The rain had not let up for three days, and Holmes had not left the sitting room for two of them. When I came down on the Monday I found him at the window with his violin under his chin, not playing it, staring at the street as though the final of a World Championship might be decided by watching the cabs go by.
“Saturday,” he said, without turning. “The fourteenth of November. Gen.G against Bilibili Gaming, best of five. You will want to know who wins, Watson, and you will be disappointed, because I do not intend to tell you.”
“You have the model’s verdict. You must have.”
“It is sealed until the picks close,” he said, and at last put the violin down. “The people who run our pick’em keep the machine’s choice hidden while the match is open, so that nobody simply copies it. When the first game begins, its pick appears beside the result for all to see. Until then you will have to make do with the evidence, which is the better half of any case.”
The evidence for Gen.G
He laid two sheets side by side on the table. “Gen.G first. The model rates every professional team in the world, sixty-eight of them, from more than three thousand games this season. Gen.G stand first, at 1815. They went through the Swiss stage without losing a series, swept Lyon three games to none in the quarterfinal and Invictus Gaming three to none in the semifinal. In eleven games at this tournament they have lost exactly one, to Lyon, in the Swiss.”
“Then it is settled.”
“It is nothing of the kind. Look at what they have beaten. Lyon and Invictus were rated ninth and twelfth of the sixteen teams in the Swiss stage. A man who has knocked down two boys in the street has not yet met the prize-fighter. Their jungler, Canyon, has the best kill-and-assist ratio of anyone at the tournament: forty-three kills, sixteen deaths and a hundred and eleven assists in eleven games. Their marksman, Ruler, is third on the same list. Their mid laner, Chovy, is rated 1859. These are the facts of a very good team that has not yet been tested.”
The evidence for Bilibili
“Now the other sheet. Bilibili Gaming are rated 1758, third in the world. They have played fifteen games here and lost four, which is to say they have been tested, and repeatedly. They lost their very first game, to Movistar KOI, as I told you at the time. They lost a series to Top Esports. They came into the last round of the Swiss at two wins and two losses, needing to beat Hanwha Life, and beat them two games to none. Since then they have dropped one game in two best-of-fives, and that against T1.”
“And they have Knight,” I said, for even I had heard the name.
“They have Knight. The model rates him at 1934, the highest of any player still in the tournament. The only player rated above him, Hanwha Life’s Zeka, went home on the last day of the Swiss, beaten by Bilibili. Knight is second only to Canyon at the tournament by that same ratio: seventy-four kills, twenty deaths and a hundred and ten assists in fifteen games. If you want the single contest on which Saturday turns, it is the middle lane: Chovy against Knight, the two best-rated players left.”
The ledger
I asked him, since he would not name a winner, how far the machine had been worth trusting.
He took up a third paper, covered in tallies. “Of the thirty-nine matches it has called since the Swiss stage began, it has called twenty-seven correctly: sixty-nine per cent. All six of its knockout calls have been right. Our pick’em players, forty-seven of them, have made eight hundred and ninety-nine picks on the same matches and got five hundred and six right: fifty-six per cent.”
“So the machine is cleverer than the crowd.”
“The machine is steadier than the crowd, which is not the same thing. In the quarterfinals the crowd was right seven times in ten. In the semifinals it backed T1 against Bilibili by nineteen picks to four, while the model favoured Bilibili, and Bilibili won three games to one. A crowd remembers what a team used to be; a model remembers what it has done lately. Only one of them was right about T1 this year.”
“And the crowd for Saturday?”
“Eleven picks for Gen.G and eight for Bilibili, as I write. A closer division than the crowd showed for either semifinal, which is itself a fact worth noting.” He returned to the window. “You may make your own pick on the pick’em page or with the bot in your Discord server, until the first game begins. I would only say this: when you have weighed the evidence, do not let a sentimental attachment to the team you remember decide it for you. Data, Watson. I cannot make bricks without clay.”
A Sherlock Holmes pastiche; the characters are Arthur Conan Doyle’s. Every result, rating, probability and pick count in it is real, taken from our Worlds helper and pick’em on the date above.