Researchers generally don't benefit financially from studies being locked behind paywalls either. Academic publishers like Elsevier make a 40% profit margins, while they're asking scientists to do the peer review process for free. In any case, if you want to see the article you can always go on sci-hub (this article is available for free there).

Open access journals are actually less trustworthy in some cases because a lot of publishers have a model where you have to pay to have your study be open access. This will often incentivize the publisher to publish the article even if it's not very good, which sucks because I do think science shouldn't be behind paywalls.

All that being said, people should be skeptical of any article they read because a lot of absolute bullshit makes it through peer review.

Ora/top5 predictions
Se7en/Ascent.NA predictions

Predictions Ascent/Faint https://imgur.com/a/BC7KsG4

It's a round based logit model. Basically there is some unknown skill level for each team, where the chance of team a winning a round vs team b is 1/(1+exp((score_b-score_a)/sigma))). The skill levels for each team are estimated by the rounds each team wins/loses against one another. The duration of rounds is also assumed to be gamma distributed (+ some minimum round time). The parameters of this gamma distribution is assumed to be different for each map.
I estimate all of the parameters for the model at the same time using MCMC sampling. You can then forward model different scenarios for games by simulating rounds from these chances and stopping when you reach 30 minutes/win difference 5.

Here are the predictions for the Ascent EU / BIGBLOKELAN game. https://imgur.com/a/s9IPMMh

I've been working on a statistical model to try and rank the teams participating in this lan based on recent results. I managed to get some pretty nice results from this using the group stage data and some scrim results leading up to the lan, which I added just to give the model enough data to run.

https://i.imgur.com/msSuZir.png

The estimated team ratings are pretty similarly ordered to the seedings, which makes sense. The top 8 open group teams in general are a bit off (I had less data where they played each other). There's definitely a big gap between the bus crew and the other open teams based on match results, but comparison between open teams and the invite group isn't great. I had to choose some sort of starting rating for both the open and invite groups and I forced it so that the bus crew is on a par with the bottom of the invite group which I thought was a reasonable assumption. This might still be underrating the other open teams a lot.

Another cool thing about this model is that you can use it to predict the odds of different match results. At the moment, it can't tell if teams are better or worse on different maps (you'd need a lot more data than I've used for this), but it can predict the number of rounds that are going to happen on different maps (e.g. Granary tends to result in lower scoring games than Gullywash). I'm going to show some of the predictions for the 1st round of the playoffs and I'll probably post some predictions for the later rounds too. As this first round is all open vs invite teams, the predictions probably won't be hugely accurate for the reasons described above.

Probably the most interesting matchup is Corentin Mas Damage vs The Bus Crew. As mentioned above, I deliberately set this up so it would be pretty close.

https://i.imgur.com/QsPtv41.png

https://i.imgur.com/iMIBKtZ.png

The next closest matchup is Xypher vs top5sons. Because The Bus Crew confidently beat the other top 8 open group teams they played, the gap here is big, so this ends up being a lot less close. Because the map used for the prediction is Granary, there's a fairly high chance of a low scoring game.

https://i.imgur.com/DXpHROI.png

https://i.imgur.com/zyvogIn.png

The 1st vs 16th seed game prediction might be a little disheartening for THE OCEAN.

https://i.imgur.com/4PQyrta.png

https://i.imgur.com/Xp3DVuu.png

I'm going to try and put up predictions for some of the matches that are on stream later today (if I can wake up for them).

gink will win.. jay cant move his arm further than 2 inches

https://i.imgur.com/TK14BhN.png

https://clips.twitch.tv/EphemeralFlaccidBasenjiSpicyBoy

https://i.imgur.com/18QWJAX.png

https://clips.twitch.tv/ElatedDirtyVultureKappaWealth

I have a recurring nightmare where im playing against a team of 6 people with no hats, all of them are using the default engi avatar on steam.

dont u just hate it when this happens lads?

https://i.imgur.com/RQ2HCsU.png

There used to be a player on LA skial hightower called 'Silent Assassin' who would charge shot the hightower from spawn, only opening the door for the second the charge shot released. He would never leave spawn at all, and would always killbind on round end to retain his doms. He would play on the server frequently, often for hours at a time. To me, Silent Assassin is the greatest tf2 player of all time.

What are u talking about, this video is ownage...

bait both ur scouts and run back to forwards to tank ur chad pocket instead