Karel Křivanec and Martin Musil
We are quite sure that our attempt to the analysis of the impact of beats on final positions of competitors at the recent European Championship in Slovakia is limited by many factors which we cannot reflect in this analysis. It is also a question what kind of quality competitors meet at the particular beat or what the weather and changes of water level during the three days of competitions were.
For this analysis, we have used only the data regarding the total place of the competitor at his beat and these results are in tables from individual venues. The first number is the competitor´s placing and the second number is the number of fish caught. With respect to the fact that also one Bulgarian competitor took part in the competition, other beats had to be occupied by domestic anglers who were not counted among the official results, but the Slovak organizers published also their unofficial results which were used for this analysis. Some results of these individuals are hard to explain and with respect to the fact that they were often significantly better than the results of domestic competitors, it´s up to readers to make their own judgement why it was so.
In the main analysis, we focused on results of competitors from the Czech Republic and Spain who had very neck-to-neck results until the last moment. Our team was lucky in the fifth round when after the half of the period, there was a rain shower which caused that the Spanish did not win, because fish were not rising as much as in other sessions.
The question, where to look for causes of such sudden improvement of the Spanish in the last years, is quite clear. The Spanish team was always very good, but it´s mistake was to arrive to championships without any time for preparation. This approach has changed recently, and therefore we will have to seriously take this team into account for the future.
Our imagination about the fact that the draw for the Spanish was much better than for our team did not prove to be true. The sum of all placings at Czech beats was 1,067 and the Spanish sum was 1,048. The difference is smaller than 2%, which is below the level of statistic importance, and therefore we can say that all in all both teams had the beats of very similar quality.
Regarding the individual competition, the impact of the beat is obvious. This can be seen in the final results of competitors of individual teams. The exception can be found only at the Czech competitor Roman Jörka who finished on the sixth place and had a very bad draw with the sum of placings 232, while the sum of beats of the last member of the Spanish team Miguel Matilla (22nd place) was 237. The worst sum of beats, however, had Roman Heimlich – 274 and he finished on the 16th place.
The best beats of the championship had the sum of placings of all competitors – 9 and these were number 10 in sector II and number 13 in sector V. The worst score was the sum of placings 68 – No. 5 in sector II. It can be said that beats with sums up to 20 can be marked as winning ones, up to sums of 30 as very good ones, in the scale 31 – 40 as good to average ones, 41 – 50 under average ones, 51 – 60 bad ones and 61 and more as very bad beats. Almost anybody can win at the best beat, but to have a good result at the bad beat is the sign of a good quality of competitor. As a result we can mention the victory of Roman Heimlich in the first session in sector III at the beat No. 7, whose quality was 59 (and this was just due to Roman´s performance, otherwise it would be much below 60 points).
As it was mentioned at the beginning, there are many other factors which we did not manage to capture. Such an analysis cannot be done for all championships, but the Slovak Championship was very suitable for the reason that the venues were excellently stocked with fish and the influence of random catches was significantly reduced. Similar analyses of individual sectors would definitely take a lot of space, but we will leave it on other fans into it that can play with the attached tables.
Tables (PDF, 171 kB)