Get to know the PokéStats TEU-CPA Invitational competitors!
Announcing the PokéStats TEU-SHF Invitational
- Only tournaments hosted on the Limitless Online Tournament Platform will award points towards qualification for PokéStats Invitationals. As the online tournament scene continues to grow, it can be difficult to keep track of all available tournaments and ensure that all tournaments are run fairly by reputable staffers. The Limitless platform is an easy way to catalog available tournaments and standardize their operating procedures. We encourage any tournament organizers who do not currently utilize this platform to begin doing so (PokéStats will be migrating our own tournaments over to the Limitless platform in the near future).
- Only Standard TEU-SHF format tournaments will award points towards qualification. The goal of our Invitationals is to highlight the top-performing players from a specific Standard format. Thus, Expanded, old-format, custom-format, or other tournaments will not award points towards Invitational qualification. While we understand that this may be a disappointment for players who currently enjoy the Expanded format or our own old format tournaments, we still believe this choice is necessary to make the Invitationals accessible to skilled newer players and help grow the community, as well as to make the qualification process easier to track and quantify. We want player skill in a particular format, not PTCGO card availability or years of experience in the game, to be the chief factor in who qualifies for our Invitationals.
- 48 players will be the attendance number that determines whether we count an event towards Invitational qualification. Moving forward, PokéStats will not be analyzing data from online tournaments with fewer than 48 players. This is simply because there is a very large amount of data available from the current online tournament scene and we need to focus on the "biggest and best" for purposes of both metagame analysis and player points. This number is not arbitrary--PokéStats has treated COVID-era online events as similar to League Cups for purposes of data analysis, and 48 is the attendance size for League Cups that triggers CP allotment for Top 16 (not just Top 8) players.
- Point allotments: As before, we will award points to the Top 16 players in online events (with 48 or more players) as follows:
- 1st place - 5 points
- 2nd place - 4 points
- Top 4 - 3 points
- Top 8 - 2 points
- Top 16 - 1 point
- In events with 200 or more players, Top 32 placements will earn 0.5 points.
- Any player qualifying for a PokéStats Invitational must be in good standing in the competitive community with no recent history of cheating, unsportsmanlike conduct, or other infractions. While PokéStats will evaluate everyone fairly on a case-by-case basis, it is likely that if you are banned from another tournament circuit for these infractions, you will not be welcome in PokéStats Invitationals. PokéStats reserves the right to remove a qualified player from an Invitational based on these standards and replace them with the next-highest-ranking player.
- PokéStats strives for high-quality content creation and, with this in mind, will make an effort to provide a high-quality stream experience with skilled casters for each Invitational. (The stream details and talented casting lineup for our first Invitational will be announced on our Twitter soon.) We will also strive to provide cash prizing for top performers in each Invitational and will look to secure sponsors from within the community to help achieve this. Please remember that for the foreseeable future, all donations to our Patreon will go directly back into the community in the form of Invitational prize pool funding.
A Statistical Overview of the "Ban ADP" Debate
Editor's note: The conclusions in this article aren't representative of everyone on the PokéStats staff, but whether you agree or not, Christian has done some very solid statistical analysis and given good thought to his conclusions. I agree with his finding that ADP does not affect metagame diversity to a greater degree than other decks in previous formats (think Buzzwole-GX or Yveltal-EX/Garbodor), but “gatekeeping” or affecting the meta has never been my problem with ADP; I dislike ADP because I feel it significantly decreases the skill cap of any format it exists in. Regardless, the analysis here is worth reading and is useful for metagame analysis beyond simply the ADP debate. For those of you who don’t know Christian, I think he is one of the most underrated newer players in North America and he has a great mind for the game; I’m excited to work with him on more PokéStats content in the near future! (He’s been doing a great job keeping our OnToPP rankings running!) -Tate
Hey guys! My name is Christian Chase, and I have been playing competitive Pokémon TCG for about two years now, finishing the abbreviated 2019-20 season with 554 CP. I have been a part of the PokéStats team for about six months now; as a math major and statistics minor at the University of Florida, I'm very interested in the statistical and data-oriented side of the game we all love, and since I'm not the biggest fan of online play, this is where I've been focusing much of my Pokémon attention recently.
Currently, one of the more controversial topics within the PTCG community is whether or not Arceus & Dialga & Palkia-GX ("ADP") should be banned. I decided to dive a little deeper into whether or not an ADP ban is is warranted. The algorithms I utilized for this are pretty baseline and intended for a wide audience to be able to understand the results.
Overview:
- A statistical analysis of why ADP is not the BDIF
- Is a meta with ADP healthy?
- Is the meta without ADP healthy/healthier?
- A possible solution
- Statistics of the solution
- A look at the current Standard metagame through nine top decks
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