Results[]
Saturday, April 25, 2020
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | Division 6 |
|---|---|
| Match # | 108 |
| Match Date | Saturday, April 25, 2020 |
| Oracle Expectations |
Portal 2 - 54.00% 46 for - 4 against |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Portal 2 - 23.57% |
| User Votes |
Portal 2 - 4765 Red Dead Redemption 2 - 4156 |
| Anonymous Votes |
Portal 2 - 3925 Red Dead Redemption 2 - 3401 |
This is the match that knocked me out of the guru, and I truly couldn't care less. A big weakness I've always had is having way too much faith in new stuff in contests, and I figured Red Dead Redemption 2 would have a bunch of crazy strength behind it. Whoops! The final score was very close and respectable, but Portal 2 easily won the match to validate all of the beliefs about its true strength being hidden all these years. Props to those who saw this all coming.
There were a few spots in this match where RDR2 was able to make some prolonged stalls, but it never made a push to do much in the way of actually winning this match. With its loss, this meant Rockstar's exit from this contest and the exit of casualbait titles altogether. One day I'll remember to stop having any faith in any of them, regardless of how popular they are off-site.
This set up a very interesting match between Portal 2 and Persona 5 for the division title, and with a lack of reliable data on either it had the potential to be a very unpredictable match.
Ctes's Analysis[]
In what was a pretty good division half, Portal 2 managed to come out on top. Every match had the guru favorite winning, but you could make a decent argument for every game that won round 1 getting to the division finals. Portal was favored by only 50% of people, which is the most, but not that great in a chalky cookie cutter bracket like this one.
Portal 2 is one of the leftover games of the previous decade. It was released in 2011 of course, but I mean that if you tried to group games together by era, Portal 2 belongs with its predecessor in the previous decade. Portal not being very relevant any longer is one of the main reasons why as many people hesitated to pick it here. There was fine reason to think it was not at peak strength any longer. The Portal games’ performances in 2015 looked weaker than how the first one had performed previously and GLaDOS looked a good bit weaker in 2018 compared to 2013.
Then there’s Red Dead Redemption 2, the upset most people went with today and clearly also the best one. The game released to universal appeal in 2018 and the franchise is probably at all time peak. If you look at the 2015 x-stats, the Portal games look no better than Red Dead Redemption. Yes, both Portal games were clouded by rallies from Melee and Undertale, but even so. It was reasonable enough to expect Portal to continue to decline and RDR2 to be stronger than the first one. You only needed one of the things to be a little bit true for the upset to look likely. In fact, I’m sure more people would have picked RDR2 if the match had been more talked about. Most people probably looked at the match and thought it looked like something Portal would win on GameFAQs and didn’t think more about it.
The match had a bit of early excitement. Portal 2 had the lead from the start but struggled to run away with it initially. People expected Portal 2 to have the bracket votes and it’s a big deal on board 8. On top of that, Rockstar games tend to not do so well with the board vote. The first Red Dead Redemption and GTAV had both made some decent comeback attempts later in the day, so maybe if RDR2 could keep it close early on, it stood a chance. It turned out Portal actually struggled the most initially and as end of the power hour drew near, it would take off and set the match in stone. I’m guessing Red Dead Redemption actually had the most bracket votes, it’s likely only board 8 Portal 2 was the favorite on and even here it wasn’t by that much.
Turns out Portal 2 didn’t really decline or if it did, the Game of the Decade title kept it up again, perhaps even stronger than in 2015. It’s been mentioned in Game of the Decade debates in a lot of places and perhaps that helped it out today. I still believe Red Dead Redemption 2 is stronger than the first game, it makes sense for it to be. The adjusted x-stats kept it below, but I disagree with some of the decisions regarding division 4. I think Xenoblade should have been adjusted down a bit and Persona 4’s rallies and bandwagon effect certainly wasn’t adjusted for as much as I believe it should. I hope and expect to see Red Dead Redemption 2 back again.
Safer777's Analysis[]
So this match everyone predicted it would be really close. And it was close but not as much as people expected. Still who could have expected Portal 2 of all games to reach a division finals in this site? RDR series is decent here it seems after we saw how both games performed. Both RDR games had close losses too! However pretty sure in every other site RDR 2 beats Portal 2. At least I think so.
So for the match. Well the match was close but Portal 2 was never in danger. So what does that say for Portal 2? At least for me it says that we still like this game even though it is 9 years old by now and the Portal series is dead. Yeah imagine you are a company having Portal and Half Life series and doing nothing with them. So yeah a good match even though nothing exciting happened. Funny thing is that in the previous games contest 5 years ago Portal 2 lost in the very first match even though it was the favorite to win too. So yeah. So is the game stronger now? No. I mean why it should be when we had nothing Portal related since then? I guess it was just lucky with the matches.
Also I always thought this game was a PC game and then got ported to consoles, but no, it got released in PC and all consoles at the same time. Same with Portal 1 actually! I don't know why, but I always count Portal as a PC series. I guess since Valve makes games for PC mainly I thought that too. So I can't even say a PC series reached the division finals. Still nice match. I mean from losing to Round 1 in the previous contest to reaching the division finals in the next contest without having anything new and no rally is truly glorious. And it even has a shot to win the division too! Of course the prediction Percentage was low since well I guess casuals saw RDR 2 and went with that.
Tsunami's Analysis[]
If you ever wonder why the leaderboard always seems to be dominated by Gurus, here's why. Portal 2 wasn't the overwhelming groupthink favorite that a lot of games were (fully half the matches in R3 had the favorite holding over 90% of Guru Brackets), but it was still the clear favorite, with 50% on the dot. Remember, that's as the culmination of an eightpack; 50% is still a pretty good figure. With the casuals, on the other hand, this was an upset. Just 23.57% of brackets got this right, coming off a 50.55% R2 prediction percentage, and the fact that the former figure is less than half the latter is generally the most telling sign that it's an upset. The next factor is to consider what the opponent's prediction percentage was, to see if the true "favorite" had in fact lost earlier. No dice; RDR2 had a 69.82% prediction percentage in R2 (then again, look at the fourpack it was in). That really doesn't leave much room at all for anything else to have been the favorite. So, score one for the Gurus (but not for me because I had KH3 in my bracket and RDR2 in the Oracle. Seriously, where is Portal 2 getting all this strength from all of a sudden?)