I just posted this on reddit, though it’s reproduced below. If you have any comments, please do so on reddit where you’re likely to get better discussion than you would here!
Often, commentators will mention how certain maps favor certain races. I figured I would take a look at actual win rates to see how true those differences are.
| PvT | PvZ | TvZ | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Whirlwind | |||
| Close Positions | 52-57 (47.71%) | 76-75 (50.33%) | 52-77 (40.31%) |
| Cross Positions | 25-26 (49.02%) | 31-41 (43.06%) | 36-39 (48.00%) |
| Total | 81-89 (47.65%) | 118-127 (48.16%) | 98-123 (44.34%) |
| Star Station | |||
| Close Positions | 4-4 (50.00%) | 5-5 (50.00%) | 6-7 (46.15%) |
| Cross Positions | 36-37 (49.32%) | 43-63 (40.57%) | 91-70 (56.52%) |
| Total | 43-44 (49.43%) | 50-73 (40.65%) | 106-82 (56.38%) |
| Frost | |||
| Close Positions | 24-18 (57.14%) | 29-27 (51.79%) | 19-21 (47.50%) |
| Cross Positions | 12-10 (54.55%) | 17-11 (60.71%) | 7-7 (50.00%) |
| Total | 37-28 (56.92%) | 49-41 (54.44%) | 27-31 (46.55%) |
| Alterzim Stronghold | |||
| Close Positions | 8-9 (47.06%) | 17-8 (68.00%) | 3-3 (50.00%) |
| Cross Positions | 1-6 (14.29%) | 7-2 (77.78%) | 3-2 (60.00%) |
| Total | 9-15 (37.50%) | 24-10 (70.59%) | 6-5 (54.55%) |
Methods and Discussion
For each replay, the map is divided into a 3×3 grid, and each cell is assigned a clock position (11, 12, 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9). The starting building (CC, Hatch, Nexus) position for each player is recorded. With those, cross positions are all locations that don’t share either a column or row, leaving 3 cross positions for each starting location. For example, 11 is cross from 3, 5, and 6.
The Replays are mostly from released tournament replay packs uploaded to Spawning Tool. Unfortunately, the biggest source of professional games is WCS, and they haven’t released for 2013 season 3 or 2014 season 4 (though I’m excited to redo these numbers after they do!). Because of that, we don’t have as many examples from newer maps.
Maps are collapsed across the different versions (e.g. Frost and Frost LE are counted together). Star Station was changed to a 2 player map at some point, and Alterzim Stronghold is relatively new. For the other maps, close positions are twice as likely as cross positions, so that’s the difference in counts.
A confounding factor here is bans. Since players in tournaments can ban maps that they don’t have favorable matchups in, we have a biased sample on these maps. I don’t really have any thoughts here.
The cross/close position data is available on Spawning Tool (though it does require sticking &tag=1173 or &tag=1172 to work in the research tool), so I welcome you to poke around with the data there to see if you can find anything else. Also let me know if there is anything else you’re interested in that you think can be informed by replay analysis!