It's been a long time since I looked at the lineup tips

My MBs never play in IV or V they play III and VI - I'm sure I read an article Steve wrote saying that's where he played his MBs?

And whilst looking for that article (and failing) I found another one suggesting that when your team is the Away team then your starting lineup won't actual be the starting lineup? The player in II would serve first?

Still learnig the game...

I'll answer Matt's question when I have more time.

Roy what I said was that when choosing my lineups U decide which players I want to play each match (I'm playing Quincy so T7, if I can put I'm my 3rd OH I do etc.) and put my setter at I, OHs II and V, MBs III and VI. And then tweak things around based mostly on SRV.

As for the Away team part - the away team (or team listed first in a neutral game) receives for the first point in the first set. When they win the point the team rotates. This means that the player you put in position I starts the game in II for the first point(s) so if you did the "put Setter at I to avoid Setter dumps" he is at the net and might do said Dump. So for away games put setter at VI (unless he's a great server).

I have been wondering about this. so far I have always played my setter at ! to avoid setter dumps, but I don´t actually know what a setter dump is! Is it even that bad?

It's where the Setter dumps the ball over the next rather than setting an attacker. It can't be blocked.

ATK for ATK, Setters are less likely to get a kill and are more likely to be dug. 

A Setter will take a dump 20% of the time if he's at the net and gets a Pass 3 from the receiver. Roughly 10% of all attacks.

Thar should be 5% of all attacks 

Just don't care too much about lineup optimization.

The effects are there and clearly measurable and quantifiable, but their impact is very low. Just "somehow" following the guidelines above should be sufficient to avoid any significant issues.

I randomly assign players to positions.

Damn, I've given away my 'Tactical Genius' plan

Rolls eyes

I go pretty much only by SRV.  But I do try and avoid having 3 weak ATK players together, so will move a good serving OH to be between poor ATK RS or MB, and all combinations similarly.

WIth a poor RS then this pushes my setter to be in the III slot.

I'm beginning to think Eduard is correct for the most part. It is theortically possible to work out the chances of winning a point based on where the players are - it's complicated and I've spent well over an hour working out something (I made several errors and perhaps have made others I haven't spotted). My theory has always been to get your best chance of winning points early in your rotation. As an extreme (impossible) example if your RS has a 50% chance of getting a serve point and your S only 10% it would be silly putting your RS at VI when the set could finish before he gets a chance to serve again. So I've always said (and the Tip agrees) to put your best servers in lower number zones. The other tips basically say the same - your best MB wants to be at the net for the first rotations, your better digging OH at the back. Sometimes they conflict with each other: S at I? But my RS is a much better server so shouldn't he be at I rather than IV?

Anyway some Math(s). I was hoping to prove that a SRV 17 player is better enough than a SRV 14 to warrant serving him earlier no matter what. I probably should have gone for SRV 11 but am not doing this all again. I picked 17 (Brehme) and 14 (Wheeler) because they are my T7s best and middle SRVs. I used Pekin's T7 and used their RCV (17,17,13) to work some stuff out.

First - is the serve out? For Brehme it's 11% and Wheeler it's 14%. So on a 1-100 roll 1-11 is out for both, 15-100 is in for both and 12-14 means a 3% chance that Brehme should be serving first. Is that significant? Well in a close 5 setter you might score 110 points, roughly 60% might be points lost on serve so 66. If Brehme serves well he might get 15 serves in the match of which maybe just one will roll in that 12-14 so not giving away an easy point. It could be a critical roll at set point - but only once.

I then worked out all the possible serve ratings each player could get and the chances of which Pekin player was the receiver.

The chances of an Ace are 9.4% with Brehme and 7.5% with Wheeler. Brehme might get 1 more Ace.

A Pass 3 (what you need for a MB to attack or the dreaded Setter dump) goes up from 53.5% to 57.4% (4 per game?). A Pass 1 (where it could be the OH or L setting) goes down from 13.2% to 11.7% (2 per game?)

Next is correlating the Pass ratings with the Setter's SET (13 for Pekin's best player) to see how well he sets - I did't take into account the Pass 1 going to a L or OH. There is virtaully no difference between the two servers with Set 1 (3 blockers) and Set 2 (2 blockers). There's only a 1.4% increase in Set 3s with the weaker receiver.

Added together it's possible around 3 or 4 points per 5 set match - likely to be a bigger difference if I compared my SRV 11 player rather than 14 and also put in one of Pekin's weaker RCV rather than the two 17s.

I need to bookmark this topic to revisit later. 

I just hope the other team doesn't play their T7.

Ditto on the bookmark, Steve is king, thanks for the insights (always)!

Ditto on the bookmark, Steve is king, thanks for the insights (always)!

As to TT's approach, I mostly follow the basic instruction Matt put in his post from the ORDERS page. We occasionally play around if we think we have a shot at taking all 3 matches in a 3 match session,

I have been blindly following sound strategy...I think.