With the Bassmaster Classic coming up in a couple of weeks on Ray Robert’s Lake in Texas there is a lot of speculation as to who will win. This is the biggest tournament in Bass fishing and winning is a big deal. To begin with there is £300,000 at stake. If this isn’t enough the prestige is life changing and establishes any winner as World Champion and a truly great angler. So who will win? This is what this site is really about; using statistics and science to predict events like this. That is the difference between inferential statistics as opposed to historic statistics; such as who won the last tournament, or the most.
Some of those historical statistics do provide a baseline against which we can assess a result. So Brandon Palaniuk won the most recent Elite and it’s already been suggested that he is on form and a good candidate to win. Chris Zaldain lives closest and as the ‘local boy’ has already expressed confidence that this may be his time. Chris Johnson is the reigning Angler of the Year. That should mean that he’s the best angler overall and as such has a good claim to be the most likely to win. However, Trey McKinney would have been AOY, but for a technical DQ. Then the current AOY is John Garrett, so perhaps he can reconsidered the best on current form and the most likely to win.
Let’s take one angler as an example of how likely he is to win. Let’s look at Brandon Palaniuk. He’s probably a favourite. He’s won the latest tournament. He’s widely regarded as one of the best anglers on the tour. I don’t think anyone would deny he’s got a good chance of winning. But the question is how good? Can a scientific inferential statistical approach help with this. Yes it can; and it’s not that hard. It doesn’t need complex maths, just some clear thinking.
Brandon Palaniuk has won 8 BASS tournaments out of 173 appearances. That is a 4.6% win rate. He has 6 elite wins out of 108 appearances. This is a win rate of 5.5%. That may not look very impressive for someone at the top of the sport; but that is the nature of fishing; it’s unpredictable. For comparison Kevin VanDam has 25 BASS wins out of 320 events. An overall win rate of 7.8%. Trey McKinney has only competed in 11 elite events but has won 1; so his win rate is 9.1%. Garrett has also won 1 in 11. But in inferential statistics smaller samples are less reliable and so we’d have less trust in these estimates being correct.
Coming back to Palaniuk. He’s also taken part in 13 Classics and whilst it’s become a cliche to say that he’ll win one eventually the statistics disagree. Winning one in 20 competitions, as he does, is impressive, but even if he fished 20 Classics there is no guarantee that he’d win. If he maintains a win rate of 5.5% then he’d have a 70% chance of winning a Classic over 20 events according to established probability theory (which ends some maths, so please just trust me for now). His probability over 13 events is around 50%. So it is no great surprise that he hasn’t won one yet. Though it’s worth noting that over his career (say 20 years) he’s more likely to win a classic than not.
The real lesson is how hard it is to win a classic. Those who win even a single one are beating the odds, and there is more than a little luck involved. Those who win it twice. Well, there are those who would suggest that the classic is different to a regular Elite event and there is possibly some truth in this. On that basis Jordan Lee has the best Classic success with 2 wins out of 5 appearances. An astonishing 40% success ratio; but his overall win ratio is only 3.75%.
There are also other ways to calculate the chance of winning; such as using the finishing position in events rather than just wins. We can also look at the impact of method, time of year, weather, and many other factors on results. However, the unavoidable result is that no angler has a much better than 5% chance of winning and there is nothing to choose between around 20 anglers. what we really learn is that fishing is unpredictable. But also that those who think they know who will win are kidding themselves. Likewise the predictions that every up and coming angler “is bound to win a classic” ignore the difficulties and the unpredictability of winning. There are so many variables. That’s a big part of what makes it endlessly fascinating.
In the end it’s just too close to call. That’s not the answer we want. But sometimes knowing what you don’t know is important; as Donald Rumsfeld might have said. It’s important to know the limits of what you do know. It should also make for an exciting contest.
For myself. I’d love to see John Cox win. He’s just such a hard working and passionate angler. He always has a smile on his face and is the best possible advert for the Joys of angling. I love his style of angling and he’s been fishing well and is 2nd in AOY. It’s definitely possible; but with The Classic anything is – as the stats show.
