Win/Loss ratio required for promotion

[Szei]

(06-13-2013 10:34 PM)amoffett Wrote:  Its important to keep in mind that its not just W/L ratio, but who you're beating. If you start a new account and start 30ish games immediately, you might win them all, but they're all against fluffy/clevers, so you might not even get out of gifted.

That's definitely true. On my second ST account I started ~15 games at the beginning against Fluffy-Gifted. I actually had some of the slowest of those original games still going even when I was close to ST. This means that someone could likely reach ST with fewer games with the correct strategy (not beginning a bunch of games with low hidden rating opponents). The optimal way to reach ST in the fewest number of games possible is to only have a single game going at a time and not to search for a new game until the previous one is over. This way each time you search for an opponent it will be when your hidden rating is slightly higher from beating your previous opponent. This increases your chance of matching up against a higher hidden rating opponent each time you search instead of queuing up a bunch of games when you have a lower hidden rating. As a result, on average your hidden rating will increase by more for each of your wins.

Granted, it's not fun to have to do this especially if you get matched with a slow opponent! This is why it doesn't really matter how few games you can play to get to ST because ultimately a lot of it comes down to how patient you are and how lucky you get with fast opponents rather than just skill =)