The BattleBots content you didn't know you needed
BattleBots returns to the Discovery Channel on Thursday for a brand new season. For the uninitiated, the show is the highest profile robot combat promotion. Competitors engage in remote-control battles between custom designed machines. It is not exactly Real Steel, but less Hugh Jackman is often a positive.
There certainly is not a shortage of combat sports these days, but if you are free on Thursday night perhaps check it out. CagePotato alum Ben Goldstein probably described it best back in 2015.
You may be shocked to believe that there is not a wealth of publicly available stats for robot combat. However, the BattleBots website does include match history for every veteran team returning for this season. From this, I was able to scrape the win-loss record and match length for each team, which is enough to do some analysis.
Back in 2015, Andrew Flowers, then of FiveThirtyEight, developed “fight speed score” to illustrate that not only was Ronda Rousey winning all of her fights, but she was also doing so unusually fast. The simple calculation seeks to reward fighters who finish fights quickly in victory and penalizes fighters for being finished quickly in losses. It multiplies the number of wins by the percent of remaining time in victories then subtracts the number of losses times the percent of time remaining in defeats. Let’s look at Tombstone, the 2016 BattleBots champion looking to get back on top.
The analysis includes results from the last four seasons of BattleBots (2015, 2016, 2018 and 2019). During that time span, Tombstone has gone 20-4. The percent of time remaining in the Bot’s victories was 48.42%, and it was 26.81% in losses. The following is the calculation for fight speed score.
Fight Speed Score = (20 * 0.4842) - (4 * 0.2681)
This results in an 8.611 fight speed score for Tombstone, which is higher than any other competitor returning for this season. The bot is also tied for the best winning percentage, which means it might be the robot to beat this year. Its outlier status actually rivals Rousey during her peak.
In addition to the 39 returning bots, there are also 22 making their debut. Tombstone is the early favorite based on past winning history and finishing ability, but it is entirely possible that this Rousey runs into the robot version of Holly Holm.