And the Winner Is...

A little late is better than never right? I was away for six weeks in South East Asia (not that you asked, but I had a great time, so I want to mention it!), which coincided with the end of the first half of the Vancouver Whitecaps MLS season. As a result, I am a little late in getting out the winners and stats from our First Half contest.

In the end, it was close. Hopefully I didn’t make any mistakes…I did double check things to try and be sure. In the final match against Philadelphia, GreyHouseEffect and dfree646 ended up with identical 14-point rounds, to give dfree646 first place, with 199 points. GreyHouseEffect finished second with 197, while perennial favourite Arjon made a strong, late, charge to finish third with 196 points. Rounding out the top five were AmandaC and BlackPanther99 with scores of 186 points each.

Congratulations to dfree646 for winning the first half. Now, can you repeat in the second half? dfree6464 joins a short list of previous winners. You did win the Second Half 2017 contest, so I guess that is back-to-back, but let’s put it all in one season!

Here are the rest of the finishes. Note, if you add up the scores for each match, you will not come out to each person’s “Overall Score”. Remember, we removed each participants worst TWO matches. Do that and the scores will work out.

Of course, this contest would not be complete without providing all the fun statistics to see how everyone did on the various components of each match’s score. So, here we go!

The above table shows all the fun statistics for each participant in each category. I have made it sortable, so you can pick whichever category you want and see how you (and others) stack up. Let me know in the comments where you finished in each category.

I will spend a bit of time highlighting a few of our best in each category. First off, we had 41! people make at least one prediction in the first half of this season. That is up from the second half of the 2017 season, in which 23 people made at least one prediction. The record number of guessers made for a LOT of work for me after each match! That is okay though, as I am excited how many people we have participating all the time. It does mean that I need to find a more efficient way of calculating everything each week!

We had three participants end the first half with an average of 10/11 in the Starting XI component; however, two of the three only made one match guess. Congrats to TrevFresh, who did 10/11 twice! Isabelt did well too, averaging 9.5/10. They only had a few guesses in the first half, but have continued their strong play into the second half. They finished 3rd in the July standings! Looks like a new, regular, contender is in the mix.

When it comes to predicting a perfect lineup, and getting the bonus three points, no surprise that dfree646 led the way with four. CascadiaCrunchFC was next with 3. Then there was a seven-way tie for third at two. Impressive was that 24 participants had at least one perfect lineup prediction.

While dfree646 used the lineup prediction to work their way to the top, Arjon and GreyHouseEffect were more reliant on predicting the Winner and Final Score. Both correctly predicted eight matches, and averaged a top-five (excluding one-timer guessers) “Score” rating of 0.82. Above the two were AdampP17, who averaged 0.88 points per match, followed by AdamHutchinson31 and Caps72, who both averaged 0.83.

The final category I included was “Bonus” points. This was not the bonus from our monthly contest, but rather the number of bonus lineup points received. Remember, you receive one bonus point for 10/11 and three bonus points for 11/11. No surprise, dfree646 was at the top with 15. That is an average of almost one per match! Right behind them was CascadiaCrunchFC at 13, and GreyHouseEffect with BlackPanther99 at 10. Several potential surprises, as they did not finish at the top of the standings, tied at nine points: AdamP17, Arjon, Island Life, and IrfanD.

Again, congrats to our winner dfree646. THANK YOU to each of you for participating. I hope you enjoyed it and have continued into the second half! Let me know how you did in the contest, and maybe what you learned to apply in the second half.