Greatest Fantasy TV Tournament Results

With Christmas Eve this Saturday, we’re closing voting on this a day earlier than usual, with over 95% of the usual number of votes coming in. That’s enough to know that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the official winner of the Greatest Fantasy TV Tournament, with 54.2% of the vote, edging out the original The Twilight Zone. Complete brackets can be found here. Join us next year for the greatest Science Fiction novel tournament!

5 replies on “Greatest Fantasy TV Tournament Results”

  1. The end result isn’t particularly surprising to me. I’m not sure which one I would have picked if someone put a gun to my head and said, “Choose or die,” but I think my choice would have been different. Still, Buffy would have been on the short list to make the choice from.

    I do find it interesting that neither of the finalists are marked as statistical upsets anywhere in the brackets, but they both went up against statistical upsets at some point. It would be interesting to see what the predicted bracket results would have been based on the first round voting had there been no statistical upsets.

    It seems that “X is better than Y” is probably not transitive. (X better than Y and Y better than Z does not necessarily mean that X better than Z.) I’m not a statistics expert or anything like that, but I seems like a very small perturbation at any stage of the tourney could lead to markedly different results. I can’t think of any practical way to test that, though.

    • The biggest reason for the statistical upsets is that we typically only have about 30 voters, and some of the initial round voting gets very, very close. But, yes, based on round one, Buffy was #1 and the original Twilight Zone was #2. You can see the details here.

    • Well, working through the brackets is part of what makes the whole process both fun and a source of occasional anguish, so I wouldn’t suggest changing it. What could possibly be done though is to follow up a tournament with a second form of voting – everyone picks up to 10 entries from the ballot, perhaps? – then seeing which entry gets the most votes. You could also add some kind of scoring into that, for a more nuanced weighting, but trying to rank my top ten of pretty much anything into any kind of order would just mean much more anguish.

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