EDITORIAL NOTE

Warhammer 40,000 11th edition launches Saturday 20 June 2026. The Archive is pausing weekly data ingestion (Performance pulls, ELO updates, Attention snapshots) through the transition and resuming with the first post-launch competitive weekend. Existing W23 data remains visible on every signal; the next data cycle lands the week of 3 July 2026, capturing tournaments held on 27–28 June — the first competitive weekend of 11th edition play. The Editor is using the gap for site refinements.

MATRIX CAPTAIN DECISION ARCHIVE

CAPTAIN DECISION ARCHIVE

High-stakes pairing calls from major team events, recorded with their information state, counterfactual analysis, and outcome. The decisions are interesting; the captains are not on trial. Every entry is reviewed for fairness before publication.
5 LIVE ENTRIES · 1 PLANNED
Filters reactivate when the catalogue accumulates across multiple events.

CHTT 2026 · THE FIVE-ROUND ARC

5 LIVE ENTRIES · PUBLISHED MAY 2026
A complete pairings-craft arc from one event, one captain’s seat. Riley Tremblay captained Blunt Force Trauma’s pairings across the five rounds of the 2026 Canhammer Team Tournament. Each round’s entry is a standalone walkthrough — pre-round matrix, the pairing dance push by push, a backward-induction solver comparison, the result, and the captain’s lessons — and together they read as a connected arc: the table miss in Round 1 cashed in Round 2; the soft spot flagged in Round 2 resolved in Round 3; the captain’s sacrifice in Round 4 that originates the Day 2 gear-switch Round 5 refers to. Round 5 is the only dual-captain entry (sourced from both team captains) and carries the Editor disclosure.
CHTT · ROUND 1MAY 2026
The Table They Missed
8-PLAYER WTC-STYLE · SINGLE-CAPTAIN ENTRY
The Custodes pin worked — the table inside it didn’t. BFT got the matchups it wanted and drew the round two points short of a win, because one table layout inside one correctly-pinned pairing went unrated.
table pick unmodelled variable value of a coach
BFT DREW 84–76 · PAIRING WORKED, ROUND DIDN’T
CHTT · ROUND 2MAY 2026
The Table They Took
8-PLAYER WTC-STYLE · SINGLE-CAPTAIN ENTRY
Round 1’s lesson cashed. Same player who lost to an unrated table now wins on a chosen one — Jag’s flat-0 matchup into Death Guard finishes 17–3 on the optimal board. +46 aggregate.
lesson applied threat extraction captain override
BFT WON 103–57 · STATEMENT WIN
CHTT · ROUND 3MAY 2026
The Robbery
DAY 1 FINAL · SINGLE-CAPTAIN ENTRY
Two pairing “blunders” both produce near-max wins — a roster with seven positive matchups absorbs the dance. The EC/DW/GSC soft spot the Round 2 entry flagged finally resolves.
roster depth blunders absorbed soft-spot resolved
BFT WON 135–25 · LARGEST RESULT OF THE RUN
CHTT · ROUND 4MAY 2026
The Captain’s Sacrifice
DAY 2 OPENER · SINGLE-CAPTAIN ENTRY
A pairings captain deliberately routes himself into the team’s hardest remaining matchup, giving up a +2 cell and any claim on top-scorer because the unit of victory has changed. The Day 2 gear-switch the Round 5 entry refers to originates here.
captain’s sacrifice Day 2 gear-switch table denial
BFT WON 105–55 · ADVANCE TO FINAL
CHTT · ROUND 5 (FINAL)MAY 2026
The Blunt Force Gambit
8-PLAYER WTC-STYLE · DUAL-CAPTAIN ENTRY
The Archive’s first dual-captain entry, sourced from both Riley Tremblay (BFT) and Nick (RLD). Three rejection-engineering plays, a captain-as-bait defender call, and an RLD non-matrix championship that called a BFT gambit for reasons the gambit didn’t account for.
dual-captain rejection gambit matrix recalibration
BFT WON 93–67 · CAPTAIN CRAFT MIXED
PLANNED ENTRYINTAKE PENDING
Edmonton / Trinity Hobbies Event
TBD · LATE MAY 2026
Riley flagged the upcoming Edmonton / Trinity Hobbies team event as fresh material for a follow-up entry. Captain-side intake will run after the event.
team event coming soon
INTAKE PENDING

LESSONS · CROSS-ENTRY PATTERNS

THREE THREADS · ONE EVENT · ONE CAPTAIN
THE TABLE THREAD
Table layout is a captain-craft variable, and the matrix doesn’t price it

A four-round arc. Missed in Round 1 (the Custodes “Super L” layout flipped a predicted +1 into a 2–18). Taken in Round 2 (Jag handed the optimal board against Death Guard, a flat-0 cell finished 17–3). Fumbled by the opponent in Round 3 (BDE picked the wrong heavy table for the TSons mirror). Denied in Round 4 (BFT won the roll-off and pulled Table 7 from TH’s top scorer). The variable that costs the round in entry one becomes a captain’s lens by entry four.

Trail: R1R2R3R4
THE SOFT-SPOT THREAD
A captain naming a roster weakness and resolving it across rounds

EC, Deathwatch, and GSC struggled in Rounds 1 and 2 — Riley closed the Round 2 intake saying he wanted “to get them something better next round.” Round 3 is that round: François 20–0 into CSM, Kas 13–7 into EC, Stu 20–0 into the Recon Guard the GSC list was built to pin. Multi-round team management as captain craft, not just single-round pairing.

Trail: R1R2R3 (resolved)
THE COORDINATION THREAD
Pairings authority works as singular — with absence, it fails one way; with overcrowding, it fails the other

The Round 1 entry names “the value of a coach” — the missing role that would have coordinated three games losing on variance into the smaller-loss plays the team result wanted. The Round 5 entry names the inverse failure on the opposing team: “too many cooks in the kitchen,” a coach plus two co-captains producing a confused process. Same variable, two failure modes, two rounds. Round 4’s Captain’s Sacrifice sits in this thread as the positive demonstration — a single captain seeing the round-vs-game distinction and acting on it.

Trail: R1 (absence) ↔ R5 (overcrowding) · R4 (the unit of victory)

These three threads are the catalogue’s current shape. The patterns are drawn from the round drafts’ explicit cross-references — no invented statistics, no “captains who X win N% of rounds.” The pattern surface will widen as the Archive accumulates entries from other captains, events, and formats.