How hard is it to win a Continental Cup?

[AJW 2,319]

Taking a look at @Kisslinger’s most recent player King Kisslinger, he played 5 seasons for Warsaw to start his career with 12 total playoff games played. In his sixth season he got traded to Vancouver and won a cup, then got traded again to Seattle the following season and won another cup!! Mic dropped his retirement after that I love it lol. 

 

My question is, is winning a Continental Cup actually hard to do or is just pure luck and/or timing? I know some members go 10-20+ seasons without any luck, while some members can win a cup with each player. I’m on my third player now with my only cup coming in S83, I’ve been traded to good teams but obviously haven’t had the same success story of Kisslinger. What’s a man gotta do???

 

Btw @Kisslinger congrats on the back to back cups man and best of luck with your new player!

[Berocka 2,271]

1/16

[Beketov 9,242]

A bit of timing and a lot of good luck really. I’ve had only 1 player get 2 and several players get none including a 20 season run without even making the finals. There’s been good teams in there obviously but especially with 16 teams now just being on a “good team” isn’t really enough, you need that luck of the draw element as well.

 

And that doesn’t even account for whatever voodoo curse @Gustav only just exorcised.

[Gaikoku-hito 2,284]

Luck as the GM can do everything correctly and you still might be eliminated early from the play-offs. See Victory Cup curse as it has been a thing since Hybrid and ask Spartan as he has been to way too many Finals just to lose or been traded away mid-season only for the team to get hot and win!!

 

But hey, Meta was really as Vancouver won it three times in a row!! So maybe a GM just hasn`t found the new meta yet!!

 

But I will say being on the right team at the right time plays a huge role but in the end Luck is everything!!

[Smarch 3,230]

You just have to ride the coattails of much better members than yourself to get cups, that's what I do. 

[Daniel Janser 2,287]

4 hours ago, Berocka said:

1/16

Actually it is 1/2...

Assuming an eight season career you have 8 times a 1/16 chance, which means one has a fiffy-fiffy chance of winning one cup in a full career...

 

Alas my bastard brother had 2/5 so what do I know?

[Greg_Di 1,039]

I think it's all luck, you can be on the best team on paper but still end up not winning anything. I have been lucky enough to win 4 cups so far. 2 with Greg Eagles and 2 with Henry Eagles but didn't win any with Tom Eagles and haven't even made the playoffs yet with current guy.

[Banackock 8,381]

Not that hard

[Banackock 8,381]

Lots of people saying luck but Seattle has made the finals 29% of my time as their GM in 48 seasons

Those who need luck, lack skill. 
 

[Gustav 6,585]

1 hour ago, Daniel Janser said:

Actually it is 1/2...

Assuming an eight season career you have 8 times a 1/16 chance, which means one has a fiffy-fiffy chance of winning one cup in a full career...

 

Alas my bastard brother had 2/5 so what do I know?

It’s more like a 40% chance; the chance of NOT winning a Cup is 15/16. Raise that to the power of 8 and you end up with about 0.6 (i.e. a 60% chance of never winning across a full career). 
 

That said, competitive teams usually have more players on them and someone at high TPE likely isn’t going to play for a rebuilder anyway (so you’re more likely to play for a team with a better chance and especially more so when you’re highly active). So realistically it’s above 40% if you account for more than just randomness. 
 

5 hours ago, Beketov said:

A bit of timing and a lot of good luck really. I’ve had only 1 player get 2 and several players get none including a 20 season run without even making the finals. There’s been good teams in there obviously but especially with 16 teams now just being on a “good team” isn’t really enough, you need that luck of the draw element as well.

 

And that doesn’t even account for whatever voodoo curse @Gustav only just exorcised.

 

Which makes this really stupid. Raising my 60% chance of never winning to the power of 3 gets me about a 21% chance that I never would have won, which actually becomes more like an 18% chance when I factor in Vandelay’s ninth season and Lazlo’s first couple. 
 

And that’s of course not accounting for the competitive effects I mention above, so it’s probably lower than that. At the very least, this is the last time I’ll have to run this analysis on myself and I’m happy about that. 

[Nykonax 1,618]

6 hours ago, Gaikoku-hito said:

But hey, Meta was really as Vancouver won it three times in a row!! So maybe a GM just hasn`t found the new meta yet!!

60 di (unironically)

 

 

[Daniel Janser 2,287]

41 minutes ago, Gustav said:

It’s more like a 40% chance; the chance of NOT winning a Cup is 15/16. Raise that to the power of 8 and you end up with about 0.6 (i.e. a 60% chance of never winning across a full career). 
 

That said, competitive teams usually have more players on them and someone at high TPE likely isn’t going to play for a rebuilder anyway (so you’re more likely to play for a team with a better chance and especially more so when you’re highly active). So realistically it’s above 40% if you account for more than just randomness. 

I admit I am quite ignorant to the topics of statistics. 

 

The question asked was 'What is the chance of winning' and not 'What is the chance of NOT winning'. I am sure you are more adept at that and I trust your figures more than my very simplistic approach. But I feel there is a difference in the evaluation of an Event happening or an event not happening. 

[Gustav 6,585]

3 minutes ago, Daniel Janser said:

I admit I am quite ignorant to the topics of statistics. 

 

The question asked was 'What is the chance of winning' and not 'What is the chance of NOT winning'. I am sure you are more adept at that and I trust your figures more than my very simplistic approach. But I feel there is a difference in the evaluation of an Event happening or an event not happening. 

So the reason why it’s better to look at it as “not happening” is that if you were to just add up the 1/16 chance every season, you’d come to the conclusion that there’s a 100% chance of winning a Cup at some point in your first two careers. Which we know isn’t true. I like looking at it as not happening because chances just converge to zero over time rather than doing something weird like hitting and eventually exceeding 100. 
 

It’s interesting because if you take the chance that it happens (1/16) and add it all up, you’d expect one championship every other career on average if you’re OK with assuming complete team randomness. Which is sensible to think of as 50% chance per career. 
 

The difference lies in the fact that a chance over a given career doesn’t add up. As we know already, the analysis needs to account for the possibility that winning could just never happen, which simply adding probabilities doesn’t do. There’s actually about a 65% chance that you’d win at least once over two careers by my method—hopefully that seems more sensible than 100%. 
 

So we have two statements that are true based on both of these things: 

-With complete randomness between teams, an average player who plays 8 seasons per career will win a Cup about once every other career.

-The chance that someone will win a Cup in a given 8-season career is about 40%. 
 

Also think about repeat winners—the other 10% per season is being taken up by people who have already won and thus are taking up Cup wins from the larger-than-50% who haven’t won yet. Numbers can be really confusing sometimes in ways that don’t seem to make sense, but the really cool thing is that when it doesn’t make sense, there’s usually a very interesting reason why. 

[Triller 1,742]

I managed to win cups with teams that had never won before!  Founders in San Diego and Continental in London.  That felt extra nice.

[TenIQ 32]

Its at least as hard as winning the VHL Playoffs

[Nykonax 1,618]

49 minutes ago, Daniel Janser said:

I admit I am quite ignorant to the topics of statistics. 

 

The question asked was 'What is the chance of winning' and not 'What is the chance of NOT winning'. I am sure you are more adept at that and I trust your figures more than my very simplistic approach. But I feel there is a difference in the evaluation of an Event happening or an event not happening. 

hello resident math major here

 

theres a rule in probability that the probability of all possible events has to add up to 1.

 

So for example a 4-sided die:

 

P(roll a 1) + P(roll 2) + P( roll3) + P(roll 4) = 1

 

This can be rearranged so that P(4) = 1 - P(1) - P(2) - P(3)

 

In real words, the probability of rolling a 4 is also the probability of not rolling a 1 or 2 or 3. This is called the complement rule.

 

So generally P(event) = 1 - P(event doesn't happen) 

 

So in the case of continental cups, if we want to calculate the probability of winning at least 1 cup we can:

 

Calculate the probability of winning 1 cup + probability of winning 2 cups + probability of winning 3 cups + ... + probability of winning 8 cups

 

Or we can use the above rule and calculate P(At least 1 cup) = 1 - P(no cups)

 

The probability of winning no cups is much easier to calculate than the chance of winning exactly 2/3/4/n cups in a career.

 

So it's about 40% give or take some assumptions

 

 

[Spade18 1,312]

I've been here since season 57 and through all of my players I've only won 1, and it was while I was inactive.

So it's pretty hard.

[Garsh 1,208]

6 hours ago, Gustav said:

So the reason why it’s better to look at it as “not happening” is that if you were to just add up the 1/16 chance every season, you’d come to the conclusion that there’s a 100% chance of winning a Cup at some point in your first two careers. 

 

i think you need to work on your conclusion skills, I don't know anyone who would come to that conclusion

[Beketov 9,242]

14 hours ago, Garsh said:

 

i think you need to work on your conclusion skills, I don't know anyone who would come to that conclusion

You would be surprised how many people don’t understand odds. I used to sell scratch tickets and people legit had the belief that if there was a 1/4 chance of winning they would be guaranteed a winner if they bought 4. People do not understand that each one has the same 1/4 chance.

[Garsh 1,208]

2 minutes ago, Beketov said:

You would be surprised how many people don’t understand odds. I used to sell scratch tickets and people legit had the belief that if there was a 1/4 chance of winning they would be guaranteed a winner if they bought 4. People do not understand that each one has the same 1/4 chance.

something something the Canadian education system

[Victor 11,181]

On 3/7/2025 at 2:34 PM, Banackock said:

Lots of people saying luck but Seattle has made the finals 29% of my time as their GM in 48 seasons

Those who need luck, lack skill. 
 

That proves it's luck though...