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JC98 & I & shuzoku top 8 predictions. We are still the best prediction group on the site for OLT.
Separation vs Typhlosion48 (48/52) (Our protagonist continues to look strong. Both players also have some favorable fortune throughout their games so it will be interesting to see)
Vert vs TDNT (60/40) (Vert is larping as ABR, lucky & good)
Ewin vs Clean (51/49) (Surely he won't lose twice )
Storm Zone vs Alhen (55/45) (Alhen looks solid but storm's teams will make or break this set)
I also made a Strength of Schedule document that was retroactively determined based on swiss records. Using this, I extrapolated a point system to determine the "strength" of each player.
Based on the sheet, the higher rank has always won EXCEPT when the opponent is directly 1 rank below. So Separation, Alhen, Clean and Vert should win.
Other facts:
- #1 was tied between Fusien, Alhen & Separation. 2/3 won their game
- The lowest ranked qualifier for playoffs was Tace
- The highest ranked non-qualifier was Heileone, beating 5 qualifiers
- The 3rd highest non-qualifier, zS, has a higher ranking than a few qualifiers despite only playing 4 sets. Quality losses or something.
- Clean & Heileone had the highest Strength of Schedule
Let me know if there is any other stats people want to see, I know JC has some cooked up
Also, also, looking back at early winner predicts:
1LDK - only Vert stands out of his 3 picks
JC - Vert, Typh stand, t4 members Xav & Fusien out
Me - Only Vert is in LOL, Heile out in swiss, Fusien, Jolteon out in t16
Ghoulish Champ - Vert, SZ hold on
Ego - Vert again
Gendercast - the Vert half is still in as is the sole Sep call, the Tace, Hellom, Fusien, MRH calls were all fried
Ninth - Vert
Looks like if Vert loses all the brackets are cooked
Okay, big post coming in here. Putting this off til top 8 lets me update some numbers but also means that there are a few players it would have been fun to talk about that are now eliminated. I'll get to talk about them next time! So with eight players left (and all eight of them adding a career quarterfinal to their name), let's take a look at this playoff.
Vert:
- team tours: 6-2 sheet record, 6-2 in SV OU, 0 sheet games this year
- individuals: 1 trophy, 3 finals, 3 semifinals, 4 quarterfinals
Storm Zone:
- team tours: 41-35 sheet record, 22-17 in SV OU, 7-5 record this year
- individuals: 1 trophy, 1 final, 1 semifinal, 5 quarterfinals
clean:
- team tours: 13-14 sheet record, 10-11 in SV OU, 10-7 this year
- individuals: 1 final, 1 semifinal, 2 quarterfinals
Separation:
- team tours: 31-26 sheet record, 9-12 in SV OU, 7-4 this year
- individuals: 1 final, 1 semifinal, 2 quarterfinals
Ewin:
- team tours: 30-27 sheet record, 20-17 in SV OU, 12-7 this year
- individuals: 2 quarterfinals
Typhlosion48:
- team tours: 0 sheet games
- individuals: 2 quarterfinals
TDNT:
- team tours: 26-12, 3-5 in SV OU, 9-7 this year
- individuals: 1 quarterfinal
Alhen:
- team tours: 2-5 sheet record, 2-5 in SV OU, 1-2 this year
- individuals: 1 quarterfinal
This is a very different kind of top 8 to STour this year, in which 6/8 players already had individual trophies going into the tournament (which I'm pretty sure has never happened any other time). The quarterfinalists this time around are coming in with a collective 11 prior top 8s, in contrast with this past STour's 47. It's also unlike the Classic quarterfinals happening right now in that it's also not loaded with accomplished yet trophyless veterans, where the tournament favourites each have several deep individual runs under their belt with no hardware to show for it. It's perhaps more similar to Grand Slam this year in the composition of its top 8, and that's perhaps a constructive example because despite Slam's mix of established tournament threats who were unable to convert their previous finals' appearances into rings and up-and-comers bringing a unique skillset to the pool, ultimately that trophy went to the only player who already had one. If anything, this OLT top 8 is even more top-heavy than that, and its pair of existing trophy winners loom even larger over this bracket.
We'll start with Alhen. They've had a pretty impressive set of wins so far, putting up the second-best qualifying GXE this year and dropping clean, Giannis, ima and Originality56 to get here, a very solid improvement from last year's 1-3 exit in Swiss pools. Nonetheless, their previous official experience in the tier is decidedly a mixed bag, and they're one of two players in this pool to have never made an individual quarterfinal before this one. They'd be the newest player to take an individual trophy if they made it all the way, and I'm just not really sure I see that happening, but I'm always happy to see a breakout from a 2020s joindate.
Though ranking above two remaining players thanks to an SS-era STour quarterfinal (via a Pohjis win), I think it's probably fair to say that Typhlosion48 has the most limited SV track record of anyone left here, basically not competing in the tier before this OLT. Making it out of Swiss via Bloody, Stareal, and Gray wins is admittedly a little fraudulent, but it's also hard to deny that the hellom win gives them at least a little bit of credentials. They're still probably the underdogs against anyone left here.
Looking at overall Smogon credentials, TDNT is legit, with a kind of preposterous sheet record that gives them a better winrate than the likes of ABR. That said, though their sheet debut date in 2023 aligns them much more closely with the SV breakouts chronologically, their pedigree comes almost entirely in gen 8. What can they do in SV? Well, I'm not really sure. This run has certainly been better than last year's 0-3 exit from Swiss, at least, and Tace, Stareal, 3d and ima is a pretty respectable bunch of wins. Again, though, I do have to point out that this is their first time getting this far in an individual tournament.
Separation and Ewin have almost identical sheet records: 31-26 and 30-27 respectively. The rest of their profiles diverge; Separation's carrying performances are a finals run to OLT VII and a 7-2 run in SPL 2022, both in the SS days. Meanwhile, Ewin's arguably at their peak, having reached their first individual top 8 last OLT and just generally having their strongest sheet results in this tier. I think they're both solid, deserving playoff contenders here, with both having some pretty massive wins in Swiss to get here (Ewin over hellom and Separation over xavgb). They're good.
clean might be an SV breakout performer, but is there really that much separating them and Ewin in the tier besides the fact that Ewin just has a few more years prior to the generation? clean's gone 10-7 on the sheet this year, which is good, but Ewin's actually been stronger at 12-7. The real differentiator for clean is the fact that they made OLT finals last year, and the other OLT finalists this gen have been lax, Vert, and xavgb. It's pretty good company, and it's that peak performance that fuels clean optimism here.
I will say this. About 8% of players with only one career top 8 (21/249) won a trophy on that attempt, which slightly underperforms the expected 1/8 rate for a quarterfinalist. Meanwhile, among the players with two career top 8s, only around 6% of them have trophies (5/83, the list including Golden Sun, gr8astard, Hiye, giara, and ict). This is not a particularly useful predictive metric, but on the other hand, the numbers skyrocket from here; around 45% of people with three career top 8s have a trophy, and the percentage is about the same for people with four. The sample size really starts to dip from here (only 28 players ever have more than four career quarterfinal appearances), but generally it seems like around 65-70% of players in that rarified air have a trophy depending on how you slice up the sample.
I use top 8 as my benchmark here largely because older STours/OLTs/Slams don't all go to top 16, some doing a top 12, others doing full double-elim playoffs. I'll try for top 16 stats eventually, but I'm a little worried about the numbers underrating players with active results from like 2012 even more than they already are by the generally lower number of tournaments from this period. Also, I just haven't gotten around to it and parsing through name changes for early OSTs is a pain.
I can't just figure out the stats for people with one career top 8 because that isn't the same sample as "people on their first top 8", and in general we would expect good players to get more than one career quarterfinal. As a result the one-career-top-8 group is going to be skewed towards weaker playoff contenders (since the better ones will typically get more later) and so it's probably going to give overly pessimistic projections to players who are making their first top 8 but who you'd expect to finish their careers with more.
I'm trying to say some combination of "deep tournament runs reward veteran experience" and "deep tournament runs reward good players, and consistent good individual performances is a really useful indicator of that". I don't have comprehensive numbers for the reasons listed above, but I did write during Slam that 28/33 non-OSDT trophies this decade have gone to someone with prior top 8 experience, and of the five won by a relative newcomer to the dance, three of them involved a finals win over another such player (thus guaranteeing that the finals would end with that outcome). This isn't to say that clean or Ewin, for instance, would necessarily be shocking winners here, certainly not if you're high on their playing abilities, but they'd absolutely be light on experience for a champion.
So whereas the six players that compose the bulk of the field are pretty light in terms of individual track record, such that their comparables don't really contain many other trophy winners, the last two players in this field stand out for their experience, not just in that they're trophied and looking for a second but in the consistency with which they make deep tournament runs. Let's start with Storm Zone, who's now tied for 18th all-time with 5 quarterfinal appearances. This is a fun group, consisting of a pair of two-time winners in Loki and M Dragon, a pair of critically-acclaimed Youtubers in blunder and lax, and a player currently looking for his first trophy as we speak in PDC. Storm Zone is one of just two players with at least five top 8s, however, who has only made it past that round once (the other being Luigi), and I think that's undeniably something to prove with a win against Alhen. Storm Zone's been pretty quiet since SPL, to be honest, with a first-round exit in STour and no games in either WCOP or SCL. It's hard to read their current form, but it's also true that their only loss has been to a red-hot Fusien and they got a pretty impressive xavgb win last round. They also have more sheet games than anyone left in this tournament (ima and Tace both being eliminated last week). If not for the player I'll talk about last, Storm Zone would be pretty clearly the most accomplished here in individual tournaments. They're always consistent in this tier, if rarely dominant, and I do think it'd be fitting for the tier's most prolific ladder player to pick up the Ladder Tournament trophy.
To be honest, though, the other reason that this playoff doesn't feel anything like any others this year is because to me, it feels more like Empo's journey to the Masters II trophy. It isn't very often that a tournament feels like one player's slow march to an inevitable trophy, but that's how it feels to me. Prior to cycle 1 signups last year, Vert's last Smogon post was in last year's OLT Swiss pools. They captained US West in WCOP, but I don't think they had a single game in an official tournament all year. I genuinely had no idea they were actively playing, and surely I wasn't the only one who was in that boat, given that their sign-up post blew away everyone else's in terms of reacts (including ABR's own somewhat unexpected signup). And then they led cycle 1 in GXE among qualifiers, and it just felt like every game they played on ladder was a headlining event. Their route so far has taken them through JJ09LIE, heileone, clean, and MRH1106, and though the heileone set was closer than expected, the wins have just kind of seemed inevitable so far.
When I was running through some stats for Slam, something that surprised me is that the first SV OST was actually Vert's individual tournament top 8 (and for that matter I'm pretty sure first top 16 as well, although they made top 32 in OST and OLT in 2017). Not only that, but they had zero sheet games by that point, and to date they still only have 8. In that context, it's pretty remarkable the esteem they've built up as a player in such a short time. How did Vert do it? Well, by making three individual finals in two years, that's how. There are 14 players who have made at least three finals in their career, all of whom getting multiple trophies out of it except for craing ;_; (honourable mention on the last top-ten ranking anyway), mncmt (only such player without a trophy, 0-3 finals record), Giannis Antetokommo-o (top 5 all-time in appearances in the finals, semifinals, and quarterfinals), and of course, Vert.
Intuitively, I know how stats work. Vert obviously isn't guaranteed to win this tournament, and all of these words will seem very funny if they proceed to get upset by TDNT this week. But in the context where Vert made finals three times out of a stretch of five consecutive individual tournaments that contained SV OU, was in the playoffs in a sixth before withdrawing, and appeared one year later to steamroll everyone they've faced in their path so far, I just have a hard time seeing anyone else winning this tournament. All of Vert's remaining games will be must-watch television for me because they will have either done the extremely impressive feat of making winning their second trophy seem absolutely inevitable, or someone else will have put together a once-in-a-lifetime performance to take the upset.
the OLT playoff bracket is either determined after each round or just isn't public, so instead I'll rank the final in terms of how I'd rank them (and of course 1 and 2 could face each other in the semis because that's just how it is
1. Vert
2. Storm Zone
3. clean
4. Ewin
5. TDNT
6. Separation
7. Alhen
8. Typhlosion48
And predicts for this round: Separation vs Typhlosion48 Vert vs TDNT
Ewin vs clean
Storm Zone vs Alhen
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