Beer Pong Sabermetrics III

Back in the day I did this post and then this post, and now if you search "beer pong sabermetrics" on Google, it's the first thing that comes up.  So I guess you could say I'm the foremost authority on the subject.  Sure, that's roughly the equivalent of my friends' Merchant of Venice website from Freshman year English topping the Yahoo! search results, but I'll take what I can get.  I remain of the opinion that my original posts are pretty cool, but they were the product of a much younger me that was somewhat stupider about the best way to do simulations and such.

Flash forward to now, and I'm at least a little bit smarter.  At least, I'm smart enough to cook up a cool little beer pong simulator on a whim.  Since I'm going to another Stateline Beer Pong tournament, I thought I would re-run the numbers and see if they agreed with my earlier findings. As a reminder, the main thing I was concerned with was the decision of whether or not to go first (WSOBP rules dictate that the team going first has just one shot).  Since I am a little short on time, let's just list out the results and go from there:

Evenly-matched teams (all players shoot 30%):

Team going first won 49.94% (10,000 sims), 50.05% (100,000 sims), 49.78% (1 million sims), 49.87% (10 million sims)

Top heavy vs. Balanced (33%/10% vs. 25%/25%):

Top heavy goes first - won 36.25% (100,000 sims)
Balanced goes first - won 64.77% (100,000 sims)

One better player vs. Balanced (33%/25% vs. 25%/25%):

One better player goes first - won 66.43% (100,000 sims)
Balanced goes first - won 33.84% (100,000 sims)

Super teams (all players shoot 50%):

Team going first won 49.44% (100,000 sims)

First things first: these results line up pretty closely with the results from my second post.  I have added in logic for overtimes, so we're not dealing with the same exact thing, but it's clearly behaving in the same manner.  In the even games, there appears to be a slight advantage to going second, but it's not 100% clear that the difference exists, and even if it does it's not significant enough to actually affect gameplay.  In the uneven games, the team going first appears to have a slight advantage, but once again, it's not much of one.  The basic message is that if you have a choice between side and turn, and you feel somewhat strongly about which side is better, take the side.

I'll probably re-visit this at some point, but for now, I wanted to open it up to others.  If there is some question you have that could potentially be answered by simulating a million games of beer pong, let me know.  The comments don't require a username, so feel free to let me know what you want to learn.