Anyone interested in putting together a little friendly competition for the upcoming World Cup? I'd be willing to run the deal. I'm not sure about a system to use, but it would basically be like the NCAA tournament where you pick winners/advancers and earn points based on how well you do. The person who accumulates the most points wins the cash. $10 or something small just to make it interesting. If people are interested let me know and I'll work on putting something together.
I know for the 02 Cup yahoo did a prediction thing, cause my college soccer team had a league, I'm not sure if they are doing one for 06 or not.
This means I'll have to do two brackets. One where the USA wins it all. And one for this thing. I'm in.
My favorite type is the draft style that I do each year for the NCAAs. You split up into groups of 4 and draft 8 (16 for NCAA's) teams in order. Groups and draft order are drawn out of a hat. A1 B3 etc. Guy who picks 4th in each group picks first in the 2nd round and so on. You get an increasing number of points as the tournament advances so late wins are more important. Everyone keeps track of points against the whole pool though not the draft pod. There's strategy in that you might like two teams, but if they face each other in the second round, that might be a bad play. The problem sometimes becomes too many people have similar combinations, and tiebreakers like predicting final score are necessary.
In as well. My suggestion is like an NCAA bracket, but with score predicitons. You pick your bracket, pick each games score. Then, in the end, the winner is the person that has picked the winning team, and the tie breaker is player with most correct scores picked, 2nd tie breaker is person who picked closest to the actual total number of goals scored in tournament, 3rd tie breaker is person who picked most correct shutouts...etc.
My suggestion: For the first round: - Predict the placings of the teams in their respective groups. Correctly predicting first place: 15 Correctly predicting second place: 25 Correctly predicting third place: 10 Correctly predicting fourth place: 10 - Predict the scores and winners of each game. 5 points for getting the winner right 10 points for getting the score right. That means that there's 1200 points total in the group stages - 150 in each group - 60 from placings and 90 from scores (in each group). Second round: 0 points for each R16 matchup correct (you've already gotten those points from the placings) 25 points for each QF matchup correct 100 points for each semi final matchup correct. 200 points for getting the final matchup correct. 100 points for getting the 3rd place matchup correct. 400 points for predicting the champion. 300 points for predicting the 3rd place winner. That's 1300 points total in the second round - 100 in the quarterfinals, 200 in the semis, and so on. Which means there's 2500 total points, with a slight bias towards the second round.
My issue is that we almost have to re-pick our brackets once the elimination rounds start. Because if you are a bit off on who gets 1st and 2nd place in each group a lot of your teams could actually play one another in the second round.
I am tentatively in. I would imagine there will be plenty of official contests to choose from -- both prediction and fantasy type contests. Depending on the format I am in. I would keep a close eye on yahoo, soccernet, bbc, etc for their official contests.
I'm in. Last World Cup a group of my friends picked on yahoo and it works pretty good. Since Yahoo is an official sponsor, I'm sure they will offer it again this year. You pick all the group games and scores before the tournament starts and then get to pick the knock-out stage after the group stage is over. It is pretty easy to set-up and you can make the league private. Another nice thing about Yahoo is that you can see what everybody else has picked after the Cup starts and can post messages to talk a little ****.
Bump, anyone else interested? I'll probably go with www.soccernet.com They have one where you pick the score for each game and then pick the bracket once the final 16 are situated.
I've also got a guy at work interested in playing this with us. So far I have these people.... Ben Matt Humphry ralfonso MtMike Goalieo George S. Greg Z. Jeff S. Alex Tom O. Chad Diego Pasley Mark That's 14 people. Hopefully we can get a few more and get it up near 20 people. As I said before, it will be $10 to play. I'll do something like 80% to the winner and 20% to second place.
I'm in. I'll probably get a guy I work with to play, and I might be able to convince Oklahoma Eric to play as well.
http://games.espn.go.com/fsl/front Go to the link, create a user name or log in. Find the group named “KC Soccer Fans”, join that group. The password is: wizards