Official scoring takes place after the convention and wil be posted here. Each member of the winning team receives a Team plaque and is memorialized on the website. The plaques will be awarded at the BPA Annual Meeting at the following convention.

Odds Calculations

Stuart “the Happy Handicapper” Tucker gives every team member a Baton Rating. Baton Ratings are summed to get a team's Power Rating. Here's his explanation of how he comes up with it all:

What is this "Baton Rating" stuff all about? My old system used seven variables, many of which overlapped—and it was totally dependent upon the breadth of the field. That made the odds fluctuate with each new entry. Few, if any, teammates could ever remember their odds going into the convention. What fun was that? So, I thought, why not give the team a power rating that didn't fluctuate--one that represented its raw potential, regardless of competition? Face it, "the competition" is pretty much the entire world's best players who show up--regardless of whether or not these players are teamed with anybody. It doesn't take a Team Competition Entry to knock Reiff off his Football Strategy pedestal (though if you know of anybody who can, I know many a team which would like to have that person carry a baton for them).

With this in mind, I came up with a system of rating each player's value based on the assumption that each player will enter the team event in which they have the best world standing. I narrowed down the parameters slightly--cutting out some of the duplication of significance. And I got rid of perhaps the least significant variable from the earlier system. The end result is that a Baton Rating is composed of a player's success in his best event plus his overall success at WBC plus what I call "team savvy."

Success in an event is judged, most appropriately by Wood earned and recent world standing (which is either recent Laurels earned or AREA Rating). You get Baton Rating points for Wood (gauged according to the recent size of that event--in terms of Team Tournament points earnable). You get Baton Rating points for being ranked in the top 15 in the event. Overall success at WBC is judged by the number of opponents defeated in earning all of your Wood.

Finally, "team savvy" is represented by the number of times your team has scored in the top 25 over the lifetime of WBC and Avaloncon team competitions. Yes, this means an otherwise ratingless teammate contributes to a team's score by being smart enough to be on winning teams of the past. Call it a lucky charm factor. Or team spirit. Whatever. It just seems to me that experience at joining teams that consistently score well shows some sort of "edge" over other unranked players in the field. Or put the other way around, if you are the weak link on your team, your teammates must have a good reason for carrying you as dead weight. That's worth something. Who am I to judge those teammates as illogical? They play with the player and know his potential.

Hence, each player now has a Baton Rating in my database and the team is the sum of those ratings. Let's look at a recent example of the Manly Men team. In 2004, Bruce Reiff had a Baton Rating of 107, the best in the world--not just because he has won so much Wood at WBC, but because he utterly dominates FBS, his best team event. Ken Gutermuth is a 69, which was quite respectable, but showed that Ken's ability to deliver Wood is somewhat more suspect. He has scored Wood in more events than Reiff, but to date has no three-peat. Dave Metzger added a 62, with his strength being that he tends to dominate smaller events, a bit more consistently than Gutermuth. Steve Likevich contributed an underrated 36. His Wood to date vastly underestimates his Wood potential in the classic wargame tournaments. In all, these four had a team power rating of 274. This system places a heavier emphasis on recent performance in players' top-rated events.

This is not to say that all Wood is the same. If a player drops out of the top rankings of the event, older Wood will not make up for the fact that an opposing recent WBC champion is a current top-rated player. And a wide number of players have Wood from events that no longer exist, with no Wood for the current tournaments. This has been appropriately downgraded in the scoring system, without losing the fact that such players have already shown a certain winning potential.

Fine Print:
1) As usual, nobody should take any of this seriously enough to actually try to find a bookie for their bet.
2) Please refrain from using batons on the body of your happy handicapper, virtual or otherwise.
3) Lying to A.R.E.A. will only lengthen your nose, not your Baton Rating.