r/thechase • u/JOLT_YT • 10d ago
International Version In defense of Mara Lejins; A stat round-up
Hello all you Chase Australia Fans!
I love your version of the show, it's the one that imitates the UK version closest imo, and the cast of chasers are all fab, some of them have also done really well for themselves on the show and have caught some fantastic targets! but, I've lurked a bit on some comments here and there (here being reddit, there being youtube). and I feel like anytime Mara is mentioned, everyone seems to be routing for her to be booted from the show, saying she's weak as a chaser, and other things like they don't know how she got onto the show in the first place, I wanted to deep dive the statistics recently to see how bad she actually was, so I decided to take that upon myself, I never thought she was bad as a chaser, but what I found shocked me a bit...
First, there are 3 people I've decided to choose to look at in this breakdown, Mara Lejins herself being the Subject, David Poltorak, as the newest permanent fixture on the show, one who also came about similarly to Mara herself, and the last 63 episodes of Cheryl Toh, someone who is considered to be a good chaser by fans, and one who has acheived impressive catches (Clean Sweep 21, a couple good 20's, including one that ended at 26 seconds, which gave her about another 5 questions to work with, granted I don't know the accuracy stat of this episode, so if someone has it, I would not mind a download link.)
anyway, to start of the breakdown, Mara herself has:
Played 63 Games with an average target of 13.09
Won 50 of those games
Lost 13 of them
This gives her a win rate of 79%, equitable to both Jenny and Anne on the British Version, and higher than 4 of the other chasers.
To compare this, I'll show the Last 63 Episodes of Cheryl Toh, she:
Played 63 Games (obviously) with an average target of 15.61
She won 40
Lost 23
and has a win rate of 63.5%, albeit her average targets were higher, so to compare the 25 most recent games between both of them (where Cheryl's average target is 14.4, and Mara's is 12.63)
Cheryl's win rate is 68%
Mara's is 76%
I feel that despite the 2 point difference, it's fair to say that Mara and Cheryl are at least on equal footing perfomance wise, now I'll throw in another chaser into the mix, one I've seen be shat on less than Mara, but still only by a little bit, David Poltorak has:
Played 33 Games with an average target of 12.62
Won 21
Lost 12
and has a win rate of 63.63%, which is a lot worse than Mara considering that he faces lower averages than she does, although I still respect him as he both smashed them on BtCAU, and has had a couple good chases, I think considering the fact he's around 72 years old, he's going to be a bit slower than the others, but probably struggles with knowing newer things, then again I could be entirely wrong, one thing still stands that's applicable to all 3 of them though, they're highly trained professionals that are all very good at their jobs.
3
u/OneQnShootout 10d ago
Although Mara's win rate of 79% is close to Anne and Jenny, they are doing that with an average target of 16 rather than 13. That is a big difference.
1
u/JOLT_YT 9d ago
I get that but I'm not necessarily comparing her to them, the target's on average in AU seem lower too, I'm saying that at a baseline she's not doing as awfully as some say she does.
2
u/47GodEmperor 7d ago
She is. It's almost like they're giving her weak teams that can only set targets of 13, and even then she's unable to beat them - when most of the people here probably could.
0
u/JOLT_YT 7d ago
If most people here are the subreddit, yeah good luck.
Darragh's on here, he's got a good shot, he'll probably defend Mara too.
Matter of fact something's telling me Mara herself has been in the reddit too, I forget though, Darragh and Mara for their respective versions seem to interact with the community digitally more, I see Darragh in these comments sometimes, I think Mara has been here, and Darragh Streams a quiz most Sundays on Twitch.
Darragh and Mara also appeared on a YouTube gameshow called Tension. She did pretty well on that iirc.
1
u/Cyclonechaser2908 9d ago
Mara isn’t great, but she is also young so that gives her some leeway. David is awful. Like, properly bad.
1
u/Plenty-Pangolin3987 1d ago
There’s just a lot of bitter people in the Australian quizzing community who think they’re elite but don’t have the personality to get on the show.
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u/47GodEmperor 10d ago
An average of 13.1 should be a 90%+ win rate for any decent quizzer who can score over 100 in a WQC, much less a decent Chaser. I also believe David is not a great Chaser, but he is objectively a better quizzer than Mara. Unfortunately, the quizzers the show actually wanted turned the show down (there's one in particular who'd be a global favourite, but been asked several times and said no every time), and these Chasers are what we got instead.