First Day of Games

From Sukhdev:

The excitement is building up. We are almost there for the first game. We plugged in the two games for today into our model and we discuss the results below. We used 9999 iterations to produce the results.

In the first game, Mexico is a clearly a more likely winner, which may dismay the hosts. Our model predicts a 68.8% probability that Mexico win compares to a 9.9% chance of a South Africa win. The probability of a draw is 21.3% according to the model. This may seem harsh, but South Africa has not had the best lead up to the World Cup and Mexico, though losing to England and The Netherlands beat Italy in their final warm up game. Against England, Mexico were very unlucky to be 2-1 down by the end of the first half, even though they lost 3-1 in the end. The likely scores look like the following:


















In the other game today, France vs Uruguay, the model unsurprisingly predicts France to win, but only gives a 52.4% chance for that win. Uruguay’s chance to win is 17.7% with a draw having a probability of 29.8%. So the model is less sure about this result compared to the first game. The predicted scores look like:

Well, we hope you have a great first day of the World Cup, and we’ll be back tomorrow to check on these scores and provide the model view for the next set of games.