Comment by alexpotato

So I wrote a whole bunch about college paintball statistics here: https://www.pbnation.com/showthread.php?t=3949120

Then I wrote some more about pro paintball stats in the below three Reddit posts:

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/paintball/comments/1h17f2m/intro_to...

2. https://www.reddit.com/r/paintball/comments/1jy5xqp/paintbal...

3. https://www.reddit.com/r/paintball/comments/1k6bzi7/paintbal...

Some highlights:

- I started with just pen, paper and a stopwatch (as a college coach)

- I assumed paintball would be more like football where it's hard to track individual effects

- Turns out it's a surprisingly simple and stable "state machine". e.g. the odds of winning with +1 body (e.g. 5v4, 4v3 etc) is, in college, about ~75%

- Paintball is one of those sports where "the weakest player determines the outcome". Why? b/c if 1 player gets out early, you are fighting out of a hole.

It also made me appreciate that as good a book as Moneyball is, reading it after you try to create analytics for your own sport makes it 3x as enjoyable/insightful.

One downside though:

I would watch games and I got so good at internalizing the stats per state of the game that it was like watching the world series of poker where I could see both player odds of getting eliminated and probability of winning over time charts as I watched the games. Made it harder to be the "come on guys! we can win this" coach when we were down on points + bodies.