With the 2010 World Cup less than three days away, diehard soccer fans with an affinity for data can test their pitch-predicting prowess using two new services.
Predictalot, from the engineers at Yahoo! Labs, builds off of their initial March Madness version to bring a combinatorial prediction market to the science of picking World Cup victors in a multitude of ways. Fans have 15 different options to compare one country's advancement over another, how a certain region will perform, or which side will end a decades-long losing streak. (England, anyone?) The calculated odds of each scenario are adjusted in real-time, based on what the market predicts and how much they're willing to wager. The company says that nearly 50,000 hoops fans made some 100,000 predictions in March when the first rev hit. Now, with the effort going global, Yahoo is no doubt hoping for a larger turnout and will perhaps expand the service to other sporting events down the line. And with 28 trillion possible combinations for the World Cup, there's no shortage of ways to come out on top.
Kaggle, on the other hand, has opted for a slightly more geeky direction, giving users a chance to go head-to-head with quants from various Wall Street fixtures and see who can most accurately predict the outcome. Just enter a CSV-formatted entry form with each country, how far you think they'll advance, and your degree of certainty. Contest organizers have provided some handy historical reference data to help in your selections and have even made predictions from Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and others available for perusal.
So check the latest betting odds and brush up on your World Cup rosters. Soccer bragging rights could be a few clicks away.
