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Alright, tomorrow is the big opening between Mexico and the host country. Here is how the National Team rankings handicap each match in the group stage. The way this is done is by separating each game into 33 equal scoring chances for each team, and their chances for each would obviously be the predicted goals scored divided by 33. From there it’s fairly easy to use the Binomial Distribution to predict who wins and loses. [Read more →]

Well this Friday the big shindig starts in South Africa with the host country facing Mexico in the opening match. And so in anticipation of that, here are the final set of numbers before the tournament gets under way. [Read more →]

It’s now May of 2010 and that means the big shindig is almost here. So to kick off the run-up to the start of the World Cup, the most obvious place is an update of the National Team Rankings. Since last November, most of the International Matches played have been friendlies, though the African Nations Cup was completed (congratulations Egypt) and some Asian Cup qualifiers have been played. [Read more →]

Okay so now we know exactly which teams will play each other in the Group Stages and where the teams that advance will go in the bracket.

How has that changed things? [Read more →]

Here it is, which teams will play which teams.

WC 2010 Draw

A good draw for my team, but we’re capable of losing to anyone, so no point in getting too excited.

I’ll try and run some sims as soon as possible.

UPDATE: A coding error caused some odd things to happen in the previous set of sims and so I had to re-code things and then re-run the sims. The new (and fixed) run of sims are now reflected in the table and the old ones tossed out. The data dump file has also been replaced with the new set of sims. Apologies for this screwup. My bad.

Okay, so we have 32 teams and they have been separated into the following pots:

Pot 1: South Africa, Brazil, Spain, Netherlands, England, Argentina, Italy, Germany
Pot 2: Mexico, USA, Honduras, Australia, Japan, South Korea, North Korea, New Zealand
Pot 3: Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Cameroon, Ghana, Algeria
Pot 4: France, Portugal, Denmark, Serbia, Switzerland, Greece, Slovakia, Slovenia

The restrictions on these are that South Africa can’t be drawn with any of the African teams in Pot 3, while Brazil and Argentina can’t be drawn with any of the South American teams in that pot. [Read more →]

Have finished writing the code for the World Cup Simulations. Some features in this one:

1. 10,000 sims as usual.
2. Results of all 640,000 matches in dump file.
3. Win percentages for each team in both percentage and fractional odds form.
4. Current version alternates between CONMEBOL/CAF and CONMEBOL/AFC/OFC composition of pots. Will change when we know for sure which is which
5. Penalties decided by coin flip.
6. New match simulator using a binomial function instead of Poisson (this further reduces the problem of underrating favorites).

Will try and get a full roll out by tomorrow. Unsurprisingly, Brazil are the tournament favorites winning roughly a quarter of the time.

[Read more →]

Three more teams are in, the final six will be known by tomorrow night.

The updated National Team Rankings can be found here.

Full qualification chances can be found here. [Read more →]

Okay, there’s 9 spots left, 4 in Europe, 3 in Africa and 2 more in playoffs between Asia and Oceania and North and South America.

An important note: One minor change has been made to the National Team rankings. In the explanation to the rating system posted earlier, I explained that I needed to convert goal scoring to a number between 0 and 1. To do that I divided goals by the number ‘180.’ That number has been changed to 27. Why? Well because it appears to work better, it covers every single score in the history of international soccer and it also makes a favorite like Slovenia was over San Marino less likely to drop points (but not by a lot). For now that’s the only change I’m making as other changes have proven to be a little more complicated and I need time to work on them.

The updated National Team Rankings can be found here.

Full qualification chances can be found here. [Read more →]