Breaking Best
Who gets the most advantage from breaking? Who would prefer NOT to break?
I’ve put some focus on my break recently. Around here that means thought, analysis and practice time. During my practice I started to wonder if my break was actually a disadvantage for me. Does the data exist to prove one way or the other?
The APA doesn’t lend itself to great analysis here. The problem is the format: winner breaks. The second problem is that APA data is aggregated at the end of the match. That means I can probably figure out how many times I broke, but not really if I won or lost with that break.
BCA on the other hand is MUCH more friendly for this type of analysis. The breaks are alternating and shown in the data. Not only do I know who broke, I know who won, how much they won by and I know the skill level of each player.
The BCA is also much more transparent with the data: I can simply download the data from the entire season and analyze away. (Imagine a montage of me writing code with cool music playing.)
AND… Done.
There are 675 matches in the data as of right now. I treated each match as an event for 2 people and aggregated the data by player. In other words, you see the game from each player’s perspective. In this case, that’s a good approach. Then I divided the matches into “Breaker” and “Not Breaker”. I averaged the points scored, ignoring handicaps points and then subtracted the average “Not Breaker” from the “Breaker” number. The result is “How many extra points does a player get when they break?”
Note: I’m publishing the names of all the players in the league. This data is publicly available on the internet right now, names and all. If you’re in my league and prefer I don’t show your name for some reason, contact me and I’ll redo the graphics with your name removed.
How do I read this?
If the difference between breaking and not breaking is zero, that means it doesn’t matter if you break or not. You score about the same number of points either way. A significant number of players are in that situation. (The green band is +/ 0.5 points. The effect is so small it probably doesn’t matter.)
There are also players on the extreme end of the skill spectrum that benefit greatly from the break (+1.5) as well as players who seem to perform better without the break (-1.5).
I think it’s interesting that there is a group of medium skill players (400-500) that don’t seem to benefit from the break. Also, the people that seem to benefit most from the break are lower skill. I’d love to hear a theory.
Could you use this for strategy? Maybe. If you have a player that does significantly better with the break and player that does better when NOT breaking and your league allows substitutions…
Now that I have code to automatically download the league, I think there are lots of different analyses to do. The next one is probably handicap-adjusted MVP. Have a suggestion? Put it in the comments.