Simon's World Cup 2010 Prediction Game

Rules to the Game

• Predictions: For each match played you must provide, in advance, your best guess at the difference between the number of goals scored by the home and away teams. This can be a postive number if you think the home team will score more, a negative number if you think the away team will score more, or zero if you think a draw will occur.
• Scoring: The idea is to reward a player for guessing a result that is near to the goal difference that actually occurs. The score is defined to be the absolute difference between the prediction and the observed goal difference. The aim is to get the lowest total score.
• Tie-breaking If, at the end of the competition, two players have the same score, then they will be ordered by who has the most predictions that were exactly correct. If players are still tied then they will be ordered by who had the most predictions out by just one. Further tie-breaking will be done, if required, by counting the number of predictions out by 2, 3 and so on, until players are not equal.

Examples:

• In the opening game, South Africa v Mexico, if you were to predict +2 then you think that South Africa will score 2 more goals than Mexico. So if a score of 2-0 or 3-1 or 4-2.... occurs then your prediction is exactly correct and you score 0.
• If South Africa win by +3 goals then your prediction is out by 1 so you score 1. Similarly if South Africa win by only +1 goals then your prediction is out by 1 and the score is 1.
• If Mexico win by 1 goals, then a goal difference of -1 has occurred; this is 3 goals away from the prediction so you would receive an even worse score of 3.

Result: The result is the full-time result in all the matches. Any periods of extra-time or penalty shoot-outs are ignored.

Timing: A player can modify his or her predictions for a match up to kick off. Any predictions that have not been altered are set to 0.

Team Names: The teams are listed according to the convention of quoting the "home" team first. For example, in the second match "URU:FRA" Uruguay is the home team and France is the away team. A full listing of the country abbreviations is here .

I cannot personally accept an entrance fee and award the winner the prize-fund, for practical and maybe legal reasons. However who's to say what you could organise amongst a group of friends.

I reserve the right to remove any player found to be cheating in any fashion.

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