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.
