Big Dawg Billiards

Why the Posting Cap Is Dropping to 25 This Session

Session 3, 2026 — Monday, Tuesday & Wednesday Race Grid Leagues

The Short Version

Starting this session, the posting cap for all three Big Dawg leagues is coming down to 25 — a drop from 27 on Monday and Wednesday, and from 28 on Tuesday. Two things are driving the change: player turnover has thinned and reshuffled several rosters, and a hard look at what teams actually posted last season shows the old caps had more room in them than the current player pool needs.

The clearest sign of the roster shift is Monday night. All Queued Up and The Leftovers didn’t come back this session; in their place, the field regrouped into two new squads, Raising Gordizona and Team Flinta / Croucher. Across all three nights, team sizes this session range from as few as 6 players up to 11 on a single roster — a wider spread than a league running at full strength would typically show.

The table below lines up the two pieces of evidence side by side: what teams actually posted, on average, under last season’s cap, and what this session’s rosters compute to under the same method used to set the cap in the first place. Both point the same direction — down to 25.

“Session 2 Avg Posted” is the average of every fielded skill total (HPSL/VPSL) across every team match last season. “Session 3 Top-5 Skill” is each team’s 5 players with the most last-season matches played — the ones most likely to actually be fielded — pooled across every current team into one average, rounded to the nearest whole number, then multiplied by 5 matches. *Monday’s raw average (4.45) was just under the standard rounding cutoff; it was rounded up to 5 as a judgment call to keep the same 5-per-player baseline as the other two nights — see the note under “Rolling it up” below.

The Math, In Detail

How a posting cap is calculated

The posting cap is meant to represent a realistic ceiling on the total skill level a team can field across a weekly match. Rather than use a team’s whole roster, only each team’s 5 players with the most matches played last season are counted — the players who actually show up and play, not the occasional sub who’s on the roster but rarely fields. Those top-5 groups are pooled into a single average skill level across every team for that night (not an average of team averages — every counted player counts equally), that average is rounded to the nearest whole number, and the result is multiplied by 5, the number of matches played in a weekly team meet. Rounding happens before the multiplication, not after.

This session’s rosters, night by night

Below is every current team, its roster size, its average skill level among only its top 5 players by last-season matches played (the number that actually counts toward the gross average), and its full-roster average for reference.

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Rolling it up: the gross average per night

“Gross” means every counted player (each team’s top 5 by matches played) on every team for that night is added into one pool, rather than averaging each team’s average — a night with more players on strong rosters pulls the number up more than a simple average-of-averages would.

Monday’s raw average, 4.45, sits just below the standard 4.5 cutoff and strictly rounds to 4. It was rounded up to 5 instead — a deliberate judgment call to keep the same 5-per-player baseline across all three leagues rather than let one night land on a different number by four hundredths of a point. Tuesday and Wednesday both clear 5 on their own. With that call, all three nights land on a gross average skill level of 5 per player, and 5 × 5 matches = 25.

Worth noting on Monday specifically: the Magicians’ top-5-by-playing-time average (4.20) comes in noticeably below their full-roster average (5.10) — some of their higher-skill players simply logged fewer matches last season than their more frequent, lower-skill teammates. That’s part of the same story as the roster turnover described above: who actually shows up and plays now looks different from the roster on paper.

What teams actually posted last season

To check that 25 is a fair number and not just a formula on paper, it’s worth looking at what teams actually posted under the old caps last season. Every individual match record from Session 2 was pulled and each team’s posted skill total (the sum of the actual skill levels of the players who played, not the final game score) was compared week by week against the old cap.

Data note: two exact-duplicate game records (one on Tuesday, one on Wednesday) were found in the raw export and removed before these totals were calculated. One Monday match — Pho Cue Monday vs. Magicians, week 15 — is still missing 1 of its 5 game records; that week’s totals for those two teams reflect 4 games, not 5.

Monday — old cap 27

League gross: 23.05 average posted across 60 team-match instances — 2 over cap, 8 exactly at cap, 50 under cap. When a team posted under the cap, it did so by an average of 4.80 skill points.

Tuesday — old cap 28

League gross: 24.01 average posted across 90 team-match instances — 5 over cap, 7 exactly at cap, 78 under cap. When a team posted under the cap, it did so by an average of 4.67 skill points.

Wednesday — old cap 27

League gross: 23.26 average posted across 90 team-match instances — 9 over cap, 13 exactly at cap, 68 under cap. When a team posted under the cap, it did so by an average of 5.13 skill points.

Putting it together

Two independent checks land on the same conclusion. First, actual play: under last season’s caps of 27 (Monday/Wednesday) and 28 (Tuesday), teams posted under the cap on the large majority of weeks — roughly 80–85% of all team-match instances across the three nights — and even when a team did fall short of the cap, it was typically by 4.5 to 5 skill points, not a razor’s edge. That’s a sign the old ceiling was set higher than the rosters fielding under it actually needed.

Second, roster composition: applying the exact same gross-average-times-5 method to this session’s current rosters — after the player movement and team reshuffling described above — produces a rounded average skill level of 5 per player on all three nights, for a cap of 25. That’s not a coincidence of the math; it’s the same underlying pool of players, now smaller and reshaped, producing a lower number by the same rule that set the cap in previous seasons.

Together, that’s the case for 25: it’s close to what teams have actually been posting in real matches, and it’s what the current rosters compute to under the league’s own method. It isn’t a cut for its own sake — it’s the cap catching up to where the leagues already are.