Category : Sport

A Simpleton’s Succinct Summary of Sport

In today’s modern world, it is quite likely that you will come across a group of individuals doing battle with another group of individuals. However, it may surprise you that there are no kingdoms, knights heads, or fair maidens up for grabs. Instead, these people running around like headless chickens are participating in something known as ‘sport’. I appreciate that this may seem rather puzzling. Fear thee not! I have assembled the finest succinct guide in all of the galaxy […]

World Cup prediction results (and some statistics)

Well, the World Cup has been and gone. Enthralling as always, this time the tournament proved to be more of a tactical battle. Although I felt Germany deserved to win, Spain did manage to stamp their authority and lose their ‘perennial underachiever’ status. Let’s look back at my prior predictions to compare them to what really happened…     1. Team that completely meets expectations Prediction: Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) No surprise that I was spot-on here. […]

How many games are there in a tournament?

In keeping with the football spirit, I’m going to use the format of the FIFA World Cup as an example to show you how to calculate the total number of matches/games played in a tournament. There are two cases that we need to consider: 1. The league stage – where every team plays every other team in a group 2. The knockout stage, which follows a structure like that shown in the picture above, until one team is declared the […]

5 alternative World Cup predictions

It’s less than a week to go until the start of the 2010 FIFA Football World Cup – the second biggest sporting event in the world, after the Olympics. As always, before any sort of tournament, there will be predictions, wagers, speculation etc. on matters such as who will win, who will score the most goals, and so on. Whilst all that is very entertaining, it gets a little boring after the same things are said by 100 different sports […]