2025 Posit Table Contest submission

Estimating NRL finals probabilities with Monte Carlo simulation

My submission is from a sports analytics side project I did earlier in the year that estimated the probability of National Rugby League (NRL) teams qualifying for the finals based on how many matches they won during the regular season. I simulated 10,000 seasons using a Monte Carlo approach. The full post and methodology is available on my site.

Technical Implementation

Data

• Summarised results from my analysis (nrl_simulated_finals_probabilities.csv)

Tools & Packages

• gt: Core table creation and formatting
• gtExtras: Additional features e.g. stacked bar chart
• tidyverse: General data manipulation and transformation
• Custom styling: FiveThirtyEight theme with custom fonts and colours

Code Structure

create_table.R          # Table creation script
nrl_simulated_finals_probabilities.csv  # Data
table.html             # Generated HTML output
table.png              # Static image version
renv.lock              # Package management

Reproducibility

This project uses renv for package management to ensure consistent results across different environments.

Prerequisites

• R version 4.4.0 or higher (this project was developed with R 4.4.0)
• Git (to clone the repository)

Step-by-step instructions

1. Clone the repository

   git clone https://github.com/mitchhenderson/2025-Table-Content
   cd 2025-Table-Contest

2. Restore the package environment

   # Install renv if not already installed
   if (!requireNamespace("renv", quietly = TRUE)) {
     install.packages("renv")
   }
   
   # Restore all project dependencies
   renv::restore()

   This will automatically install all required packages (gt, gtExtras, tidyverse, etc.) at the exact versions I used.

3. Run the script

   source("create_table.R")

Output

After running the script, table.html will be generated containing an HTML version of the table.

The table object will also be available in your R environment and display in the Viewer pane of Positron or RStudio.

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Created for the 2025 Table Contest using R, gt, and gtExtras