The Nostradmus Game

For many years now - at least 20, I suppose - my best buddy from college and I have regularly been indulging in our 'Nostradmus Game' during summer footall tournaments: each round we'll trade lists of predictions for the scores in every game, and see how well we do.

I have almost always been well ahead on the number of exact scorelines guessed, but I felt bad for him that he often seemed to notch up a lot more 'near misses' than I did. So, I devised a scoring system where we get 5 points for a spot-on scoreline, 3 points for a correct result that's only out by a single goal, and 2 points for a correct result but inaccurate scoreline.

I'm pretty sure this tournament so far has been my worst ever. In fact, until the weekend, my buddy was actually ahead of me; and he's still got a lead in exact scores, which is what he still cares about the most.

In general, during the group phase, at least (when ties are often a bit unbalanced, results against the weaker teams usually rather easier to predict), I generally get the right results about 70%-80% of the time, and the exact scoreline a least once in every 5 or 6 ties. This time,... I've only hit the nail on the head once in every 18 games, and I've only even had the right result in 42 of the 72 matches (less than 60%). Of a potential maximum of 360 points from the opening phase, I've only garnered a paltry 128 points. Oh, the shame!

I believe this tends to confirm my general impression that this has been a more than usually topsy-turvy kind of tournament so far, one that is particularly hard to predict. Most of the supposedly 'weaker' teams were not as poor as generally expected; even the weakest of them weren't really complete pushovers. And a number of the big names stumbled out of the starting-blocks rather. Nobody foresaw Qatar taking a point off Switzerland in their opening game, or tiny Cabo Verde holding European Champions Spain to a draw, or Ecuador nicking a win off the mighty Germany, or Congo frustrating Portugal, or Turkiye going down to Paraguay, or Iran and Ghana holding Belgium and England to impotent goalless draws.

I am not a great fan of gambling: I am wary of its addictive potential, disdainful of the supposed thrill of risking money you can ill afford to lose. But I do like to back my own judgement occasionally; I like to think of it more as 'investing'. I only make bets very occasionally, and only when I feel fairly sure that, even if I have less than 50% confidence of success, at least the odds on offer are strongly in my favour, and so, if I make enough of these well-judged bets, I should come out with a net profit. And I almost invariably do - not usually a very large profit, but some.

Unfortunately, what tends to happen is that I get well ahead during the group phase of a tournament and the first round or two of the knockouts, and then start pissing my winnings away again - usually only redeeming myself with mostly successful pre-tournament bets on the semi-finalists and finalists. I've realised that my weakness is sentiment; in the later rounds, I am more inclined to back the teams I want to win, rather than assessing the pros and cons of betting on them more objectively. I wonder if I can finally reverse that trend this year??  (Well, I won't have the chance to do so with an actual betting campaign this time, since I've lost my UK bank card, and am thus unable to top up my online betting account. Bother. But, given how badly I've been doing with my Nostradamus-ing so far, perhaps that card loss was a happy accident; it might have saved me from a first loss-making campaign. Funny how 'luck' seems to have a way of balancing itself out like that!)

Oddly enough, though, despite my thus-far fairly disastrous attempts at prognostication on the results, I'm having one of my best-ever campaigns in a summer Fantasy tournament. It is a funny old world, indeed.