It’s time for me to take the ARG flag down and put it away for 4 years. The neighbours will be happy. Heidi too.
Congratulations to GER, and to Jim T and Sayaka T who rose to the top and snatched 1st and 2nd place. Read the rest of this entry »
Nice short piece on the US experience at the Brazil World Cup.
Alternate moral: We are all Germans now.
I like Spanish because it uses upside down punctuation marks.
ARG recruits some serious backup for the final
World Cups are uncompromising, brutal, emotional affairs that invariably end in heartbreak for all but a few. But that’s why we love them.
Gary Lineker, OBE (English former footballer and current sports broadcaster)
Did I really say that this was getting tedious? Wrong!
BRA self-immolating was completely unexpected, even if it was fairly clear that they were not a match for GER. A day later, NED and ARG seemed perfectly matched, but NED crumpled on penalty kicks. The FIFA Organizing Committee clearly knows how to write the script for excitement, and the ARG flag stays up outside my house till the end (much to the chagrin of some of my friends and neighbours). Read the rest of this entry »
Don’t know about you, but this was the most tedious set of quarter-final games I could have imagined. It would have been way more fun to watch CHI, MEX, USA and ALG play off against each other.
The pool standings haven’t changed much with Blair C and Sherman H still leading the pack. Read the rest of this entry »
Hi folks
Below are the leaders after the end of all Round of 16 games. We still have a tie for 1st. Read the rest of this entry »
Ready for ARG-SUI on Canada Day at our house
Holy moly! NED pulls one out of the bag. BRA and CRC both stumble through on penalty kicks. URU flounders without their biting star.
And in the pool results, half-way through the “Round of 16”, we have a tie. Blair C pulls even with Sherman H. This could be (almost) as exciting as the big match-ups on Tuesday (ARG-SUI and USA-BEL).
| Rank | Name | Points |
| 1 | Blair C | 42 |
| 1 | Sherman H | 42 |
| 3 | Charles R2 | 39 |
| 3 | Rezmi M | 39 |
| 5 | Seannie G | 38 |
| 6 | Carlos C | 37 |
| 6 | Donna M | 37 |
| 8 | Casey T | 36 |
| 8 | Charles R1 | 36 |
| 10 | Jim B | 35 |
| 10 | Jim T | 35 |
| 10 | Ken S | 35 |
| 10 | Mauricio C | 35 |
| 10 | Monique P | 35 |
[Ranking have been corrected. Email sent out was incorrect]
If you are wondering whether your compatriots are holding up their end, here are the “team” (and I use that word loosely) results:
| CIBC Drones | Other FI Slaves | Normal People | |
| Avg Score | 31.6 | 29.4 | 30.3 |
The CIBC team has a bit of an edge over the Normal People, with the Slaves from Other Financial Institutions in last place.
Here are the leaders after all group games have been completed. Sherman H is on top! Clearly Sherman has done his homework because in the 2012 Euro Cup Pool he shared last place, and got his entry fee back. Seannie G, who shared last place with Sherman, is also on the “most improved” list in 2014, now tied for 5 spot. Read the rest of this entry »
There are 75 entries in this pool, and 73 of you picked ESP to make it to the elimination rounds. Nearly 2/3rds of you have them getting at least to the quarter-finals. I mean, why wouldn’t they? ESP won the last three international tournaments and brought many of their brilliant players from those competitions to Brazil. They might not win, but surely they would put up a good fight. Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s something.
I have received 69 entries to the pool, with two more promised to come very soon. So 1st prize will be at least $345 and that’s not too shabby.
Most of the payments have come in, so thanks for that. I will be harassing reminding the rest of you shortly.
A listing of all entries will be posted soon (probably on the weekend) just to make sure that I recorded all the picks accurately.
PS: If you haven’t seen John Oliver’s diatribe on FIFA yet, its worth a trip to YouTube. Or click below
Here something to digest in the time remaining before the first game. A meditation on fútbol that references the myth of Prometheus as the reason we are so drawn to the game (some of us only every couple of years, others more regularly).
When an ex-Bank of England governor (Mervyn King) quotes John Maynard Keynes on the topic of English soccer, you know the prospects are bleak.
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-06-08/england-s-world-cup-decline-is-good-for-economy
Here’s a helpful overview of strategy and tactics that we are likely to see at the WC, all in refreshingly plain english.
We’re not scared of the Death Group
We don’t care about death…
because we’ve beaten death before.
We have about 20 entries so far, which I think is pretty good. If I don’t have yours, don’t procrastinate any longer. Send in your picks today. And recruit your friends and family.
If you are looking for more inspiration, here is some from the masters of the universe. The “GS Probability” column shows Goldman Sachs’ estimate of the likelihood that each team will win the cup. (click on image to enlarge)
Here is Goldman Sachs description of how they came up with these predictions:
At a very high level, our approach is as follows:
- We construct a stochastic model that generates a distribution of outcomes for each of the 64 matches of the 2014 World Cup, from the opener between Brazil and Croatia on June 12 in São Paulo through the final on July 13 in Rio de Janeiro.
- The predictions for each match are based on a regression analysis that uses the entire history of mandatory international football matches—i.e., no friendlies—since 1960. This gives us about 14,000 observations to estimate the coefficients of our model. The dependent variable in the regression analysis is the number of goals scored by each side in each match. Following the literature on modelling football matches, we assume that the number of goals scored by a particular side in a particular match follows a Poisson distribution.
- We generate a probability distribution for the outcome of each game using a Monte Carlo simulation with 100,000 draws, using the parameters estimated in the regression analysis described above. We use the results of this simulation analysis to generate the probabilities of teams reaching particular stages of the tournament, up to winning the championship. We use the rounded prediction of the goals scored to determine the outcomes of each game during the group stage and the unrounded forecast to pick the winner in the knockout stage.
- To be clear, our model does not use any information on the quality of teams or individual players that is not reflected in a team’s track record. For example, if a key player who was responsible for a team’s recent successes is injured, this will have no bearing on our predictions. There is also no role for human judgment as the approach is purely statistical.
Use at your own risk.
More gibberish in the full report, here.
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Is it just me, or is this incredibly lame?
The Beautiful Pool 