filed by Agent O
This season, we were top of Liquid Good, triumphed over the Yellowstone Magic (who we faced due to an ILB clerical error involving the playoff seeding rotating somehow), and got knocked out in semifinals by… the Baltimore Crabs. Who then proceeded to pull it out over the Chicago Firefighters. So congratulations to the Baltimore Crabs on their first (?) championship??
As Cat Manning pointed out, the Crabs started S1 of Discipline at the very bottom of the league. So just because this feels like same as it ever was doesn’t mean that it is the same as it ever was. It’s already diverged. Quite a lot, really.
Kofi Break
We’ve found standouts in… both directions… in our crew. Here’s the highlights:
- Eleanor Thyme is a star pitcher, going toe-to-toe with the best in the league.
- On the other hand, Briggs Diallo and King Zeezee are… not good. They’re not complete dead weight, but they’re not good.
- Link Rodriguez is our star hitter. Their plate appearances are now heralded by chants of “THE STRONGEST LINK”. Apparently the Yellowstone Magic believe that Link is just Logan Rodriguez in a funny hat?
- Kofi Chocolate refuses to swing. I’m told that they’re the strikeout leader for the entire league. Some people believe Kofi is the sole reason we did not make it through playoffs.
The Weather Dial
There were five incinerations across the league, none of which were ours. Our rotation got reverbed. Roman Lighthouse got Night Shifted out of pitching and replaced with Madison Sycamore (to the relief of most of the statheads, who felt that Roman was like Jordan Hildebert – which is to say, a pitcher who desperately needed to be batting).
A handful more Night replacements, reverbs, and feedbacks happened across the league as well – though, because of the whole thing where these rosters will only last for two weeks, they don’t really matter and so I will not bother to recount them all.
I’ve seen some surprise that the “weather dial” was not significantly increased. But maybe that’s because this is a gamma test. If the weather dial was turned up, it wouldn’t be an accurate test for Blaseball proper.
The Plan
A betting scheme formally called Operation: Combinatorics, colloquially referred to “the Plan”, has emerged. Essentially, we assign fans to bet on different sets of halves of the same games, covering all possible permutations of wins and losses, so that someone will win every time.
This is because the “expected value” – the amount that each bet would pay out on average if you ran it randomly millions of times – is higher the larger your bet combo is, but since you get nothing if you lose any of those games, any one person doing that size of bet combo could bet on dozens of games without winning a single one. So, pooling the risk keeps more people engaged because it guarantees that someone wins.
This kind of scheme – which is apparently called “Dutch betting” – requires a good number of participants to ensure that someone is winning every time. At first we were doing combos of 4 to see if we could get people on board, because covering every possible combination of 4 takes 16 people. We then expanded to combos of 5 once we had more than 32 participants. If we can find 64 participants and can jump to betting on 6, that’ll be another significant increase in expected value, so please drag your friends into this.
Several other teams have independently implemented the same basic system. The Kansas City Breath Mints have this whole thing involving one’s Discord OAuth ID number. The Baltimore Crabs have their own spreadsheet for their own “pyramid scheme”. The Boston Flowers call theirs SOUP, which is apparently short for “Strategy for Optimizing Unlimited* Payouts (*not actually unlimited)”.
I think we were the first to implement this kind of pool: we had our spreadsheet up, working, and recruiting the first participants by game 15. I asked around and didn’t find anything organized from before then, but if anyone else was faster, please let me know. Whether or not we were the very first to do this, though, it still speaks volumes about our organizational speed and capacity. I am so, so proud of you all.
Not every team is doing this, mind you. But –
You know how the Plan is that force moving underneath the surface of things that makes Spies always win? We’ve ensured that all outcomes of Blaseball let at least one of us win.
We are the Plan now.
Shorting Out
Meanwhile, as to plot, let me just call attention to a certain bit of the Blaseball front page:
The Microphone will Short Out two weeks after going Online, interrupting the Current broadcast.
“Interrupting”. “Short out”. Clearly, the Microphone is not okay.
What’s going on?
Class-F Eyes
This election, remember that votes are no longer subject to the hyperinflation of the Expansion Era: less than 100 votes is already a significant amount. Adjust your expectations accordingly.
Our voting strategy poll results are as follows:
Amplifications: More Eyes polled overwhelmingly better than any of the other options. Not just for aesthetic reasons, but because if we already have the best defense in the league we may as well lean into it further. Also it will be funny for our team to be even more of a brick wall than it is already.
Distortions: Arm Cannon, Cold Call, Gunblade Bat, Catcher’s Mitt, and Long Distance Call all polled well. So I guess you’ll just have to pick for yourself. …Okay, fine, if you insist on asking me personally, I think Cold Call and Long Distance Call are fine and will be less contested, since they’re at the bottom of the ballot, but there’s no particular reason to listen to me and the election might not even work that way anyway.