ELO and the VHL

[Enorama 1,980]

For those who are unfamiliar, ELO is essentially a way of measuring how good something is, in this case how difficult a VHL team is to beat. Each time two teams play one another, a formula is used to estimate the chances each of the two teams has of winning the game. The more likely a team is to win the game, the less ELO they stand to gain from winning it, but the more ELO they stand to lose from it. The reverse is also true, where the underdog team loses less if they lose and more if they win. 

 

ELO is always a zero sum game. However much one team has subtracted from their ELO, the winning team has the exact same amount added to their ELO. Also, there's a constant called a "K-value" used in the ELO calculation formulae, the higher the K, the more variance you see. By default, I chose a K of 32. I might look at higher or lower Ks in the future though.

 

For example, here's the VHL's ELO across S65:

 

There's a couple things you can gleam from this at first glance:

1. Riga's first round loss suddenly doesn't look so jarring, as they were in a tailspin for the latter bit of the year

2. Moscow was worse than we ever thought (they started at 1000 ELO like everyone else and ended around 600).

 

I'll keep looking at VHL's past and present ELO in future weeks.

 

246 words.

[Phil 5,019]

ELO = Electric Light Orchestra; obviously, Mr. Blue Sky