Hammer of Math – Predicting the World Championships of Warhammer

In Hammer of Math we look at statistics and probability in Warhammer. This week, we’re looking at the lineup for the World Championships of Warhammer happening this week and trying to predict a winner!

Welcome back reader, to the second article in our ongoing coverage of the World Championships of Warhammer from a statistics perspective. In this article, we’re going to be reviewing how the event is going to work, the strongest (or easiest) groups, the expected winners of each group, the expected faction performance, and finally who we think is going to perform the best with their respective faction and who will take it all!

Event Overview and Structure

The World Championships of Warhammer has two stages, with three separate components: the group stage, followed by concurrently-run “World” and “Champs” brackets. These are played over the course of 4 days, with 2 games played per day.

The first stage of the event consists of 16 groups of 16-18 players (totally 274 registered attendees) who will play through four rounds of Swiss with the winner of each group advancing onwards to the Championship bracket. As there are some groups with more than 16 players, in the unlikely scenario that there are two players on four wins, then there will be a “shadow” round on the Friday evening.

The second stage has two components: the championship bracket, where the winner of each group will then play a further four rounds of Swiss, resulting in a single player who wins the entire event (note that draws are not permitted in this stage and they have a system for resolving battle point draws), and the rest that will fall between 2nd and 16th places. The remaining players who did not win their respective groups will then also play four games of Swiss, with the pairings continuing based on their record at that point.

A note that while winning it all comes with the most accolades, there are multiple other awards to win, including finishing 4-0 in the world stage, winning best in faction (which is determined by the best record for a player within a faction by Wins -> OGW% -> Battle Points), and several others. Each of these awards is also worth valuable WCW points for the player’s nation, so we’ll be exploring this a little more later this week.

A Note on Elo

We’ve been discussing Elo a fair bit the last couple weeks, and there’s some key things to point out before we go further with this coverage. Elo is one tool in predicting outcomes, and while we previously covered how well it can predict outcomes, one of the restrictions is that it requires a fair amount of data before it starts to accurately represent the skill of the players involved. Thankfully, as we reviewed last week, the majority of the players in this event have played quite a bit of Warhammer. Of the attendees, we lack data on 7 of the 274 participants – and for those we do have game data for, it’s quite extensive.

One of the other things that needs to be considered is that Elo can have regional bias; for example if you are to compare Elo between players from North America and Europe, you would need a fair number of players who play in both metas. If there is a lack of interaction, you can end up with Elo rankings that do not line up and some rather abrupt shifts as a result of an event that brings many different areas together. An element of this was seen last year at the inaugural World Championships of Warhammer, the results of which can be seen here on Stat Check’s website.

The Simulation

For the rest of this article, we’re going to be going through the results of an attempt to simulate and predict the outcome of the overall tournament. We’ve taken each group, randomly generated pairings for each round, and then used the expected winner based on the Elo difference between each player against a random number generator to predict the outcome. We then ran the tournament to conclusion, seeding the championship bracket with the winner of each group, and then repeated the process 50,000 times.

With that being covered, let’s go through the groups that have been assigned. Note that these may change as players may have to drop due to unforeseen circumstances, but this is the best we’ve got until the event proper!

The Group Stage

The 40k event has been broken down into 16 groups of 16 to 18 players, distributed as evenly as possible between the countries in attendance. Below we can see each of the groups, with their average Elo ranking, the player who is favoured to win the group, and their respective country & faction. The final column gives us the chance that this particular player will win their group.

The first thing to note is that the highest Elo rank player in each group is expected to win their group, with one notable exception – Group 11 where Tim Schneider of Germany slightly edges out Samuel Pope of the USA. In this case, both players are quite close in Elo going into this event (Tim Schneider at 2008.0 and Samuel Pope at 2032.6), but they end up with very different pairing paths because of the restriction applied on same country players not pairing into each other until it is the only option available in resolving a group (or the event). These result in the slight difference between Tim Schneider (31.8%) and Samuel Pope (30.4%) chance of winning the group.

The other interesting thing here is that despite making up just shy of 38% of the attendees, Americans are overwhelmingly favoured to win their groups – 11 out of the 16 have American players as the front-runners. While this may seem like an over-representation, it should be noted that Americans have the 3rd highest average elo in the event at 1747.3, beaten only by the English (1773.9) and the German (1835.5) players, so the results are not too surprising. The table that follows summarizes each country’s representation at the event, the average number of their players that make the champions bracket, and finally the chance of a player from that country winning the event.

As highlighted above, the chance for an American to win the event is 2 in 3, while making up 2 in 5 players. What is quite interesting is that both the German (11.8% chance to win against 2.6% representation and English (9.4% chance to win against 5.1% representation) beat the Americans in terms of their relative chance to win against their player representation.

Lastly, what makes these results very fascinating is that of the 16 groups, there are 12 unique factions that are expected to win. This speaks quite well to the state of the meta that the top players are playing a very diverse set of armies!

We’ve now hinted at the predicted event winners, but let’s look at faction performance first.

Faction Performance

For faction performance, we focused on what would be required for a player to achieve Best in Faction (BiF) for their particular faction. Several places have already covered the faction distribution at this event, and you can watch this space later this week for some breakdowns of the most popular factions. From our understanding, the Best in Faction awards are given out to the highest ranked player for a faction by Wins -> Opponent Game Win % -> Battle Points.

The two most difficult factions to achieve a BiF award for appear to be a two-way tie between Necrons and Tyranids, each with a maximum average wins of 6.6 games.

Event Favourites

Now we come to the main event – who is favoured to win the event? Unsurprisingly given the amount of talent in attendance, there is no one clear favourite. Instead we have several players that have very similar chances to win the event, as shown below.

The current favourite is Tim Schneider of Germany, coming in with Leagues of Votann and an initial Elo of 2008 (Ranked #8 in the world), with a 6.14% chance of winning the event. This means that across 50,000 simulations, Tim won 3,070 of these. Following closely behind him are two players with home ice advantage – Justin Moore (5.96%) and Samuel Pope (5.39%). What’s interesting here is that Samuel Pope and Tim Schneider are both in Group 11, meaning that the winner of this group has a more than 1 in 10 chance of winning the event overall between these two alone (they also make up 62% of those who make it out of their group).

Full Results

Looking to see how your countryfolk are predicted to perform? Look no further – we’ve uploaded the full results from these simulations below. Most of the columns are fairly straightforward, with only Average Placing being a bit head scratching until you dive into it a bit deeper. No one player has an average placing below 29, which seemed high right up until we realized that because of the championship bracket, unless someone had a guaranteed chance at winning their group (no one does, TJ Lanigan is the strongest favourite in Group  13 at 34.0% chance to win), there are more cases where they will finish 17th+ place than cases where they’ll finish 1st through 16th place.

Closing Thoughts

In summary, the World Championships of Warhammer promises to be an exciting and unpredictable event, with a structure that allows for both immense competition and strategic depth. With only the top player from each group advancing to the championship bracket, the stakes are high from the very first match. The diversity in factions among the favorites further demonstrates the rich meta-game in play, highlighting that skill, preparation, and adaptability will be just as important as list-building.

While our simulation has identified some front-runners, including Tim Schneider and Samuel Pope, it is worth remembering that Warhammer is a game where dice rolls can shake the fate of even the best-laid plans. The regional diversity and complexity of player matchups ensure that surprises will be plentiful, and while Elo provides a useful tool for predicting outcomes, the unexpected always makes for the most memorable moments.

With so much on the line, including individual accolades and valuable points for each nation, we’re in for four days of intense strategic and tactical play. Will the favorites deliver, or will we see a breakout performance that defies expectations? Only time will tell, so watch this space for more coverage and wild statistical dives!

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