# Jackpots Not A Big Factor In London Roar’s Match 5 Win

##### by Barry Revzin 0

October 31st, 2020

The London Roar came away with their 2nd win in as many matches this week, and for the first time this season, Jackpots didn’t wind up playing a major role in who came away with the victory. That’s largely due to the fact that the top 3 teams were more balanced than we’ve seen in other meets.

London Roar netted out +8 on Jackpot points, LA Current and Tokyo Frog Kings were each +11, while DC Trident were -27. This marks the first meet where the winning team wasn’t at least +40 on net Jackpot scoring.

This dampening was expected both as meets become more balanced, and as teams learn which swimmers are ‘on’ and which are not, adjusting lineups accordingly. Coaches we’ve spoken to expect there to be fewer-and-fewer Jackpots, especially into the post-season.

Broadcaster Bernie Guenther made a comment during today’s match about how jackpots seem more likely to happen in the shorter races, so we thought that we’d take a look to see how accurate that observation was. With 5 matches, and lots and lots of jackpots, in the books, we can take a look at what the breakdown is of the jackpots by distance and see if there’s any trend there.If we just look at the total jackpot points earned, by distance, we get the following:

+---------+-------+
| dist    |   sum |
+---------+-------+
| 50      | 190.0 |
| 50 Skin |  72.0 |
| 100     | 117.0 |
| 200     | 203.0 |
| 400     |  57.0 |
| 4 x 100 |  26.0 |
+---------+-------+

If you include the skins, that’s 262 points earned in jackpots across the 50s as compared to 117 in the 100s, 203 in the 200s, and just 57 in the 400s. But let’s set aside skins for the moment.While there have been more jackpot points earned in the individual 200 events than in the individual 50 events, there are actually more individual 200 events (10) than there are 50s (8). We don’t have the 50 IM quite yet (although we here at SwimSwam are unaware of any rule that would prohibit a team from reliving the Greatest Swimming Rivalry of All Time and selecting Breststroke-Backstroke for the skins). And so the 50 comes out ahead on a per-event basis (23.75 jackpot points per event, as compare dot 20.3). Surprisingly, on a per-event basis, the 400s (14.25) actually even come out ahead of the 100s (11.7), although they have less of an overall impact on team scoring.We can break it down further and look at the percentage of events earned a jackpot at all and what percentage of those events earned a large jackpot:

+---------+-------+------+-------+-------+-----------+------------+
| dist    |   sum | mean | stdev |  perc | perc >= 4 | perc >= 10 |
+---------+-------+------+-------+-------+-----------+------------+
| 50      | 190.0 |  4.8 |   4.9 | 92.5% |     40.0% |      22.5% |
| 50 Skin |  72.0 |  2.4 |   4.0 | 43.3% |     30.0% |       3.3% |
| 100     | 117.0 |  2.3 |   2.8 | 80.0% |     16.0% |       4.0% |
| 200     | 203.0 |  4.1 |   4.4 | 80.0% |     34.0% |      18.0% |
| 400     |  57.0 |  2.9 |   2.5 | 85.0% |     20.0% |       5.0% |
| 4 x 100 |  26.0 |  1.0 |   1.7 | 36.0% |      8.0% |       0.0% |
+---------+-------+------+-------+-------+-----------+------------+

Here we see that nearly all 50s (92.5%!) earn at least 1 point of jackpot, although it’s still a large majority for the 100s, 200s, and 400s, and overall the average jackpot for a 50 is 4.8 — the highest in the group. The 50s also have a larger share of large jackpots. 2 in 5 events has a jackpot of at least 4 points (which would be jackpotting 3 athletes in an individual event ) and more than 1 in 5 has a jackpot of at least 10 points. Earning 19+ points in an event individually is pretty huge, so seeing numbers this large (22.5% for the 50s and 18.0% for the 200s) is quite something.Separately, here’s the distribution of the jackpots earned by distance (relays earn double this much). I omitted the Skins in this table because the specific jackpot values just differ a lot:

+---------+----+----+----+---+----+----+----+
| dist    | 21 | 15 | 10 | 6 |  3 |  1 |  0 |
+---------+----+----+----+---+----+----+----+
| 50      |  0 |  5 |  4 | 7 |  6 | 15 |  3 |
| 100     |  0 |  1 |  1 | 6 | 12 | 20 | 10 |
| 200     |  1 |  1 |  7 | 8 | 13 | 10 | 10 |
| 400     |  0 |  0 |  1 | 3 |  8 |  5 |  3 |
| 4 x 100 |  0 |  0 |  0 | 0 |  2 |  7 | 16 |
+---------+----+----+----+---+----+----+----+

The largest single jackpot thus far has been Marco Koch‘s 21-point jackpot in the 200 breast last week. Nobody has yet earned a perfect 30, although we’ve seen 7 15-point jackpots thus far.