Asunto: Playoff promotion

Hello All...
I have been playing PPM for about 3 weeks now. We had played maybe 30 games before I joined, and I was responsible for maybe 8 games. When I joined, I was placed in a league with a lot of "noname" teams, and was lucky enough to get one of the better remaining teams.

Anyhow, I managed to qualify for the playoffs as the 8 seed, and won my 1st playoff game. If I win the next game (and the series), I'll either (a) Win the league if I win my next series, and get promoted, or (b) finish 2nd in the league, and play for a chance to get promoted. Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding.

So here's my question. I've put together a decent USA III.14 team, but I'm afraid that if I get promoted, I'll get absolutely DEMOLISHED at the next level. Am I better off staying at the III level, and building my team for another season, or going ahead and making the jump to II, and getting killed?

Interested in hear opinions on this. Thanks.

You need to win 3 series to promote. Lose the third series and you will have to play the promotion round. I haven't looked at the lower IIs in a while, but you'd probably lose that series.

I would recommend staying down. You need to get as much OTR as you can to build up your sponsors. No reason to rush things. This is certainly not a sprint.

First off, welcome to PPM and congrats on winning game 1 of your first playoff series.

If you win this playoff series, you'll be in the semi-finals. If you win that series, then you'll be in the finals. You'll need to win 3 series to promote. (If you win all 3 series in your playoffs, you'll promote OR if you win the first 2 series in your playoffs and lose in the finals, then you'll play a promotion/relegation series).

If you promote, you'll get a good amount of prize money and would play in II.4 next season (II.4 is considered the weakest of the division II leagues by the way). You'd definitely have trouble competing against quite a few of the teams in II.4 though and that may take away a lot of the enjoyment you get from the game. If you can handle losing while building up your infrastructure, then I'd suggest trying to promote. If not, then perhaps you should do what you feel is best for your team. In either case, I'd suggest trying to perform as well as you can in the playoffs. Sponsorship offers are heavily influenced by your finishing position in the league playoffs.

In II.1, you would probably lose all 38 games. However, since you're lucky enough to play in II.4's section, you would probably have a chance at 11th or so at best based on the bottom ten teams and teams likely to promote. You would need to significantly improve your team and infrastructure to do any better (unless enough teams quit), but that is not too bad.

Thanks for the opinions, everyone. My bad on needing to win 3 series, not 2. Makes complete sense. In my mind, if I beat the #1 seed, I'll be on autopilot thru the promotion round. I know thats not true and I shouldn't get ahead of myself.

I guess I'm just going to play the best game I can play, and see what happens. Thanks again everyone.

I had the same consideration. However, I'm pretty sure I'm not making it past the 3rd round. But rather than killing my guys to try and have a chance past the 1st round (I'm a 7 seed vs a very active 2), I'm accepting the likely defeat and saving the energy to win the consolation rounds, so I can get decent sponsorship next year and still start near the top of my league.

I would stay down another year.... Congrats on joining. Fun game.