Results[]
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Round | Patriot Division Semi Final |
|---|---|
| Match # | 42 |
| Match Date | Monday, October 23rd, 2006 |
| Vote difference | 1,425 |
| Oracle Expectations |
Yoshi - 49.10% 50 for - 64 against |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Yoshi - 31.20% (13,306 brackets) |
Yoshi/Dante being close would have been far more dramatic had we not seen Jill/Peach give us a template of trends a few days prior. The difference this time around is that Yoshi had nothing going for him going into this match. He'd never done better than Dante in the stats, and the two looked like they were in opposite directions after their first round matches. Dante beat Ryu H as expected, while Yoshi struggled with Riku. Even the people who picked Yoshi to win this match acknowledged that Dante looked like he would win easily; we just stuck with Yoshi out of faith more than anything.
In fact, here's part of my analysis crew writeup for the match, complete with the one stat (albeit a big stretch) that gave Yoshi a chance:
Yoshi scored 43.67% against Bowser in an SFF match in 2003. Dante 2005 supposedly would score 44.79% on Bowser 2005.
If Yoshi was noticeably SFFd in 2003, then he has a good chance of beating Dante. The problem is that the entire Dream Division from 2005 has tanked this contest, so Bowser is a bad measuring stick. Dante will likely win this barring some NintendoFAQs magic, but I'm picking Yoshi anyway just to keep with what I have in the bracket.
By the way, anyone using Riku as a basis for why Yoshi may do bad here needs some common sense. Have you people SEEN what KH2 has done over the past two contests?
Odd as it was to have a lot of faith in Yoshi due to him being behind SFF in all the stats, Yoshi semi-proved early in the match that he's been underrated for years. He came out and smoked Dante early, en route to a lead of 600 in under an hour. But then the Nintendo Power Hour wore off, and Yoshi's lead increase stalled. Dante then began a painstakingly slow process to get the votes back, and I feel during the night is when Dante lost the match. It was reasonable to assume that Yoshi would have strong morning and after-school votes, yet Dante spent the entire night struggling to chip away at 600 votes. By the time Dante was able to break through and tie, the morning vote was already here.
Yoshi used the next few hours to build another lead for himself; this time he stalled at 450 or so, but that's only because the Nintendo children all went to school. Dante then went on another struggled comeback train, and yet again was only able to tie the match once Yoshi's next expected surge came. Sure enough, Dante was able to build a lead of 43 before finally going into the tank. The after-school vote completely buried him. Yoshi would eventually lead by 1700 votes before Dante made another push, but by then the match was too late.
Thanks to Peach, very few people watching this match believed that Dante had a chance once he made it clear that he would struggle just to break even. This wasn't a Jill Valentine situation in which Dante put the match into question by going berserk during Yoshi's off time. He just... kind of tanked. Dante had no reason to lose this considering what the two characters had going for them coming into the match, but some good old NintendoFAQs magic did him in. Depending on how seriously you took the Jill/Peach trends, Dante was done sooner than later.
RPGuy's theory like Vince Young comes through in the clutch once again!
Match Trends[]
