Champions Wildcard Diamonds Semifinal Preview
One of these days I’m going to get to restructuring the J-ometry home page a little bit and I’ll have a more coherent place to put links to summaries of subsets of seasons and play styles. But for now you’re only going to get it here: a summary of just the Diamond group for this Champions Wildcard.
Semifinal 1: Dave Rapp vs Emily Sands vs Yoshie Hill
The first semifinal includes the top two attempters by value still in the competition against each other in Emily and Dave. Emily attempted quite a bit more than anyone else in the quarterfinals, and getting up the hill towards $40k is very difficult as it requires a lot of bottom-of-the-board play. She sits in the median groups among the semifinalists for both forms of conversion: getting in the buzzer and getting responses correct. Dave scored nearly as well as her in the buzzing game through higher accuracy, but he didn’t get in on the buzzer as well. Yoshie is in the lower group on both forms of conversion and didn’t work from a strong attempt base in her quarterfinal, but it was one of the Diamond games with lower attempts in general and might have been a product of the board.
Semifinal 2: T.J. Tallie vs Leah Wiegand vs Aaron Craig
T.J. has the strongest conversion factor of any of the semifinalists, so when he has a good category he is very dangerous. Aaron’s attempt statistics are higher, and his lower buzz conversion should be considered in the context of playing against Hari in his quarterfinal. Leah comes in with lower attempts but median conversion, and her attempt context was the lowest-attempt quarterfinal. This one is going to rely heavily on what the board looks like, as a board that favors T.J. is going to turn difficult for the others quickly, while one that doesn’t will more likely favor Aaron. One of more median difficulty may boost Leah more than the others, too.
Semifinal 3: Dave Pai vs Jilana Cotter vs Brian Adams
Jilana sits in the semifinalist center in both graphs above and will likely attempt reliably and convert well in both buzzing and accuracy. Dave’s strength was in accuracy, an interesting feature when attempting much more than his opponents in a low-attempt game. He may need to attempt more to keep up with Jilana, but his accuracy may suffer. Brian already had accuracy issues in his quarterfinal and didn’t work well with the buzzer, either. He’ll need to significantly change his playstyle to catch up in the buzzing game in this semifinal - but being strong in other aspects can make up for it, as his correct FJ in the quarterfinal showed.