By Zach Slaton, Contributor Day Two of the 2013 Sloan Sports Analytics Conference is already underway, but here are a few brief thoughts from Day One. The Soccer Analytics panel is at 1 PM this afternoon, but the next best thing was on Thursday night at the third annual Soccer Analysts meet up at McGreevy’s.  All credit goes to Sarah Rudd and Ravi Ramineni for arranging an event that had 30+ soccer nerds discussing their latest theories, favorite teams, and sharing a few beers along the way.  You’ll find very few gatherings with so many of the foremost soccer analytics writers and practitioners present and engaged in casual, off-the-record conversation.  A small sampling of attendees included two out of the four Soccer Analytics panelists – Chris Anderson and Blake Wooster – along with Manchester City’s Gavin Fleig, the “reclusive” Orbinho (his own Twitter profile description, not mine), and the entrepreneurial Howard Hamilton, amongst others.  There were even a few people unable to attend the conference who still attended the meet up knowing the fun and value in the Soccer Analysts event.  All had a good time, new connections were made, and everyone made it back to their hotels in time to not make the first day of the conference too tiring. The theme of the day one panels was certainly data presentation and making data consumable by non-analysts.  There is a sense from the conference’s size, its range of participants, and the general zeitgeist of sports analytics outside of the conference that the battle for acceptance has been won by the data nerds.  Trouble With the Curve moments now seem to be the exception rather than the rule, but there is still a lot to be done by data analysts to ensure their models are used in the most effective manner possible by those who are not as numbers-inclined.  The conference has emphasized cleaner and leaner data presentation as being key to such success, with an outstanding emphasis on Tufte principles in the Data Visualization panel.  Data analysts who want to be effective and move up within organizations should heed the conference’s advice and focus as much on their presentation, visualization, and general “people” or EQ/EI skills as their data management and programming skills. Betting analytics has its own panel on Saturday, but that didn’t stop gambling from coming up during Friday’s panels.  Blackjack legend Jeff Ma and Nate Silver, known for his poker exploits amongst others, provided interesting commentary on the True Performance and the Science of Randomness panel.  They actively encouraged attendees to use gambling and games-of-chance of the legal variety as one of the best training grounds for the use of probabilistic thinking and applied statistics.  Elsewhere on day one the Business of Sport panel provided some useful comparisons between the prevalence of betting organizations as sponsors of teams in Europe (even to the point of having their logos on jerseys) and such organizations’ complete absence in official relationships with North American professional sports teams and leagues.  Gambling is always a …read more
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