Freed the confines of the prison that is gullywash week, we finally find ourselves on old, familiar soil. Badlands is a classic, I cannot remember a TF2 where we did not play this dynamic, fast moving map. Possibly the most recognizable part of any map, spire, demands excellence in DM and strategy to take. But once teams have accomplished the task, they face a last so hard to push into, it is only bested by the difficulty in pushing out of. Expect backcaps, airshots, epic DM fights and mid shenanigans in what has, historically, been one of the most exciting maps to watch, and play.

This week is special for a lot of reasons. This is the first week in which we will start qualifying teams to be in playoffs. 11 wins is the number I came up with, more through gut feeling and heuristics than actual rigor. Seendio should nab it, as might SYOPS or Guado Glories (but not both). Night Owls I am less certain about, but if they continue their winning streak, absolutely it will happen. The Muffin Men have a relatively easy week, and should be able to secure their two wins this week, also giving them the necessary 11. Everyone else will have to wait until Sunshine to secure their slot.

This also means we will start disqualifying "bubble" teams from our top 16 team list. I suspect there will be 2-3 top 16 teams with 10 wins, and it will all come down to rounds won. I think anyone sitting at 6-6 is probably not going to make it, though they could with a near flawless final three weeks. There are a handful of 8-3 teams. They will need to be careful as they play teams around their skill level, a ton of 7-3 and lower teams would be all too happy to take their place. Anyone with an easy schedule needs to be putting up 5-0s, because round losses matter in tie breaker land. The whole season is a race to playoffs, and the middle of the pack is neck and neck. Good luck to all the teams, give them hell boys (and girls).

Plenty of drama this week, I think as the season draws to a close, teams start scrambling, looking at their results and coming to the conclusion that cutting players is the way forward. Sometimes it is, sometimes you just gotta make room for a paid mercenary to come and win open for you.

We heard from Just Greatness last week in our "New Team Spotlight" segment, and I distinctly recall copious quantities of smack being thrown about. Late last night, the interviewee XCV was cut from his team, a move that also saw 3 of his other teammates quit the team. I chatted with XCV briefly and he said that he actually had decided to leave the team and had lost interest prior, but was cut before he could actually leave. To me this story is typical of teams in open (and TF2 in general). Sticking together is hard, and as I was giving the interview, sitting in their mumble was a uniquely awkward experience. There was snapping and some in-fighting going on between players. It was clear to me that the team may not be long for this world. I am not sure to what degree the roster changes are upgrades or downgrades, but for a team that was unlikely to make a run at a top 16 spot anyway, it will likely not matter. 5-5 is an okay record for a new team, and technically they could get 6 games in a row and pull into playoffs. I highly doubt it.

Bubble team Virgin Police has been making a lot of interesting roster changes as of late. Spadez earlier this season (who doesn't appear to actively play for the team) and old standby carnage (who appears to be a bit washed up, at least not his old dominant self) seemed to not be enough. Now relic, the man who might as well have invented pocketing, has joined the crew. He is not paid up as of posting, so it is unclear if he will be contributing to their match against The Muffin Men. 13 straight seasons of invite and 10 or so LAN appearances is and impressive amount of experience to bring to bear. If he plays, time will tell if he is able to dominate as hard as he used to. I sure hope so, relic was always one of my favorite player to watch. I was unable to reach a member of Virgin Police for comment.

Finally, Squid Squad player Knuckles was cut and joined Mumble Robots He had this to say:

It seems a pretty cut and dry case, no drama, just a team re-arranging players hoping to make the best of their final weeks. Knuckles should bring a lot of force to Mumble Robots, replacing Darktechno may not have been a skill based decision, but I feel that their new addition is certainly an upgrade. Mumble Robots is looking better and better every week and I think this change will help push them that little bit higher. Knuckles will be starting for Mumble Robots starting this week.

I have said before that I want to start developing a statistics based heuristic to help determine which team should reign supreme in a matchup. This is still a goal of mine, and this week's statistics is my first attempt at bringing some of that idea to light.

When we talk about how well a team does against another team, what do we mean? We can measure that in a couple of ways, round won is the easiest one to see. A team that wins more rounds (and thus the game) performed better than their opponent. This is trivially true. We could look at rounds won against other teams that they both have faced. In a way, I do this already when making predictions. It is a good start, and offers a lot of insight, but can miss a few important factors.

So what is a good statistic to look at then? I think the answer lies in assessing a large variety of stats and drawing smart conclusions about the stats, while keeping in mind that no outcome is 100% predictable. This week we look at the centerpiece of TF2 stratagem, the Ubercharge. The following table shows Ubers, ubers on a game to game basis, the enemy team's ubers/game, the difference between those numbers and then a nice little graph showing game by game the difference in ubers for the top 16 teams. All stats are as of end of gullywash week and do not include badlands games.

A few things to notice with this graph. First off, the relative similarity between the first two graphs for any given team represents how close they were with their opponents in ubers. The Difference In Uber column assigns a number to that value. So we see a general trend, the more games a team has under their belts, the larger their difference in ubers. My question is if the mirror of that is also true. If a team has more ubers in a game, what are the odds they will win that game?

To answer this question, we have to determine what percentage of games won are also games that had more ubers for the winning team. But lets back up just a moment. First we have to define what we are asking. My question going into this project is this: to what degree does a team having more ubers in a game predict the outcome of said game? To answer this question, we need to look at data. The data I collected above will be sufficient for this task. There are 129 games played by the top 16 teams at the time of recording the data. Please note that this does not include forfeits (which is why the number isn't even) and double counts any games played by top 16 teams (about 25 or so games). The latter isn't necessarily a problem because of the relatively small amount of games, the fact that those games are going to be better, closer games anyway (and so the quality of data recorded from them is likely to be better) and because its my writeup and I am gonna make the rules. Counting out those games will give us four numbers as follows. All numbers are from the perspective of one team. As in the loss for the Muffin Men against Guado Glories provided two data points. From the perspective of the Muffin Men, they had one tick for the "Games lost where winning team had more ubers" and from the perspective of Guado Glories there was one tick for "Games won where winning team had more ubers".

Games won where winning team had more ubers (True Positive): 82

Games won where winning team had fewer ubers (False Positive): 20

Games lost where winning team had more ubers (True Negative): 19

Games lost where winning team had fewer ubers (True Positive): 8

These numbers tell us very little without some analysis. I have laid the groundwork for a binary classification test. These are often used in medicine to judge the efficacy of a test. Say you were verifying whether or not a breast cancer test was "accurate". What you are actually asking is two-fold. How many sick people are correctly identified (known as the True Positive Rate or Sensitivity, we will abbreviate to TPR) and how many healthy people are NOT identified as sick (also known as Specificity or True Negative Rate, abbreviated to TNR). These numbers are the hallmarks of medical testing, and they will be useful for us here. Sensitivity is simply the ratio of correctly predicted wins vs total predicted wins:

\begin{equation} \frac{\text{True Positives}}{\text{True Positives} + \text{False Negatives}} = \frac{82}{82+19} = 0.812 \end{equation}

Simple right? Specificity is equally simple. It is the number of correctly predicted losses vs the total predicted losses:

\begin{equation} \frac{\text{True Negatives}}{\text{True Negatives} + \text{False Positives}} = \frac{8}{8+20} = 0.285 \end{equation}

So what do these numbers tell us? Well, the first number, the TRP is the probability that, if a team gets more ubers, they will win the game. 82 percent of the time, this will be true. This number is also called the positive predictive value. Great right? Awesome! 81% is pretty damn predictive. Woah there, not so fast sonny. It is also important that any predictor of outcome also be specific. No use predicting all of the True Positives if we have too many of those sneaky False Positives getting in our way. If the TNR is too low, then we are predicting too many losses that should actually be predicted as wins.

Overall I think this is a decent predictor, even with a 29% TNR, it is catching about 81% of the wins, but also catching probably too many false positives. But the false positive number is really really skewed downwards. When assessing something like the top 16 teams, very few games are actually going to be losses. So it makes sense that the majority of false positives will occur somewhere near the top of the field. After the season ends, I will revisit a lot of stats and only count numbers in games played between two top teams (perhaps top 20 or so). This will drastically reduce the number of data points, but improve data quality significantly.

Another issue is the one of accuracy. How accurate is our test? Honestly, the best way of determining this is our good friend the Arithmetic Mean:

So about 70 percent of the time, our test will correctly identify a game as either a win or a loss depending purely on uber differential. Putting this in context of the game, it makes a lot of sense. A team that is able to keep their medic alive, get uber and use that uber more frequently than their enemy is going to be at an inherent advantage. It also makes sense that it would not be a perfect predictor. Often times teams will not need to pop their own uber going into a fight, or can easily pop the enemy team's uber without sacrificing their own. In this situation, the losing team's medic may have the ability to get more ubers, but won't be utilizing them as well as the winning team.

So what is our take home conclusion? Remember that I make a lot of assumptions and there is a heavy amount of selection bias in my data. I think that we can draw the conclusion that may have seemed obvious at the outset. The more ubers a team is able to get vs their opponent, the more likely they will be to win. We can use this insight to look at a potential game between two teams: A and B. If we see that in historic matches between team A and their opponents, team A is consistently able to get more ubers than them, and if those teams are all of relatively similar skill level to team B and Team B has been less able to put up good uber numbers against those teams, we can say at least that Team A is more likely to take the victory because they are better at getting and then using those ubers.

At the end of the day, will I be using this to help drive predictions? Sure. But it will be especially important to keep in mind that this metric is not amazingly predictive, and there are a ton of confounding factors. Remember that the only thing we showed was that the more ubers a team gets, the more likely they are to win. There is no way of easily predicting how many ubers a team will get during a game, and sometimes the extra ubers will be the reason for a victory, but it is at least just as likely that they are a symptom of the domination that comes from winning a game that just isn't close. This metric is more likely to accurately judge close games than non-close games. Certainly it can be said that Seendio doesn't beat their opponents match after match simply because caboose is able to get more ubers. Even I cannot be so reductionistic.

Week two of our slew of good matches heats up this week, and finally we are starting to get some hard match data on who will be placing where come end of season. This week will also be the first week in which teams can confirm their entry into playoffs, signaling the approach of end of season.

I did a lot of research on the topic, and it turns out that there is no good way of determining how many games a team will need to make playoffs, and even less way of predicting the bubble teams considering we won't get information on matchups for those crucial last two weeks until this and next thursday. All this considered, it appears the split will be as follows: any team with 11 wins will make it into playoffs. There will be about 3 or 4 spots that could go towards teams that pick up 10 games, so for those teams that can foresee themselves just barely coming into that 10 game limit, rounds won will be very important.

This week will also be a good one to determine the relative skill level of a lot of middle playoff teams. Teams like Night Owls, Animus Victoria, bwatbwatbwat, Cloud 9 and others will really hit some hard and close matches this week. Their performance will directly affect their seed come playoffs.

Again, there are a metric fuckton of great matches this week, and we are starting to get to the point where all of them are meaningful for any team that hasn't already secured themselves a spot. These are my top picks for week 6: badlands.

In what may be the best and closest match of the week, the cap point kings in Night Owls are taking on Animus Victoria. This game holds a ton of importance in the rankings for the top 4-8 teams. Night Owls is currently 10-0 and, although they dropped 2 rounds to Morin Meets the Eye and 1 to bwatbwatbwat, their game is currently at its peak. Air continues to dominate and the rest of the team, save their medic main who accidentally picked up a scatter gun, are definitely keeping up.

Animus Victoria, on the other hand, I feel are going to perpetually disappoint me. They lost to Seendio without winning so much as a round, folding over like so much tissue paper. They looked good against SYOPS, 3-1 after the first half, but SYOPS were able to pick up another 4 rounds in the second half, a frustrating situation I am sure. But the most frustrating part for me is that there is nothing about that team that should have posed such a severe threat to Animus. But instead, the new pickup in the form of Namlay was anything but a presence to be reckoned with. Anemic damage and a chronic inability to put anything together for Animus signaled their defeat, with only blew and Fearless really putting forth the performance that is going to be demanded of a team that wants to make a run for the money come post season.

So what we have is a Night Owls that seems to be doing better and better every week and an Animus that continues to fall in my personal rankings. On paper, Animus has the better players, well except for air. But in terms of recent performance and ability to show up, I can't help but give this game to Night Owls. Will it be close? Absolutely. But look for air and sigh to wreak their special blend of havoc against the experienced but clumsy Animus Victoria.

I must admit that, at the beginning of the season, I didn't really think much of the Mumble Robots. Their roster, at first look, seems kind of underwhelming. No one on their team stands out as a star player and, in a league where many teams have at least one or two IM players on their roster, Mumble Robots stands out. But their record has been pretty good so far. True, their first three games against good teams were losses, and they have accumulated the traditional slew of glorified forfeit wins, but recently they went 4-5 against THE WIDEST KIDS YOU KNOW and finally beat out another potential top 16 team in the Virgin Police (on badlands... yes I know im late).

Squid Squad, on the other hand, was almost the opposite for me. Perhaps it was a bit of overranking on my part, but the boys of Squid Squad looked like they might do great things this season. Now I am unsure if they will even secure themselves a playoff spot. My gut says yes, that they will struggle this week and next, but then will do well enough granary week to pull out those 10, maayyybbeee 11 wins. But they will need to win here first. Sunshine will feature them playing Animus Victoria and The Muffin Men, two matches I don't see them winning, meaning that at best, they are looking at that bare minimum 11 wins if they are able to secure victory against Mumble Robots. If not? Well it will come down to the rounds for, and no team wants to be in that position. Contrast this to Mumble Robots, who play Monkey Madness and empire of emotion, two teams that will be much easier to defeat

Squid Squad should be so much better than they are. They may be one of the better bubble teams, and I suspect they will be able to pull in a scrappy 11-5 season, but they won't get that match here.5-3 Mumble Robots

I feel like I haven't been paying much attention to SYOPS this season. A huge part of that is their ridiculously easy schedule right up until last week. But on gullywash, we got to see the real SYOPS in action. Two, relatively long, games against Blanc and Animus had the team pull ahead with wins, even if only barely. However, their win against Animus, a team that I pegged as far better than them right up until a few weeks ago, is a good sign. Animus will surely present a bigger challenge than that of bwatbwatbwat. The only question left is how well they will perform on badlands. On this front, I have no doubts. SYOPS has experienced players who have been playing badlands for their entire TF2 career.

bwatbwatbwat on the other hand, is another of those teams that seemed to not be able to actually handle the pressure of being high up in the league. Their clean sweep of the league was halted in its tracks last week as they dropped games to both Night Owls and Guado Glories. In this way, bwatbwatbwat is extremely unlucky. They will have played 4 of the top 5 teams between weeks 5 and 7, possibly the hardest of the second half schedules. But their loss to Night Owls is particularly concerning for the team. 5-1 is not a good spread to put up against Night Owls, and I fully expected them to take that game with almost the exact opposite score. So where does that leave bwatbwatbwat? I think the last couple weeks will appear to be their downfall and they are in the unfortunate position of having to beat at least one team that is better than them if they want the assured playoff spot. I think they should be looking to Animus on sunshine, because that win won't come here.

Its not that I don't think bwatbwatbwat could win this game. They do have n00bies after all, but relying on your superstar demoman to win you games is a dangerous strategy as of late. The demoman nerf has hit the token black guy pretty hard. I just wonder if the rest of bwatbwatbwat is capable of stepping up to the plate and making up the loss of presence that n00bies once represented on a map. SYOPS on the other hand, seems to have a much more well rounded team, able to tackle challenges as they come. Their reactive and fast combo play will reward them well, especially on badlands. Look for a couple of quick rounds, but any time bwatbwatbwat is going to get a little space, expect them to make it a slow slug fest. SYOPS will secure their playoff spot with a solid: 5-2 SYOPS

These two teams really, really fell under my radar as they climbed the league. In a lot of ways, they are pretty similar. Both are 7-3, both need every match they can get to secure their playoff spot and both could accomplish this goal, if only just barely. Both teams also are in this top 16 less as a homage to their own skill as it matches up to those higher than them on the rankings, but instead because they have managed to, just barely, rise above the shit fest that is going to be the fight for those last two coveted playoff spots.

Monkey Madness is a team I looked at, way back before the season, and wondered if they wouldn't do a bit of work this season. RAWRAFLE has been kicking around for a bit, including a run in playoffs last season on Not Up To Var. The rest of their team though, is inexperienced, most of them having just started playing in ESEA this season. Their performances have been relatively sloppy, after their obligatory win streak for the first 4 weeks (interrupted by bwatbwatbwat), they have failed to really put anything together. They gave a hell of a 4-5 game against Virgin Police, even going into overtime. In a lot of ways, the Virgin Police represent a much bigger threat than Morin Meets the Eye, so if the team is on their game again, a win here is certainly not out of their reach. I hope to see more solid plays from Monkey Madness, doing so will show us a team that can safely sit at the bottom of playoffs, content with their first season in ESEA.

Morin Meets the Eye's story is strikingly familiar, if slightly less impressive. Their early season loss came from Victorious Secret on viaduct, a map that is trialing for a lot of teams. But they have been unable to put up even so much as a close game against other playoff candidates. I can't help but feel that Morin Meets the Eye has risen just to the level of their own inability, and their matches this week are going to put a serious dent in their playoff gambit. It is a dangerous time to be losing close games. Team namesake Morin is doing well this season, a solid performance that can be expected at this point in time from the demoman, as is Smashy and even rolling has had his moments in the spotlight. But I can't help the feeling that their other three just aren't up to the task of taking out Monkey Madness this week. Look for a close game, and one that both teams will be clawing at in hopes of being that one game more secure in their playoff gambit. Its hard being top 16. 5-3 Monkey Madness

Guado Glories has been an eternal pleasant surprise to me this season. While it is true that they have one loss more than SYOPS (who is sitting at 10-0), SYOPS also hasn't had to play Seendio yet. A loss against Seendio does not count (though it would have been awesome if they could take even one round. ONE ROUND GUYS). This team is my personal favorite for number two, now that I see Animus Victoria for their true colors. They swatswatswatted bwatbwatbwat and even took off with a victory from Trip and the rest of the boys from Drury Lane early in the season. They have been easily holding with even decent IM teams in scrims and look ready for a serious shot at money come playoffs.

SYOPS on the other hand, I am less certain about. They had a rocky time against Blanc and Animus, barely pulling out the victory against the habitually over ranked latter. I can't help but wonder if their 10-0 record is more a result of a painfully easy season than any sort of commentary on relative skill. I guess that is what playoffs are for.

Don't get me wrong, both teams have talent, and this will be a good game to watch regardless. BlueberryVillian and Mortowski have been getting the key frags and making a lot of key plays for the team, and Soarex is doing remarkably well for his first season. But for all the experience this team has, when it comes time to actually perform, I sense that there will be a lot of disappointment in SYOPS mumble. Guado Glories, however, have been playing ridiculously well lately. Airehk and Linkuser are fast, dynamic scouts who are more than capable of cleaning up the damage from their better half in overseer, bill and giraffe. Overseer is my personal pick for best medic not on Seendio this season, and her experience, skill and finesse on the field is where I contribute a lot of the success of Guado Glories. A win here will set up Guado Glories for a relatively easy sunshine week, and propel them to their assured playoff spot.5-2 Guado Glories

Cloud 9 is an example of everything that is wrong with the way ESEA schedules matches. How, how how how how how does a team like Cloud 9 become 8-2? Even worse, how, once the first half is over and matches are supposed to start being scheduled evenly, do they get a match against Just Relax on gullywash week? Fear not brave reader, for this week is the week where the world of Cloud 9 will come crashing down...or not. See the problem is, they are going up against another team I think is ranked just slightly higher than maybe they should be, Morin Meets the Eye. (their other match against Blanc eSports should be a chance for them to get some of the sweet karmatic justice that is due). A win here against Morin Meets the Eye will be crucial. They have another nigh impossible match next week against Guado Glories and I have a feeling granary week may not be easy for this team.

Perhaps I am too harsh on Cloud 9. Though it is hard not to be, looking at their roster, all I see are people who have either never played in ESEA before, or have only played on this team last season. There is just no depth of experience that shows me they should be able to hang with teams like Guado Glories or Blanc or even Carolina Fan Club. But here they are, somehow clawing their way to an almost assured playoff spot. Now is not the time to choke boys.

If I were to look for a team to take on Cloud 9 and put them in their place, perhaps Morin Meets the Eye would not be that team. They just haven't been able to put up a convincing game all season. Well boys, now is the time to start because your playoff hopes hang in the balance. I already predicted a loss against Monkey Madness and another loss against Cloud 9 will spell trouble when the great ESEA accountants in the cloud start dividing the teams into piles for playoffs or going home.

That being said though, I just don't think Morin and company can do it. I don't have any unique insight here, just a gut feeling. I don't know anyone on Cloud 9, and while their performance against SS and his 5 man fan club was surprising, they still didn't come out with the win, instead preferring to spread thin the spaghetti and ragù alla bolognese across the sandy arena of gullywash in the second half. If they can avoid that urge and show us more of what they were made of in the first half, I will have to reconsider their place in the league. 5-2 Cloud 9

Animus, baby, darling. You were my chosen ones. You were supposed to be top of the league, licking at the heels of Seendio, ready to pounce if they choke. What happened? In some ways, Animus put together an almost dream team. Blackymonster is, without a doubt, the most experienced medic currently playing south of Invite, and possibly the most experienced player in Open. From a player that has played in every season bar two since SEASON 3, I expected to be blown away. Blew is no slouch either (though, as we have discussed ad nauseum, he is not TickTak).

I feel, however, that I have been giving a lot of credit to Guado Glories. This credit is well due, and their play has certainly been backing it up. The real question is if their play is sufficient to take out Animus Victoria. This question is easy to field: yes. If I predict Night Owls will beat Animus, it almost seems silly to think it will go any other way Sunday night. So instead I am going to use this match as a litmus test for how well Guado Glories has been improving this season. Where do they stand now? A 5-0 against bwatbwatbwat is a good start, a 5-0 or 5-1 on badlands will look even better. This is Guado Glories' week to shine and show us that they can sit in that number two seat, right alongside the indomitable Seendio. Animus Victoria seems a (poor) translation for Victory of the Soul. At the end of this match, I feel that is all that Blacky and crew will be left with, and in these final weeks, it is victory on the scoreboard, not of the soul, that I really care about. 5-2 Guado Glories