The Chart Championship: FINAL ANALYSIS

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Congratulations to koganbot, our title winner.

lisa_go_blind and jeff_worrell are in the play-offs.

piratemoggy is relegated.

Final Table

1. koganbot. W7 D2 L2 Pts 23 GDiff +6 Total ranking points: 75.
2. lisa_go_blind W7 D1 L3 Pts 22 GDiff +9 TRP: 78.
3. jeff_worrell W6 D3 L2 Pts 21 GDiff +7 TRP: 81.
4. epicharmus W6 D0 L5 Pts 18 GDiff +3 TRP: 69.
5. skillextric W5 D1 L5 Pts 16 GDiff +5 TRP: 74.
6. lockedintheatti W5 D1 L5 Pts 16 GDiff +1 TRP: 67.
7. infov0re W4 D2 L5 Pts 14 GDiff -3 TRP: 58.
8. martinskidmore W3 D4 L4 Pts 13 GDiff -3 TRP: 68.
9. blue_russian W4 D1 L6 Pts 13 GDiff -3 TRP: 62.
10. poptasticuk W4 D1 L6 Pts 13 GDiff -4 TRP: 59.
11. byebyepride W3 D1 L7 Pts 10 GDiff -7 TRP: 54.
12. piratemoggy W3 D1 L7 Pts 10 GDiff -11 TRP: 46.

Week-by-week Winners

Neko Case - "Set Out Running" (chosen by skillextric, track 01)
Ultraviolence - "Hardcore Motherfucker" (chosen by martinskidmore, track 08)
Moonbaby - "Kitsch Bitch Kool" (chosen by poptasticuk, track 06)
Data Panik - "Cubis (I Love You)" (chosen by lisa_go_blind, track 02)
Sing-Sing - "Feels Like Summer" (chosen by skillextric, track 08)
Nachlater - "Fett" (chosen by lockedintheatti, track 01)
Marco Borsato - "Rood" (chosen by skillextric, track 03)
Lonnie Mack - "Chicken Pickin'" (chosen by epicharmus, track 07)
Diskoteka Avariya - "Hardcore Rap" (chosen by blue_russian, track 09)
Beenie Man ft Ce'Cile - "The Thing" (chosen by jeff_worrell, track 09)
Bobbie Gentry - "Fancy" (chosen by lisa_go_blind, track 11)
Yes - "Tempus Fugit" (chosen by jeff_worrell, track 08)

("Total Ranking Points" is an addition of inverse rankings i.e. 11 points for 1st place, 10 points for 2nd. "Goal Difference" was meant to follow it closely, which it does, but not quite closely enough, so next time I'll use TRP as the tie-breaker.)

Comments

[hoshuteki.livejournal.com]

It's been fascinating following these Championships, so (as an attendee at the 'matches'), thanks for organising them. But where do the relegated 'teams' go?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

They don't go anywhere. Piratemoggy gets to judge the play-off between the 2nd and 3rd place teams in the other league, and Katstevens gets to judge the play-off between lisa_go_blind and jeff_worrell.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

they have to work in the pitchfork news room

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

lolz

[bengraham.livejournal.com]

Congratulations to koganbot. And well done to everyone who took part, and of course to freakytigger for running this. Can't wait to see a similar final table for the Pop Prem!

Also, how lucky is infov0re? On TRP, would have finished 10th, but actually ended up 7th! (Sorry, felt some kind of post-season analysis was necessary!)

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

Pts will always trump TRP, I hope!

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Yes!

[lockedintheatti.livejournal.com]

...and how unlucky for martinskidmore - only the top 3 lost more than him but still ended in eighth due to all those draws

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

So what is goal difference?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

It's the colonels secret formula.

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

I have mail it seems.

Thanks to Tom for running this game so well.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Yes thanks to Tom and all the other contestants for making this fun. Apologies for being stroppy at a couple of points. I R a bad loser :-(

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

11th isn't a loss, it's a platform to build on!

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I'm proud of pulling my plucky team back from the brink, and closing the tournament with a series of gritty games! (OK I am rubbish at the football-speak!).

[lisa-go-blind.livejournal.com]

Congratulations Frank! What are the odds that the top 3 players would all end up drawing in the last week?

[koganbot]

It was those skillful 5th place wins week in and week out that got me the victory. (Though you had a couple of 6th place wins, as I recall. But you also got a couple of firsts. And my margin of victory was my 7th place draw!)

[koganbot]

How do draws figure in the total ranking points?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

The ranking points don't take wins, loses or draws into account, i.e. a 1st place draw gets 11, same as a 1st place win.

request for post-season commentary

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

i want to do some summing up of my own, but i'll wait until the results of the other league are in, but while we're still here, i'm curious to hear from people what their strategy/approach was "big picture." were you picking songs that you loved, or to put it another way, definiting your own taste through your submissions? were you playing to (or against) your perception of the other players' tastes? did you feel compelled to pick particularly "obscure" (your definition) artists if order to avoid a draw? was there broad category that you avoided submitting?

a few answers from my side: at the beginning of the season, i toyed with only sending Russian music, which i figured would pretty much guarantee that people would be hearing new songs. i decided not to mainly because i decided i didn't want people knowing immediately which song i'd submitted. I definintely 'tailored' more over the course of the season as I had a better sense of what people seemed to like (based as much on their submissions as their bios). i basically knew what i planned to submit koganbot and poptasticuk from early on, given their fairly well-defined (internet) personas. A couple submissions, I'll admit, were purely strategic - i certainly like my submission for martinskidmore, but i definitely searched around before settling on Major Lance; and my biggest hit, "Hardcore Rap," is on my hard drive as much for "ethnomusicological" purposes as anything else. Three of the songs I submitted would probably make "all-time favorite" lists of one kind of another. Almost all of my subsmissions were proper "singles," and that was a conscious decision on my part - I took the "pop" in poptimists seriously, although I use my own definition. (One week someone almost got a mid-period Genesis track! but I chickened out.)

My strategy

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

Oh good, this gives me the perfect excuse for a ROLLCALL. Here's my play-off achieving squad in full, in alphabetical order.

1. Aavikko
2. Au Revoir Simone
3. Bananarama
4. Brigitte Bardot
5. Yummy Bingham
6. kevin blechdom
7. Ce'cile & Beenie Man
8. ELO
9. Lindstrøm
10. Squeeze
11. Yes

Most of these were undoubtedly artists/songs I love and wanted more poptimists (and not necessarily just the home player) to hear. That applies particularly to tracks 5-11, which probably would have gotten submitted regardless.

1-4 were chosen with the particular home player in mind (also, I thought Hazel would appreciate the lyrics to the blechdom, which she did up to a point). Bardot also stood as a representative of several dozen 60s French pop songs that I would like to have submitted, just as the Beenie Man stood for any number of early 00s dancehall tunes I could have picked.

Bananarama got lucky in that Deep Sea Skiving just happened to be reissued in the week that Jessica was home player - although fielding them turned out to be my biggest tactical mistake of the tournament. (It was a toss up between "Doctor Love" and another track on the CD, which I'm minded to post on poptimists tomorrow actually!)

Re: My strategy

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

I was quite surprised that a) more people apparently didn't IMMEDIATELY recognize ELO, or b) at least like the Squeeze. When I was at uni, "Singles 45s and Under" was one of those albums that pretty much everyone had. For me, the Lindstrom was probably the big "hit" off jeff_worrell, Volume 1.

Re: request for post-season commentary

[(Anonymous)]

I decided early on that I wouldn't submit anything I didn't like myself just for the sake of scoring points, so the challenge was finding stuff I liked that fit the player profile. Some weeks that was easy, some very, very difficult (I'm thinking skilletric's week, and was duely rewarded with a crashing defeat); even harder were the weeks where my tastes coincided most closely with the home player, as it forced me to be more risky - and in both cases (Blue Russian, PoptasticUK), I lost. Also, my knowledge is quite broad across a lot of genres but not very deep within most of them, so I generally went foreign to avoid draws, even though I knew it would mean my 'style' would be guessable (you guessed your winner was my choice for that reason).

Re: request for post-season commentary

[lockedintheatti.livejournal.com]

whoops, that was me by the way

[poptasticuk.livejournal.com]

I'm impressed that Frank managed to win without actually coming 1st ever - must have been consistently good

[koganbot]

A lot of my victory margins were narrow. I think I'd have had more decisive wins if my vinyl recordings were on CD. The past would have been my Russia. I was shocked during the History Of Jop polls by how few people had heard "Set It Off" and "Square Biz" and "Jam On It."

My basic strategy was taking songs I liked and either just throwing them into the pot willy-nilly or deciding who was going to get them, but I was enthusiastic about everything I submitted. The one exception was the Nicole Atkins, when I was still subbing for Anthony; I was simply curious what piratemoggy would think of it, since it struck me as lounge goth from a singer with a lot of promise who didn't yet know what to do with herself. I was going to choose Skeeter Davis's "End Of The World" for you, because I didn't think you'd be averse to a beautiful ballad; but your description fit the Manu Chao song to a T, so skillextric got Skeeter. (There are better Chao songs, but the versions I have of them are on a promo with dropouts deliberately inserted in songs so that no one would want to copy them.) My instinct with lisa_go_blind was that if she liked '60s singers and like ESG she'd like achingly beautiful Burmese psychedelia. But if she hadn't gotten that song, someone else would have. I had a track in mind for blue_russian that was very much not like the stuff we talk about on the teenpop thread (haunting sketchy blues-jazz mood piece), but then when he mentioned my number one song of 2006 in his writeup ("4ever"), I decided he had to get my similar-sounding number three song. How was I to know he'd broken his vow never to listen to Aly & A.J.? (My number two song was "LDN," which I suspect that 95% of poptimists have heard.)

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

Sorry, blame youtube - eventually it became too hard not to listen.

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Blimey my goal difference really was rubbish wasn't it?

There are several things I might have done differently if I could have done it all again but overall I have played a random and terrible game and have no regrets about the whole thing whatsoever because I have all the tracks I sent in a playlist and I still think they're ace.

I may have suffered by being a bit teenage in

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Omgwtf I am going to set fire to Opera now.

...'a bit teenage in my music taste still.'