Jan 2-6, 2023: Conversion Terms
Highlights of this week's champions, and some terminology and data updates
Terminology Notes
This week I pushed changes to the site (including the glossary) that codify the following terms, which I will be using throughout the post.
Buz%: The percentage of attempts that become buzzes.
Accuracy (Acc%): The percentage of buzzes that are correct responses.
Conversion (Conv%): The percentage of attempts that become correct responses (the product of Buz% and Acc%).
All three have analogs in the Value way of viewing the game:
BuzValue% (BuzV%): The percentage of attempted value that becomes buzz value.
AccValue% (AccV%): The percentage of buzz value that becomes score on buzzing (keep in mind that incorrect responses accrue negative score).
ConvValue% (ConvV%): The percentage of attempted value that becomes score on buzzing (same product, same caveat).
The combination of attempts and conversion is my key view into the buzzing game, as that combination contains all three components of building money - attempting, getting in (whether through timing or solo), and being correct.
Champion Highlights
Ray Lalonde
This week we saw Ray Lalonde’s exit on Tuesday after thirteen wins. Something I found particularly interesting in Ray’s run is that he didn’t get a lot of runaway games - just four out of his thirteen wins - and only two additional games at a crush level, which is when a leader has at least 150% of second place’s score and can wager such that they’ll win unless they miss Final and second place is correct (and wagers enough). The long-run statistics are that runaway leaders win all their games, crush leaders win about five-sixths, and non-crush leaders win about half the time, so continuing to roll on a streak without hitting those higher scoring ratios all the time means he’s probably very good at Final. Which he is.
Ray remains the second-highest average estimated attempt value in the box score era at $40280/game, slotting in behind Luigi de Guzman and ahead of Cris Pannullo and Amy Schneider. His conversion value rate of 46.6% is sixteenth among the thirty-four 2+ game champions in that time, between Ryan Long and Emma Saltzberg. As I noted on Twitter during his run, over the course of his gameplay, he shifted to attempting less value but being more accurate when getting in.
Lloyd Sy
Lloyd was able to win Tuesday’s game by pulling back ahead of Ray on clue 29 in DJ, neutralizing Ray’s FJ prowess if he himself could get the correct response, which he did. He then went on to win a second game before losing to Patrick Curran on Thursday. In all of his games, he correctly got FJ, including in Wednesday’s game when his two opponents both missed.
Lloyd seemed hampered by buzzer timing. His 47.3 BuzValue% is last among the 2+ game winners in the box score era, and the TimingValue component is only +$438. You can put together a small streak with that (which he did!) through strong Solo performance or good work with Daily Doubles and Final. Lloyd managed the latter in his first two games, but didn’t get his DD correct on Thursday.
Patrick Curran
Patrick won Thursday’s game through better core buzzer game components and getting two of the Daily Doubles and Final correct. On Friday, he put together another winning buzzer game and found all three Daily Doubles, getting two of them correct, and result was a runaway. Despite these strengths, I wouldn’t expect a long streak out of Patrick just yet. He’s had phenomenally good luck in hunting for the Daily Doubles, and a game where they don’t go his way could easily swing against him.
J!ometry Site Work
As noted with terminology, I pushed changes to make these statistic names consistent across the site. Part of that included making the tabular statistics more consistent from page to page as well.
I also ran data quality validation to ensure that data I’ve gotten from the box scores agrees with data from J-archive. Some minor but rather glaring quality issues have been fixed.
Programming Notes
This post is framed around the idea of a weekly update, but I’m not committing to that yet. I won’t even be able to commit to that for next week! J!ometry site updates may be delayed compared to normal starting on Thursday.