The Beauty of a Blind Bidding Game

While some of us are still awed at Messi, Argentina, Mbappe, the final, and how the entire world cup unfolded, the new year is already upon us. I still think about it now and then. These kinds of international tournaments which happen once every few years get us all excited and make the wait worth it. They are truly special. They are a bit extra special to me and my group of footballing friends. We are a bunch of people who used to play football together for many many years before our personal life demands took us over and moved us all away from our hometowns. But whenever such international tournaments happen we make it a point to come together irrespective of our personal commitments to play a fantasy football game. It is a regular fantasy game with a slight twist.

The Game Set up And Rules

1. Each Player is given 100 million virtual money to pick a team from the entire squad list of 32 participating nations.
2. Each Player has to pick a team of 15 players within the budget of 100 million consisting of 2GK, 5DF, 5MF, and 3FW with not more than 3 players per country. The minimum bid value is 1 million and the bid value has to be always round numbers 1,5,7 etc.
3. So far the rules are just like any other fantasy game. Here is the twist. You have to bid for the 15 players and the bidder with the highest bid value gets the player. And the bidding is not an open bidding, it’s a closed bidding. You will have to send in your bids (password protected) to a common mail id without any clue about what the other fellow bidders are doing. Once everyone sends in their bids the mailbox will be opened in the presence of participants on a video call, bids will be processed and the results of who gets which player will be announced.
4. Since there might be clashes in bids it is very unlikely for participants to form a team of 15 in the first round itself. So we continue to have a few more rounds with the leftover amount and players until everyone has a squad of 15 different players.
5. There are a lot of possible chances that more than one bidder is bidding for the same player with the same amount. In such cases, we break the tie using something called priority. Each participant has 15 priorities to use from 1–15. So along with the bid amount for a player, you can assign him a priority too. A priority number can be used only once. So in case, two or more bids are tied we use priority to decide who gets the player. Like bidding amount priority number also will be carried forward to consecutive rounds if you don’t get the player to whom you have assigned that particular priority number for.
6. If both the bid value and priority clash for players. We decide who gets the player by a virtual coin toss. Luckily this time we did not go to this extent. Priority number was effective enough to resolve the conflicts.
7. Once all the teams are finalized we set each of our different teams in a fantasy site where each player receives points based on their actual match performance in the world cup and our league table is updated accordingly. And finally, winners are announced when the tournament ends.

Here is a sample R1 bid from one of our fellow participants

8. There is also another rule to bid unsold players in place of a player in your team during the tournament with something called waivers. That is a rule with too many nuances and I am too tired to explain it. The other rules will do, for now, this covers the meaty part of the game.

So What

You might ask me, “Okay a bunch of losers played a fantasy game during the world cup with some mumbo-jumbo rules. So what?” I’ll tell you. With every action of us, we leave traces of data and they sometimes form a beautiful pattern and might look fascinating when you introspect them. 15 of us took part in the game. All the stats and insights that follow are based on the bidding data from 15 of us in several rounds.

The Beauty of Blind Bidding

Since you do not have any information upfront, you do your best guess on what players others might go for, think what others might think that you might go for, avoid players others might go for to reduce competition, and bid highly for players whom you want but also guess others might want him too, etc. Basically, this is a game theory on steroids. If you are lucky enough to evade all competition and go for a player no one goes for you might get someone with a cheeky 1 million bid and feel like you have hit the jackpot.

In the first round there were 15*15 bids submitted by the participants. Out of them more than 50 (1/5th) of the bids were 1 million bids with the hope that no one else will go for that player and to use the budget elsewhere to buy a superstar. The highest bid value was 63 million.

All 15 of us follow football pretty closely. These biddings happened before the world cup started. So all the following stats based on the bidding tell us a lot about how we expected each team and player to perform in the world cup. It looks funny enough retrospectively for many players and countries.

Many for One

Here are the players for whom there was a lot of competition during the bidding rounds.

There are many good players here. Lautaro, Di Maria, and Marquinhos all had bids from 6 different bidders but only one ended up getting them. One thing to note is there are no Superstars here eg (Messi, Ronaldo, Neymar, Mbappe, etc). Many thought others would go for them and tried to evade competition by not bidding for them and using the money elsewhere. But the high competition for the players doesn’t mean that they fared well in the tournament. Lautaro, De Bruyne, Raphina, Nunez, and many more fared poorly. So the winners of the bid are also losers in a way.

Highly Valued

These are the top players based on the total money received in bids for them.

Here you can see Players like Mbappe, Neymar, Messi, etc. Even though they had very few players bidding for them, the bid value was pretty high.

None But One

This is the list I like the most. There are players who received high-value bids but only from one participant. The participant thought these players will face high competition and bid highly only to realize they were the only one in the queue.

Perception of Country

Rather than looking at individual players let’s look at the bid value by country and player position. The countries topping this list were perceived by participants to go far and fare very well in the world cup.

Defenders

The Dutch, Argentine, and Brazilian defenders were highly in demand. The high competition for the Netherlands defenders could also be due to the fact that they were placed in a notoriously easy group and had a pretty good chance to fetch a clean sheet.

Midfielders

Again it's Brazil and Argentina that top the list.

Forwards

Argentina and France Top the forwards' chart.

Argentina was the only team that made it to the top 3 in all the 3 position charts in terms of bidding value. They went on to win the world cup too. As a group, I think we can pat ourselves on the back for getting it right or it might be just a Wisdom of crowds effect kicking in.

Group Dynamics

Here is a network graph of all the participants and their clashing bids. Each node is a participant and I have replaced their names with their initials and jersey number.

Each pair of participants having a bid that clashes amongst them are connected by an edge/line. The darker the line more the number of bids clashing between the two players. We had 4 rounds of the auction and had a couple of participants who had around 8 bids in common R6-J12. Their thoughts are so much alike that they could marry and not have a single fight ever after.

This is a very complex network that is hard to read. Let’s take an inverse of this. Let’s connect only the participants for whom none of their bids clashed at all.

Here each node refers to a participating bidder and the connected edge refers to two bidders not having any bid in common. You can see here S07 and S12 have an edge connected to None. That is because they had at least 1 bid clashing with all the other 14 participants.

Since there is only a set number of good players to choose from the squads of top countries it is very unlikely to have your bids not clashing with any other participant. If that still happens it is either due to coincidence or due to a bond those two bidders have outside the game. ie They had a discussion before submitting their bids to make sure they aren’t competing against each other. For eg. K03 did not have any bid clashing between him and 4 others. It is not entirely possible for this to be just a coincidence. While questioning, K03 agreed that he discussed the bids with R10 and P31 before submitting his bids. It is interesting to note that K03, R10, and P31 are not only part of our football team but are also from the same college which probably explains the stronger bond. The sad thing is even though R10 and P31 did not have even a single bid clashing with K03, they had more than 5 bids clashing between the two of them R10-P31. If only K03 who had known both the bids of R10 and P31 had passed on some information to them their life would have been slightly conflictless. K03 technically double-crossed R10 and P31. A similar triangular pattern can be seen between V17, M32, and J12. They are not only part of our team but also are from the same school and college!

That’s it for today. In another few year’s time, another international tournament will come up, I don’t know if there will be a similar blog after it ends but I definitely hope we all friends will come together no matter what to play this game once again for the pure madness it offers and the chaos it creates.