Game of the Year 18th Place Prediction

Now that the GOTY contest has taken a fairly surprising turn (i.e. the 19th place game getting a whopping 29 points), there definitely seems to be some issues to evaluate (unfortunately having predicted the games up to 16th place to finish with <= 25 points, it might be awhile before my point predictions are anywhere near reasonable so I'll need to make some new theories about them). I plan to discus most of the enlightenment behind this fact during the judges' critique. Nonetheless, given the surprise of it and since there could well be more surprises in store in the future, it seems it could be a fair challenge to predict what those might be ahead of time. Hence every week I will publish what I think the probabilities are for the most likely candidates (most likely in my view anyways) to be the next ousted game and how many points it might receive. Obviously this is sheerly a matter of opinion so feel free to disagree, but I have chosen the first two eliminated games correctly, and maybe I can continue to get lucky. Unfortunately, I feel from this point on that getting this correct will be a much harder prospect with there not being any clear candidates for the next spot(s) (of course "clear" is relative, but had I done this article last week, I would have put the Friedel vs Milman game at 80%+ to be eliminated while I won't be giving any game even 50% this week).

Though I did predict the correct game, as mentioned I was extremely off in terms of number of points I expected it to receive (I would definitely have surmised that it wouldn't get any rankings not in the bottom five and yet it got three!). This of course means the scores are much more tightly packed then I envisioned in my predictions (again I will probably delve more into what this means in my judges' critique in a couple of days) and so any small variation in the judges' decisions is much more likely to change the results (obviously something slightly different wouldn't have changed the 19th Place vs 20th Place result, but from now on it's probable that the Games' Point Totals will be differing by much smaller amounts meaning minor differences can definitely change things). Ok, once again I'm rambling into incoherent drivel so here are some probabilities for you (when multiple games are listed under the same percentage, that percentage is each game's chance individually).


25%: FM Slava Mikhailuk (SEA) vs IM Jonathan Schroer (CAR) 0-1


20%: NM Mackenzie Molner (NJ) vs IM Larry Kaufman (BAL) 1-0


15%: IM Vinay Bhat (SF) vs IM John Bartholomew (DAL) 1-0


10%: IM Bryan Smith (PHI) vs GM Eugene Perelshteyn (BOS) 1-0, GM Julio Becerra (MIA) vs IM Ron Burnett (TN) 1-0


5%: SM Jorge Sammour-Hasbun (BOS) vs IM Davorin Kuljasevic (DAL) 1-0, IM Dmitry Zilberstein (SF) vs IM John Bartholomew (DAL) 1-0, IM Jay Bonin (NY) vs NM Mackenzie Molner (NJ) 1-0


5%: Any of the Other Games (Total)


Number of Points: 33


Be sure to keep tuned into next week's results to see if I was even close to correct!