The Stat Strats: Ladder vs Tournament Usage

By Lady Salamence. Released: 2023/05/06.

Intro

It's thought that the ladder, even at higher levels, cannot compare to high-level tournaments. While subjective, there are a number of different observations that can be used to consider whether or not this is the case. For example, the Official Smogon Tournament (OST) comes with a financial reward for winning, whereas the ladder relies on personal incentive outside of suspect tests. The ladder requires nothing more than an unregistered Pokémon Showdown! account and six game-legal Pokémon, where the structure of the Smogon Premier League (SPL) limits participation to those who have continually proven themselves across multiple fields of competition. Tournament players have used the ladder before to test potential tournament teams to check whether they were worth running.

Tournaments like SPL and OST require participants to play one high-stakes game a week against some of the best in the game where a single misplay could eliminate you from the tournament, while the ladder expects consistency to reach and stay at the top, running into off-the-wall Terastalization choices and Ash Ketchum impersonators. In those tournaments, team tournaments especially, players frequently have entire groups helping them build and test teams, whereas a suspect test laddering session could entirely be based off a single exported team used by a dozen people with an unknown creator. In tournaments, knowing your opponent and their habits allows you to finetune your team, and on the ladder your opponents are varied and random.

These are subjective opinions about the state of two incomparable areas of competition, however. A single misplay on the ladder could tank the chances that a suspect test alt can reach voting requirements, and there's nothing that is stopping you from bringing your theme team to a tournament match. What doesn't change is that the ladder and the tournament scene are different.

With the recent conclusion of both OST and SPL, objective stats can be used to compare those two tournaments to the ladder. Exploring the top 15 Pokémon for the March 2023 ladder when compared to the combined OST and SPL equivalent can give insight to how these two converge or diverge.

Disclaimers

There are two primary datasets used in this article. The ladder dataset comes from March 2023's full ladder, equally weighting every match without regard for ranking. You can find those statistics here gathered by Marty. The second dataset was gathered manually by the author, using SPL and OST games that took place after the addition of Walking Wake, Iron Leaves, and Hisuian Zoroark.

Limiting tournament stats to Week 8+ and Round 6+ of SPL and OST, respectively, allows for no bans or additional relevant (sorry, Decidueye and Samurott) Pokémon when compared to the ladder statistics. Semifinals and finals of OST, as well as SPL finals tiebreaker, had not been played when the data was collected. This comprises of a maximum of 8 games compared to a dataset of nearly 200 replays.

Lastly and most importantly, always take a stance or story using data to prove its point with a grain of salt, including this one. There are endless stories to tell with data, even conflicting ones.

#
1	43.16	70.10
2	25.31	45.10
3	23.08	32.73
4	19.29	31.96
5	18.61	23.71
6	18.28	19.59
7	17.50	18.04
8	16.57	17.53
9	16.44	17.27
10	16.72	17.27
11	16.07	17.01
12	15.94	17.01
13	15.81	15.98
14	14.42	14.69
15	13.79	14.18

Ten Together, Five Apart

Some Pokémon are just good, like how Landorus-T tends to be dominant in every tier it's present in. While not the genie, Great Tusk shouldn't be a surprise to find in both lists' first place spot. Both serve similar purposes of bulky utility move users, from Knock Off removing items to setting hazards like Stealth Rock to removing it (Great Tusk's Rapid Spin and Landorus-T's Defog), as well as checking major threats like Kingambit for Great Tusk and Mega Lopunny and Mega Pinsir for Landorus-T. It also should not be a surprise that plenty of other metagame staples place in the top 15 for both tournaments and ladder.

However, ten Pokémon in common leaves five spots where there is disagreement. In the tournaments top 15, Amoonguss in 14th place has no ladder placement accomplishment to go along with it, distantly 24th over there. Hydreigon's 11th place, Cinderace's 9th, and Volcarona's 8th place are respectable positions for Pokémon that the ladder sees less often than tournaments do. Finally, Toxapex lands in an eye-opening 6th place for a Pokémon that placed 29th on the ladder.

The ladder passing on those five Pokémon must in turn bring its own five to fill out its top 15. Hisuian Zoroark in 14th place could be its own discussion about the nature of how predictions differ between the two scenes. Torkoal, Clodsire, and Meowscarada land in 10th, 9th, and 8th place, respectively, seemingly the ladder's choice for positions rather similar to Hydreigon / Cinderace / Volcarona present on the tournaments top 15— two fan favorites and the only sun setter in OU.

Why does the sun setter place as high as 10th? Because Walking Wake's coattails dragged it to that finish, with it itself placing an astonishing 2nd place on the ladder for a Pokémon that isn't even in the top 15 for tournaments. The allure of Protosynthesis-boosted Walking Wake was enough, especially when combined with other sun beneficiaries to bring Torkoal to 10th place. Just to clarify that, Torkoal's 10th place was just a side effect of primarily a single Pokémon showing up on nearly 25% of ladder teams at 24.6%, with its tournament placing a very distant 17th place.

The second most used ladder Pokémon brought another Pokémon into the top 15 just by existing, outplacing Pokémon like Kingambit and Gholdengo for a 2nd place spot. This is a Pokémon that was suspected almost immediately after arriving in SV OU and was thought to likely upend both tournaments during its test. In Tournaments, it doesn't even place in the top 15.

Musical Chairs

So, the ladder and tournaments agree on ten Pokémon, but that agreement has some limits. Both sides agree that Great Tusk is great enough for 1st place and that Kingambit, Iron Valiant, and Dragapult are solid enough for nebulous top spots. The tournament top 15 places them in 2nd through 4th, while the ladder lowers them to 4th through 6th, due to Walking Wake and a yet-to-be-named second conspirator.

A few other Pokémon additionally place similarly across both lists. Roaring Moon places 12th on both lists and Garganacl holds 15th regardless of where you look. Hatterene doesn't match up quite as well, with 9th in tournaments and 11th on the ladder. This is about where the similarities in placements end, however.

Corviknight is a symbol of consistency, with a 7th place on the ladder top 15 but a weaker 13th place in the tournaments top 15. Gholdengo is as good as gold on the ladder, landing 3rd on the ladder top 15 matching up to a still-respectable 7th in tournaments, being the second conspirator with Walking Wake to drop Kingambit and friends lower.

Nine Pokémon mentioned wait for one more to join them, the final in the shared ten holding the award for the widest gulf between both placements. Dragonite places a solid 5th in tournaments, but it struggles on the ladder comparatively by placing a distant 13th. Dragonite places on both Top 15 lists, however, which is something that Toxapex and Walking Wake, two others with wide placement disparity, can't claim.

And so, the top 15s are settled, Great Tusk leading the way for both lists and Garganacl acting as bouncer for both lists as well, bookending a total of twenty Pokémon between two lists.

Conclusion

There are many reasons one could argue why these lists are different, and there wouldn't be any way to objectively confirm any of those reasons. Perhaps Walking Wake ranks so high on the ladder because it consistently manages to make some progress in games, whereas Dragonite's flexibility in set choice, from hyper offensive Dragon Dance and Choice Band to defensive Fire Spin and everything in between, makes for more success in tournament games where the unpredictability engenders possible success. Perhaps those reasonings are small potatoes to a different perspective that the author can't even envision.

In the end, data is present for interpretation, and conclusions are open to debate. This article focused on the entire unweighted ladder, meaning even the eternal 1000 ELO players contributed as much to the rankings as those consistently knocking out suspect test requirements. It seems like a perfect storm with two high-skill tournaments providing so many replays and a ladder metagame that made it through a month without any major additions, all in the new modern world where Nintendo is more than happy to shake things up for us mid-generation. It almost seems like it’d be a shame to disregard the opportunity to learn about what brings us together and what sets us apart.

Pokémon is a highly subjective game. If you come out of this article thinking that 10 of the two top 15s means that there's not a huge amount of variance between the two metagames, you're perfectly valid to think that. If you've come out thinking that the two metagames couldn't be further apart and point to Walking Wake and Torkoal or Toxapex and Dragonite as examples, that's a fine conclusion as well. In the end, statistics don't tell a story or pick a side.

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