Masters London: Playoffs Preview

Masters London’s Swiss Stage has finished, and it has been nothing if not historic and shocking. So far:

• The region that was thought of as the strongest heading into Masters London, Pacific, had both of their Swiss Stage teams fail to qualify to Playoffs.
• We saw the second-highest VLR rating in an international match of all time, with Keiko’s 1.85 rating against XLG. He was 0.01 away from tying the record.

• Since franchising, only two CN teams have ever gotten past the Swiss/Groups Stage of a Masters: EDG at Tokyo and Wolves at Toronto. That number is now 3, as XLG (narrowly) made it into Playoffs.
• The two teams with the highest BenPom ratings coming into Swiss Stage (Full Sense and NRG) both failed to qualify for Playoffs.

I could mention other items and discuss with greater depth, but that’s not the point of this preview. Between the limited turnaround time between Swiss and Playoffs and the fact that I’ve already done a complete overview of every team at Masters London (which you can read here), this will be a succinct overview of Playoffs focusing mainly on what the numbers say. Still, with such upheaval, it’ll be hard not to touch on a few narratives.

With the 8 Playoff teams for Masters London locked in, let’s look at how they rank according to BenPom:

For all of the talk about how Paper Rex were heavy favorites for Masters London, Swiss Stage has knocked them out of the number 1 BenPom spot. More specifically, Pacific’s middling performance in Swiss Stage has knocked Paper Rex down.

I know I said I would avoid the narratives, but it’s really shocking how bad Pacific was. Coming into Swiss Stage, Full Sense looked confidently like the second-best team in Pacific with a 2.47 rating (the 7th best in the world). They were the most picked team to make it through Swiss flawlessly on Riot’s pick’ems. Then, not only did they go out 0–2, but they got STOMPED by the EMEA 3-seed, FUT (−16 round differential over two maps). FS’s other loss was closer, but it was against the other Pacific team, Global Esports. As for GE, they ended up getting eliminated by XLG, the third Chinese team ever to make it past Groups at a Masters event. Again, Pacific were historically bad in Swiss.

The end result is not only PRX dropping out of the number 1 spot, but actually dropping two spots all the way to 3rd without playing a single match. I can’t disagree with BenPom here.

Importantly, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. In this way, BenPom doesn’t have losers without winners. For all of Pacific’s hullabaloo, EMEA is the region that shot up.

While Full Sense were expected to be great and were horrible, FUT were expected to be horrible and were great. As a certain (incorrect) VCT analyst wrote:

[FUT] have lost 3 of their past 4 matches, they come from the second-worst region, their best map in Stage 1 (Bind) isn’t in the map pool anymore, and their best player (s0pp) has only played Neon in Stage 1, who’s getting nerfed into the ground… this team is hard to be optimistic about.

That’s a quote from my Masters London Preview; how wrong I was. FUT did the following:

1. Clobbered what was supposed to be Pacific’s best team in the Swiss Stage — Full Sense — as discussed previously (re: 16-round differential over two maps).
2. Narrowly lost to their EMEA counterpart Vitality.
3. Narrowly beat what was supposed to be America’s best team in the Swiss Stage — NRG.Note: Emphasis on the “Narrowly”, as the map scores were as follows: 11–13, 14–12, 13–11.

Vitality, on the other hand, clobbered DRG and then narrowly beat FUT.

If the EMEA teams beat every non-EMEA team they played in Swiss Stage, no matter how strong/weak their opponents were, I can’t disagree with Heretics (the EMEA 1-seed) rising up to the number 1 spot. Notably, BenPom predicts that Heretics will be a cut above the rest. They have a 3.65 rating while G2, PRX, and VIT are clustered with 3.17, 3.16, and 3.15 ratings respectively.

The regional shift in BenPom Ratings is visualized below:

However, it’s one thing to be the best team, and it’s another to be in the best situation to win. Now that we have a bracket, we can take that into account. The Playoffs bracket looks as follows:

Immediately, it’s clear the bottom half is stronger than the top half. BenPom affirm this.

Using the current BenPom ratings, I simulated the bracket 50,000 times and got the following probabilities:

Immediately, the effects of regional shifts and bracket disparity are visible. Despite being in the bottom half of Playoffs teams by BenPom rating, FUT are given a ~50% chance to finish top 3 because of their path through the top half of the bracket. Similarly, G2 have the greatest chance to win Masters London despite not entering the tournament as the favorites (re: PRX) or being the highest-rated team currently (re: Team Heretics). Both of those teams have to survive a gauntlet to even get to the upper finals.

Also, BenPom’s pessimism on China continues. EDG at 1.4% to win Masters London is probably the result I would disagree with the most, but it’s not my job to alter the data to agree with me, instead it’s just to react to it. This pessimism is despite XLG making it into playoffs (i.e. promoting confidence in the CN region). In fairness, DRG did get crushed by Vitality and XLG got crushed by NRG. Given EDG’s similar power level to XLG based on domestic results, it makes sense to be doubtful of EDG’s ability to play at the level of higher-seeded teams than Vitality and NRG. Call it bias, but I have enough faith in EDG’s player quality to win Masters London more than 1.4% of the time. You can come back to this when I’m inevitably wrong.

On the topic of regional commentary, it’s interesting that BenPom predicts that the Masters London winner will be from EMEA 51% of the time. Having 3 teams in a group of 8 teams helps, let alone those 3 teams being top-5 teams by BenPom.

To finish off this quick preview, I’ll let BenPom simulate the bracket out where it advances its favorite for each match. Click on any match to see the projected probability, veto, and individual map favorites. After that, I’ll fill out a bracket with my prediction. Check back later to see who was more accurate!