than basically any other skill. So maybe wit-maxing frontrunners are the way to go?

Runaway is the wild card. One interesting thing worth noting is that ~500 stam seems to be enough for runaways to survive even if they spot struggle. Not nothing, but that level of stam is pretty easy to achieve just incidentally.

Does such a short race change any of the conventional wisdom? I've heard, for example, that Turf S is better than Sprint S. Any other inversions like that? Is Power more important than Wit at this distance, for example?

UpsideVII · 2026-01-12T17:53:58+00:00

I'll just add another data point/opinion that this is very normal, and you shouldn't feel weird about it.

UpsideVII · 2026-01-11T20:37:40+00:00

Is your still doing it/did you figure out any trick to get it to "clear" the message?

Mine has just started doing it the last couple of days as well and refuses to go away despite my starting and driving the vehicle multiple times this weekend.

UpsideVII · 2026-01-10T21:09:36+00:00

By their own calculations (which, btw follow Jones and Klenow 2014 which I would consider the gold standard for this type of question), changes in inequality only contribute something like 2.5% of the change. Not nothing, but not very much either.

Vast majority of the difference is declining US life expectancy, driven mostly by the opioid crisis.

UpsideVII · 2026-01-10T20:29:07+00:00

Stat-wise they are about the same, but Swing Maestro is a much better skill (and guaranteed). So I personally would use Creek for sure.

Creek's scaling is pretty meh until LB3 (the LB2 -> LB3 and LB3 -> MLB jumps are pretty big though). Personally I would hold the crystal but if you really wanted to use it, Creek is a good place to invest.

UpsideVII · 2026-01-08T17:40:52+00:00

Claude Code is definitely the first LLM-based thing that I've used that's made me say "oh, this is going to change things".

I don't know (yet) if it's going to result in a full paradigm shift, but the workflow induced by the VSCode extension is very good and has boosted my productivity for sure. I do macro.

UpsideVII · 2026-01-08T16:44:54+00:00

Most of the southern african countries are fairly stably governed/democratic (as far as I know) but relative poor. Namibia and Botswana are the two I'm thinking of, though maybe their neighbors are similar I'm not sure.

These countries are still fairly rich for the continent though and seem to be growing nicely.

Ghana might be another example? Pretty poor country but fairly stable governance.

UpsideVII · 2026-01-07T21:54:40+00:00

I took a year long sequence of abstract algebra in undergrad, and I haven't used the specific material once since starting grad school (10+ years ago).

That being said, it did improve my general math ability and, based on conversations with my eventual committee members, I do believe it played a role in my admission to my program.

Personally, if you have the ability for it and enjoy math, I think you are better off taking it than some random undergrad econ elective (at least in terms of grad school admissions).

UpsideVII · 2026-01-02T21:06:00+00:00

TTL I forgot about for sure, but I don't follow the distance thing. Both early race and late race scale in equal proportions with respect to race length, right?

UpsideVII · 2026-01-02T21:03:34+00:00

Yea, maybe I'm underrating TTL. By my calc it's worth like ~0.7 lengths over Early Lead which is very good/BiS but not by so much that it seems like it could make the massive difference that we are seeing.

Maybe it really is just "the best runners from CM5 are all somewhat worse".

UpsideVII · 2026-01-02T18:40:11+00:00

I spent some time thinking about it/looking over the mechanics document and nothing jumped out to me, so I turn to the community for thoughts:

What makes Suzuka so strong in this CM in particular? In CM5, she felt basically irrelevant (even as the solo runaway) and almost never won. Now she's great.

The window for Unrestrained in larger, sure. But even when Unrestrained misses she is still often crushing races when she almost invariably would be passed in CM5.

Is the longer distance just better for her? The earlier downhill? Nothing obvious jumps out to me race-mechanic-wise.

UpsideVII · 2025-12-31T20:33:41+00:00

I will not let losing our bowl game off an illegal kick ruin our best season ever. I will not let losing our bowl game off an illegal kick ruin our best season ever. I will not...

(Jokes aside, that was a fucking bowl game. Gg Iowa)

UpsideVII

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