The 2006 football World Cup is nearly upon us, and to mark this event I am organising a prediction competition for Warwick Business School PhDs and their associates.
Instructions:
Entry is open to all WBS PhDs, their partners and friends (though these may need to tell me who they are in relation to WBS).
How to enter?
Fill in the "Entry Form" Excel worksheet I sent out, or use the following blog.
To help you, I have included a list of who is playing and in which groups. (Remember, during the group stage everyone plays everyone else in their group. Then the top two teams in each group go on to the "Last 16" stage.)
I have also listed who will be able to appear in each match (i.e. which of the qualifiers for the last 16 can meet in a quarter final etc.) You are not obliged to follow this – if you want to list 3 teams from group A in the Last 16, then you can. You are however, obliged to submit only 16 teams for the "Last 16"!
For tips on the teams you could consult the newspapers or the BBC website:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/world_cup_2006/default.stm
Email your entry back to me:
The easiest way to do this is probably to copy–paste the contents of column B into an email.
Entries must be received before kick-off of the opening match on this Friday!!!
This doesn't give you much time to lose!Get working on it now – I'm sure your supervisor will understand…
Scoring is as follows:
For each correctly predicted team you score:
4 Last 16
6 Quarter Final
8 Semi Final
10 Final
12 Winner
There is a bonus also:
12 Predicting the top scorer of the World Cup ("Winner of the Golden Boot")
So you can score up to 188 points in total.
Prizes - two competitions in one!
Some of you like financial incentives, some of you don't (or can't email them, anyway)
Therefore there will be two versions of the PhD competion.
1) Version with a cash prize for the winner – to enter this give me £1 (I'm in S0.62 for those who don't know)
2) Version with no cash prize – free to enter, winner gets the aclaim ofhis or her peers!
I will know who has entered which version, because I will keep a record of who has given me £1 (honest).
Aditional questions:
I am asking for your nationality to test whether nationality relates to success and whether nationality determines who you favour in your predictions.The PhD community is obviously rather diverse, however, so we might not get large enough samples of any nationality to test any of these.
Note also the question asking you to assess your level of expertise. This is to test the hypothesis that experts are no better than non–experts in predicting the World Cup.
Further Rounds:
A common problem to these competitions is that some unfortunate people see their predicted Semi–Finalists and Finalists knocked out during an early stage, and then have little interest in the remaining competition. Subject to demand, there may therefore be further rounds to this competition. More details to follow if people request it.
Results:
I will post news of the competition on my blog
link
including
- who has predicted what
- what the scores currently are
- who finally won
- what the additional questions told us
- who would have won under alternative scoring systems
.
Finally, remember not to take too seriously Bill Shankly's famous saying:
_'Some people believe football is a matter of life and death.
I'm very disappointed with that attitude.
I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.'_
23 Apr 2007 19:17
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