The Beautiful Pool

Warning: Time Crunch Ahead

We are now 2 matches into the Group Stage, and I have updated the Beautiful Pool standings. See below.

But more importantly, the final Group Stage fixtures are this Saturday, 27 June and the first Knock-Out Round fixture is the very next day, on Sunday 28 June. This weekend is going to be insanely busy, especially because I will be out-of-town until Saturday.

I will make the entry form for the Knock-Out Round available as soon as the final standings are known, but there will be very little time for you to make your picks and send them to me. (I thought there was a 2 or 3 day gap, but I must have misread the schedule). There can be no lallygagging.

Please be ready.

Ladies and Gentlemen, your Beautiful Pool leaders…

Now that every team has played two matches, some of the quirkiness has been squeezed out of the standings. For example, when I calculated the results after one game, SCO was in first place in Group C, ahead of BRA and MAR. There was no way they could hold on to that.

As a result, the Beautiful Pool leaders look quite different now. Only Kyoko T and Sherman H have retained a place on the list. The rest emerged from the pack to take their place of honour.

Rank	Name	Points
1	Brianna W	76
1	Kyoko T	76
2	Andrew C	75
2	Donna M	75
3	John N	74
4	David DC	73
4	Sara J	73
4	Sherman H	73
4	Stephen B	73
4	Stuart B	73
4	Theo L	73

The Newbies are doing very well, it seems. There are 4 Newbies (and one Prodigal) among the top 5 leaders; so, we seem to have attracted some very knowledgeable, or lucky, competitors for our little enterprise. We shall see.

You can see exactly how you are doing by downloading the full results here. Don’t worry, unless you are Cindy B you aren’t in last place.

Remember Joachim Klement, at Panmure Liberum, who has a system that has perfectly predicted World Cup winners since 2014? I previously shared his predictions, and if you had blindly followed them you would now have 70 points, very much in the middle of the pack.

A Belated Explanation

After sending the last update, I was reminded that I didn’t explain how I calculated your rankings. I will now rectify that oversight.

Remember that you get two points for correctly predicting each team that will advance from the Group Stage to the Knock-Out Round. 32 teams will advance, so that makes a total of 64 possible points if you get it exactly right. You get an additional point if you correctly pick the position of the team coming 1st and/or 2nd in each group. There are 12 groups, so that means you could earn another 24 points for getting the advancing teams in the right order. The maximum possible score for the Group Stage is therefore 88 points (64 + 24 = 88).

To determine the scores that I used to see who is ahead while the Group Stage is still underway, I just use the position of the teams in each group after the 1st and 2nd round of games.

Glad that’s settled and sorted and done and dusted.

Epilogue

If you have gotten this far, you might have forgotten the warning at the top of this update. Please go back and read it again.

I’m serious.