manchesterpaul Posted April 10, 2011 Report Share Posted April 10, 2011 (edited) Note to Moderators. Whilst i personally avidly read as many sections of the forum as time allows, it is clear that a lot of members tend to only use the league section specific to their team. Therefore, i'm posting this thread in each of the three sections for the leagues that the tables cover. I trust and hope that's ok. There is no advertising or any personal gain from the table pages being viewed, it's just a service for supporters. I've set up a page on my speedway site for what i call MiniMax league tables. 'MiniMax' indicates that you can see the crucial information within your eyeline at an instant glance. Additionally, more detailed information/stats follow the first couple of columns of which you can peruse at leisure. As with most sports tables nowadays - in view of the numerous categories needing to be included - it's more instantly informative to have matches ridden and points gained as the first two columns. After all, they are the two key fields that matter with the others just being additional information. If you picture the Premier table as the season progresses you'd need to switch your eyeballs to a widescreen mode to make for easy and instant comprehension. This alteration i make to the traditional sports table means that the vital information is available at a glance. There is detailed explanation on the page itself as to the presentation of the various stats. But to touch on two categories, firstly the percentage of available points acheived. It's a telling stat in view of the way speedway awards league points nowadays. For example if a team wins all of it's home matches by 7 points or more it will have a 100% record. If a team wins all the matches by only 1-6 points it would actually have a true average of 67%. Therefore, displaying the percentage figure gives a far more accurate output than both teams being listed at 18 wins, 0 draws and 0 losses which is what a lot of tables show. When comparing teams records it also saves one from having to engage in mental arithmetic adding up the varying points for margins of victory. A simple glance at the percentage shows which team is performing better. Secondly, rather than display the total race points earned i show the average per meeting AND rounded up to whole figures, such as home 55-38 and away 46-45. That's far easier to grasp than the usually published four figure numbers which is made worse by the wide variance of matches ridden by teams. All of which makes the traditonal table layout not much use until the final table of the season. Even then, it is clearly preferable and comprehendable to have it in the form of a match average that one can make more sense of. I strongly proposed this in various speedway forums and suggested it to websites and publications years ago. Also added a nice little coloured graphic at the top of the page that i wish someone like Sky would use when referring to how league points are earned during their broadcasts lol. Minimax Tables Edited July 11, 2011 by manchesterpaul Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
heathen79 Posted April 11, 2011 Report Share Posted April 11, 2011 The ideas of a percentage column, average race points abd placing the points scored column second are all absolutely brilliant! Simple but so very effective. My hat's off to you! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
manchesterpaul Posted April 11, 2011 Author Report Share Posted April 11, 2011 (edited) The ideas of a percentage column, average race points abd placing the points scored column second are all absolutely brilliant! Simple but so very effective. My hat's off to you! Many thanks heathen79. If you know of anyone who might like the page by all means pass on the link. As i can't really bump the topic myself and it will very quickly disappear out of sight on each of the Elite, Premier and National league forums. Therefore anyone who hasn't been around this couple of days will be totally unaware of it. Edited April 11, 2011 by manchesterpaul Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
heathen79 Posted April 13, 2011 Report Share Posted April 13, 2011 (edited) I notice this has been made a sticky topic now, which will help it get noticed. I know you mentioned that you have pushed the idea before, but I really think that the likes of Speedway Star readers or BSPA website visitors would very much appreciate this kind of table. The improvements are simple, logical but extremely effective and I think you should lobby further for your idea to be taken up on a wider scale. Edit: I have given your site a mention on the Cradley Speedway forum (link in my signature). Edited April 13, 2011 by heathen79 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
manchesterpaul Posted April 13, 2011 Author Report Share Posted April 13, 2011 I wish i knew who to thank for making the tables a 'sticky'. I'll see if it's possible to mass PM the mods a 'much appreciated' note. I did indeed contact the Speedway Star - turns out it was nearer four years ago. Whilst they took on board my request for an amendment to their SGP sheets they said that changing the software for their league tables would be more difficult. They said they would look into it and contact the person who wrote their software. I was a little surprised because whether your league tables, and stats of any kind, are database or spreadsheet based it only takes a couple of minutes to reposition the column orders (and transfer associated formula) be it for working or printing/publication purposes. There would be no redesigning costs that i could see. The most laborious and hardest part of constructing a software program is in the initial designing of it. It should be a relatively easy and speedy task to change the display order of the columns. I just presumed that they decided they wanted to keep the traditional look and myself being one who holds the Speedway Star and it's layout (league tables aside) as a superb product i left it at that. All i can suggest is that if anyone really prefers the layout of the tables i designed then pop the Star a note showing them the tables and asking them to look into the idea once more. Got to admit i do wish they had at least adopted the matches raced and points gained as the first two columns. Ok AND the race points to be shown as a match average too lol. If one is to be able to make instant sense of the two most important values in a table one would need to possess panoramic vision. As it stands, one loses track trying to align the points with matches. Your eyes have to flit from one side of the page to the other when comparing each team. They are the two features that everyone seeks out when glancing at a league table. All the other info is appreciated and looked at from time to time, but you need to be able to scan up and down in one narrow sweep in order to speedily comprehend the important stuff. Thanks for mentioning the page to others. Don't forget the percentage column will become far more useful and meaningful as the season progresses. Also, i will likely add the 'projected points' feature later on in the year, or slightly sooner if matches ridden and/or home away imbalances becomes too silly. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
manchesterpaul Posted July 2, 2011 Author Report Share Posted July 2, 2011 (edited) From the 1st July i've now added next to each of the main tables (which are still sorted by the traditional points) a mini Projected Points table. Remember this isn't a predictive system based on personal judgements. It is how they actually stand as and when you view it. It extrapolates all the results so far and presents them on to an even number of matches ridden. It's an 'as now' view and not predicting the end of season points. One quick example comparing systems and for illustrative purposes i've made the records identical and simplistic save for the imbalance of matches (away ones in this case) which is where the projected points comes into it's own. Team A and Team B finish the season with identical records. -----------------P----W3---W2--D1--L0-----W4--W3--D2----L1----L0-----Pts Team A-----38----19-----0-----0-----0------0------0-----0-----19-----0------76 Team B-----38----19----0-----0-----0-------0------0-----0-----19-----0------76 Yet a snapshot taken during the season could have for example. -----------------P---W3--W2--D1--L0-----W4--W3--D2----L1----L0-----Pts------+/- -----PP Team A-----18----6-----0-----0-----0------0------0-----0-----12-----0------30......+12------76 Team B------8-----6-----0-----0-----0------0------0-----0-------2-----0-----20.......+2-------76 The traditional table has A at 30pts and B at 20pts The plus/minus system has A at +12 and B at +2 The projected points has A at 76 and B at 76. The traditional table can't show the equality of the teams at the time because of the imbalance in the number of matches ridden. One would have to mentally divide the matches ridden and points gained so far in both the home and away fields for all of the teams. The projected points just needs one simple glance. The plus/minus system wrongly shows team A to be 6 times a better team than B. Because the +/- system does not extrapolate the home and away matches into a season total of an 'even' number of matches. It will quite often tell you nothing useful at all and be misleading. The projected points system extrapolates the actual results so far and applies them to an even yardstick of eventual matches to be ridden. It the only system that shows the true even performance levels of the teams. Edited July 2, 2011 by manchesterpaul Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
manchesterpaul Posted March 12, 2012 Author Report Share Posted March 12, 2012 The page has now been updated for the 2012 season including the new additional league tables. http://speedway.manchesterpaul.net/leagues.html The 2011 season tables are now archived at http://speedway.manchesterpaul.net/2011_leagues.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fourentee Posted July 24, 2012 Report Share Posted July 24, 2012 This is an excellent all-round effort and I commend it. A tiny, tiny observation is that the projected points calculation is made on each team's form (obviously) but without reference to forthcoming fixtures. Thus Mildenhall and Dudley, both showing excellent form but yet to meet each other, have projected end of season point totals of 49 and 45 respectively which is not possible. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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