Captaining strategy: What would you do?

[skip100]

Let's say you have a team of eight players, with the following Fargo ratings:

- 400, 425, 450, 475, 500, 525, 550, 575

You are charged with scheduling two matches against teams with players who have the following ratings:

- Team A: 500, 500, 525, 525
- Team B: 400, 400, 425, 425

Matches consist of 16 games, with each of your players contesting one game against the four opposing players. You have to assign each of your eight players to go up against either Team A or Team B, with the goal of maximizing the number of expected wins across the two matches. What do you do?

Some possible strategies:

- Play your best players against the best team and your worst players against the worst team
- Play your worst players against the best team and your best players against the worst team
- Mix it up, it doesn't really matter
- Something else

It turns out there is a single best lineup but I'll wait for a little discussion before posting it.

 

[ChrisinNC]

Let's say you have a team of eight players, with the following Fargo ratings:

- 400, 425, 450, 475, 500, 525, 550, 575

You are charged with scheduling two matches against teams with players who have the following ratings:

- Team A: 500, 500, 525, 525
- Team B: 400, 400, 425, 425

Matches consist of 16 games, with each of your players contesting one game against the four opposing players. You have to assign each of your eight players to go up against either Team A or Team B, with the goal of maximizing the number of expected wins across the two matches. What do you do?

Some possible strategies:

- Play your best players against the best team and your worst players against the worst team
- Play your worst players against the best team and your best players against the worst team
- Mix it up, it doesn't really matter
- Something else

It turns out there is a single best lineup but I'll wait for a little discussion before posting it.

It appears your opponent’s captain has already separated their players in to the best 4 on one team and the weakest 4 on the other team. In the spirit of competition so all players have a good time, seems like you’d want to match up opponents relatively evenly. Based on the Fargo rankings, each of your two four-man teams should still be able to win at least three out of four matches.

If your goal is to simply guarantee you winning three out of four in each match, you’d match your two overall weakest players out there against their two overall best players. You’d be sacrificing those two matches and it wouldn’t be any fun for them, but in the other six matches you should win them all, as you’d have a 50 to 75 point Fargo rating advantage in all of those matches.

 

[skip100]

The two teams are different and not related to each other, one just happens to be a little stronger than the other. Each match has 16 games:

Player 1 vs. all four of Team A's players
Player 2 vs. all four of Team A's players.
Player 3 vs. all four of Team A's players.
Player 4 vs. all four of Team A's players.

And again for team B, with the four remaining people from our team.

We can imagine this being the regular season of a league and wanting to get the highest number of total expected wins to get a better playoff seed.