Uber Wars Points System

Games analyzed: I analyzed season-long results for all games available in the archives
on the UW website, plus the just-completed football season.
General approach: I looked at each UW league (e.g., for Baseball 2009, I looked at H1,
H2, H3…H10 and at R1, R2, R3…R10), not including playoffs and bonuses. My first
move was to calculate the average number of points in the standings that would move a
team up or down one place in the standings (I’ll call this SGP–Standings Gain Points). I
then averaged these numbers across all of the “like” games (i.e., across all H2H games in
Football, Baseball, Basketball, and Hockey, and across all Roto games in Baseball,
Basketball, and Hockey). There were a couple of H2H leagues early on where I had to
multiply the numbers by two because we used a different scoring system at that time (1
point for a win, 0.5 points for a tie, while we now use 2 for a win, 1 for a tie). Then, I
looked at the bonuses awarded in that game, and determined, on average, how many
places in each league’s standings that bonus represented.
Findings:
Roto:
Hockey: Averaging across Hockey 06, Hockey 07, and Hockey 09 it looks like it takes
about 4.79 points to move up one place in the standings. We have used 12 points for the
bonus, so the bonus represents an average of 2.52 places in the standings.
Basketball: Averaging across Basketball 06, Basketball 07, and Basketball 09 it takes
about 3.28 points to move up one place in the standings. We have used 12 bonus points,
representing 3.66 places in the standings.
Baseball: Averaging across Baseball 07, 08, and 09, it takes about 4.79 points to move up
one place in the standings; the 12-point bonus represents about 2.50 places in the
standings.
Note that baseball and hockey have very similar numbers, while basketball is different.
This is because we use 10 scoring categories in both hockey and baseball, but only 8 in
basketball. If you pro-rate the basketball stats to represent 10 scoring categories, you
actually wind up fairly close in the SGP, with an adjusted value of 4.08.
H2H:
Hockey: Across 06, 07, and 09 the average SGP is 11.2. We used 40 bonus points,
representing 3.58 places in the standings.
Basketball: Across 06, 07, and 09, the average SGP is 10.03 in our current scoring
system. We used 20 bonus points, representing 2.00 places in the standings.
Football: Across 07, 08, and 09, the average SGP is 1.36. We used 4 bonus points,
representing 2.95 places in the standings.
Baseball: Across 07, 08, and 09, the average SGP is 8.95. We used 40-point bonuses in
07 and 08, but only 12 points in 09. For 07 and 08, the bonus represents 4.53 places in
the standings, while 09′s 12-point bonus represents only 1.3 points in the standings. If we
correct 09 to the 40 points it should be, we wind up with the bonus across all three
seasons averaging 4.48 places in the standings.
Summary: While things are fairly consistent on the H2H side, we have some significant
variability on the toto side. Given that most of the games trend toward a 2.5 SGP bonus,
I’d propose the following structure for bonus points:
Roto
Hockey: Bonus = 12 points, about 2.5 places in the standings
Basketball: Bonus = 8 points, again roughly 2.5 places in the standings
Baseball: Bonus = 12 points, again about 2.5 places in the standings
H2H
Football: Bonus = 4 points, slightly more than 2.5 places in the standings
Hockey: Bonus = 25 points, roughly 2.5 places in the standings
Basketball: Bonus = 25 points, roughly 2.5 places in the standings
Baseball: Bonus = 25 points, again roughly 2.5 places in the standings