Week 17 Is All That Matters: Best Ball Mania VI Update
Of all the Best Ball metas debated over the years, "Week 17 Is All That Matters" has perhaps been the most polarizing. Polarizing, that is, in the wider best ball community. Legendary Upside wouldn’t exist without Pat Kerrane executing the principles of Week 17 Is All That Matters; he won $2 million in Best Ball Mania 3 with a heavily correlated Week 17 lineup.
Week 17 still matters quite a bit. But with Underdog bringing back regular season prizes for Best Ball Mania 6, it’s time to recalculate the expected value of which weeks truly matter most, and to see how this impacts our drafting strategy.
We will be using the same methodology to calculate expected value as I outlined last year for Best Ball Mania V.
Best Ball Mania VI playoff prize structure:
Tournament Structure Determines Everything
The idea that Week 17 is all that matters may seem counterintuitive at first glance. In the early days of best ball, cumulative scoring was the primary format, where every week carried equal weight. Once Underdog emerged and best ball tournaments predominantly became a playoff format, it was forward-thinking to recognize that specific weeks could be weighted dramatically differently.
Naturally, one may think that because Week 1 accounts for 5.9% of the weeks in a best ball tournament (1-of-17), it therefore accounts for 5.9% of the value of your team.
However, Best Ball Mania-style playoff tournaments are structured into 4 rounds: Round 1 (Weeks 1-14), Round 2 (Week 15), Round 3 (Week 16), and Round 4 (Week 17).
Setting aside regular season prizes momentarily, success requires advancing through each round sequentially to reach the grand prize. You need to advance through the gauntlet of Round 1 to Round 2 to Round 3 to Round 4 and then crush in the Finals in order to become a best ball millionaire.
A slightly more sophisticated approach to expected value models each of the four rounds as contributing 25% of your team's value. This means while the regular season accounts for 82% of games played (14-of-17), it represents only 25% of the tournament value. Any individual regular season week contributes just 1.8% towards your team’s overall value, while Week 17—despite being only 5.9% of total games—accounts for a disproportionate 25% of team value.
Despite the math, skeptics continue to push back. One of the most common refrains being: “you to advance to the final before you can win it."
This is… true. But just because a round proceeds another in chronological order, doesn’t ensure that it’s the higher priority of the two. It affects our EV calculation, but only to an extent. I’ll have more on this below.
The data supporting the Week 17 bros has only gotten stronger. Following Pat Kerrane’s $2,000,000 Best Ball Mania win, Michael Leone’s Best Ball Manifesto found that “Week 17 game stacking was a popular topic last season, and the data shows that your ability to win a 470-person field can increase by ~50% by game stacking.”
It may seem unfair that a single late-season week can be just as valuable as 14 combined regular season weeks, yet understanding which weeks have an outsized impact on your results—and how to exploit this knowledge—represents the biggest edge in Best Ball right now.
Now that we understand the simplified playoff expected value model, below we will use the actual payout structure of Best Ball Mania VI to add more specificity to the relative value of each round for this specific contest.
The Best Ball Tournament Gauntlet: 99.9% of Teams Never See Week 17
In order to become the next Best Ball millionaire, you need to survive the playoff gauntlet. If you experience a single Week 17 Finals sweat, then savor it. An average drafter who max-enters Best Ball Mania is expected to advance one team to the finals once every 8.3 years.
Prize Distributions Impact The Relative Value of Week 17
Obviously, surviving the playoff gauntlet and reaching Week 17 is extremely important. But there’s a crucial difference between which week is worth the most versus which week is the most important to score highly in.
Determining the relative importance of Rounds 1-3 for your team’s overall expected value is relatively straightforward. Expected value considers the prizes earned in each round multiplied by the probability of reaching that round.
Expected Value = (Prizes earned in Round N / Entries in Round N) + (Probability of Advancing to Round N+1 * (Prizes Earned in Round N+1 / Entries in Round N+1))
*This is mostly true, but I won’t bore you with the specifics.
In other words, the expected value for a given round is the value added for doing well in a round.
However, determining the relative importance of the Round 4 Week 17 Finals isn’t so straightforward. Consider two extreme scenarios:
- If Week 17 featured completely flat payouts where every finalist won $17,626.38, then your score in Week 17 would literally not matter at all, since it wouldn’t affect your payout.
- Conversely, if the entire $15,000,000 prize pool went to first place, then your Week 17 would matter a ton.
In Round 1-3, our objective is clear: finish top-2 out of 12 teams (Round 1), 1-of-13 teams (Round 2), and 1-of-16 teams (Round 3) to advance. But our objective in Round 4 (Week 17) isn’t as simple as “finish 1st”, as most players would gladly walk away with the 5th place prize of $300,000. Therefore, we need to determine our breaking point for what Week 17 finish position is worth optimizing for relative to the opportunity cost of a $3,750 Finals min cash prize.
I will define the Week 17 breaking point as a $100,000 prize. I think anyone with a Week 17 Finals team would be thrilled with a six-figure payout. Therefore, our benchmark is to finish top-15 in Best Ball Mania VI’s Week 17 finals for a six-figure score.
Best Ball Mania VI Expected Value
Week 17 is Still All That Matters
- Week 17 accounts for 36.6% of your entry’s value.
- More than the 14-week regular season (27.2%).
- Week 17 is also more important than the two stepping-stone playoff rounds combined.
- (Weeks 15 + 16 = 36.1% of expected value).
