This week points were hard to come by with 9 players getting 0, including LurkR who has been Mr Consistent up to now. One of the main reasons for the low scoring was the fact that the most popular predictions (Palace to win & Stoke to win) were both wrong.
Against this, the big winners were myself and Rosco Bosco. After a bad run in recent weeks I got a maximum 8 (Sheff Utd win, Dundee lose, Ipswich draw) and so moved from joint 11th to 1st. Rosco picked up 5 points (Sheff Utd win, Dundee lose), following his maximum last week to move from 6th to 2nd. That's 13th to 2nd in 2 weeks. This proves that the competition is very much wide open.
The top 3 is completed by MCM Hoop who drops from 2nd to 3rd. LurkR, who was 3 points clear at the top last week, drops to 4th but the top 4 are separated by only 1 point.
Stoatey, northwesthoop and QPRBex all gained 4 points for 2 correct results.
It really is wide open - a couple of good weeks would move anyone right up the table.
For a bit of fun, I thought I'd measure how good we are at predicting. So far in the 70 matches we've predicted there have been 23 wins, 22 losses and 25 draws - roughly an even spread.
If we assume all 3 outcomes are equally likely and everyone was picking 3 matches at random: - We'd expect to have 5 maximums so far - there have actually been 6 - We'd expect to have 299 points in total - we actually have 378.
So that makes us as a group about 27% better than a random number generator. The top 10 are currently 46% better than a random number generator.
All of which means that it's a hard game but it is worth thinking about it rather than picking at random!