Matchday 1 is in the books, which means it’s time to do what we’re all really here for — judge each other’s predictions.
JuveTori leads the way with 117 points after 24 matches, with Dino1995 and Kmartino close behind. The leaderboard is tighter than it looks though — a lot of people are bunched together in the middle, and exact scores are already doing a lot of sorting. JuveTori and Kmartino both hit 4 exact scores worth 12 bonus points for each of them, which at this stage is a pretty meaningful
cushion. The most commonly hit scoreline was Ghana vs Panama 1-0, which 6 people got right.
One fun benchmark: a “consensus bracket” that always picked the most popular result and scoreline would be in 7th with 94 points — 13 correct results plus the one exact score the crowd nailed. Anyone above 94 found some individual edge. Anyone below it did worse than just agreeing with everyone every time.
Across all 18 participants, contrarian picks were right about 29% of the time. I personally went against the crowd 9 times and was right twice, which is the worst contrarian record in the group. Dino1995 did it better — 5 contrarian picks, 3 correct — but the general lesson from Matchday 1 is that the crowd was mostly right when it was confident, and mostly wrong when it was overconfident on a favorite.
The results split pretty unevenly across groups. On one end, Groups I and J were both correctly predicted more than 85% of the time – by far the most through match day 1. On the other end of things, Groups H and K didn’t have a single correct prediction. We didn’t get a lot of predictions right in Group C – just 63.9% of predictions were right – but those that did pick the group correctly picked it very correctly with 9 of the 23 correct picks also picking the correct scorelines. Group L followed closely for the most exact score picks with 7 getting the right scorelines.
The tournament started hot with 17 out of 18 brackets getting the correct result in the match between Mexico and South Africa. Similarly, 17 of 18 correctly predicted Norway’s win over Iraq and Argentina’s win over Algeria (there’s apparently one Messi hater out there…you know who you are). We also all correctly picked Germany over Curacao, although I’m not sure anyone could’ve foreseen the small Caribbean nation briefly tying the match 1-1 (and none of us foresaw what happened after).
Uzbekistan and Colombia wrap up the most correclty picked result, with 17 of us getting it right. 3 people even correctly predicted the 3-1 scoreline for the Colombians.
On the flip side, no one saw either match in Group H ending in a draw. Heck, no one saw Saudi Arabia or Cabo Verde snathing getting points at all. All 18 brackets expected Spain and Uruguay to walk away from the first match day with 3 points each. Everyone also expected Portugal to grab all three points against Congo DR, and Qatar’s draw — snatched from the jaws of defeat with a last second game tying goal — stole 7 points from all 18 of us, and stole 10 points from 3 of us (although JuveTori predicted a 1-0 win to Switzerland, so maybe the draw is for the best).
16 of us correctly predicted at least one scoreline correctly, including JuveTori and Kmartino who each correctly predicted 4 matches. Both correctly predicted the same contrarian pick in getting the 1-0 Ivorian victory over Ecuador correct, and then they each added their own second contrarian prediction with JuveTori getting Brazil’s draw with Morocco and Kmartino getting Belgium’s draw with Egypt.
There’s still a lot of tournament left to play. We still have 48 matches in the group stage worth up to 480 points, and then we have 5 knockout rounds worth up to 720 points each. A 47-point means nothing at this point, or at least that’s what I keep telling myself. Regardless, if Matchday 1 taught us anything, it’s that nobody really knows what’s going to happen. None of us — not even the great JuveTori — managed to get more than half of the points from the first match day. Enjoy the Matchday 2 fixtures, try not to stare at the live leaderboard too much, and let’s hope the consensus bracket starts pulling its weight. I’ll see you all back here for the next recap. Until then, I’ll be re-evaluating every life choice that led to my contrarian picks.
