Desk Number Relevance

[benthorot]

Watching (and participating in) this season of It's Academic, I couldn't help but notice a pattern relating to success and desk position.

In all three games that we taped this season, the team seated at Desk #1 (the one that is on the left on TV, farthest from Mac McGarry) won. I know that Gonzaga got their two wins from Desk #1. Two of the three semifinals were won by the team on the left.

Possible reasons why the left could be an advantage would be going first on the team rounds by setting some sort of a tone or intimidating the other teams. But I would have thought being in one of the other two positions would give you an edge as you get a sense for the types of questions you'll be getting in your rounds.

Please let me make it abundantly clear that I am not saying that the reason that we lost to Richard Montgomery was because they were on the left. The way we got dominated, they probably could have beaten us while standing in the parking lot.

I'm mostly just wondering if anyone else has noticed this, or if my conjecture is just garbage.

Oh, on an unrelated note, a teammate of mine made a pretty nice bracket for this season's It's Academic using Excel. I'd be happy to e-mail it to anyone who wants it. Its fully updated with all the results, and might be a good thing for finalists to display in the hallways of their schools or something just to give passersby a sense of how well you're doing this year as a way to hype up the finals.

[Howard]

Another DC area coach did some research and found that the #3 team seems to get the slowest start in the Grab Bag. His supposition was that since the game moves directly from Packet to Grab Bag, that the #3 team wasn't quite ready to switch over to using the buzzers again.

As far as the #1 desk, I think it's mostly coincidence. There are advantages (and disadvantages) to all the desk positions.

#1 doesn't get to hear the other teams' Team Round questions before they answer theirs. #1 has the most direct view of Mac but is farthest away.

#2 gets to hear #1's team questions and has the best view of the studio monitor.

#3 gets to hear both teams' Team Round questions, is closest to Mac, but has the worst view of him.

[Marcel Duchamp]

I remember once when they were picking the desk positions a team (probably quince orchard) was complaining about how they had a disadvantage at that position, and the It's Academic people said that they had done an analysis of winners over the years and every position had roughly the same number of wins. I don't if that's true or not though.

[MamaFlanagan]

Both of the It's Ac games we played, #3 won. Unfortunately, we were only sitting there once.

[First Chairman]

I remember once when they were picking the desk positions a team (probably quince orchard) was complaining about how they had a disadvantage at that position, and the It's Academic people said that they had done an analysis of winners over the years and every position had roughly the same number of wins. I don't if that's true or not though.

Would be interesting to note how they controlled for a team's talent in that analysis.

[Howard]

I remember once when they were picking the desk positions a team (probably quince orchard) was complaining about how they had a disadvantage at that position, and the It's Academic people said that they had done an analysis of winners over the years and every position had roughly the same number of wins. I don't if that's true or not though.

Would be interesting to note how they controlled for a team's talent in that analysis.

If they actually did this analysis anytime recently, I wouldn't think they'd need that control. In DC alone, there have been over 1700 matches, so the sample size is huge. Desk position is currently done (and has been done as long as I can remember) by random draw. If that's true, then the chances of a distribution such that the strongest team is significantly more likely to get a particular desk position are very, very low.