I Make Predictions (Part 2)

Last week, using his scoring system I got six points and Mark Lawrenson got four.   We both got four games right, but I got one score (Manchester City-Swansea) exactly right which is worth an extra two points.  This proves that I know more than he does and my experiment is a success.

More seriously, nothing is proven by one weekend of results.  I do note, however, that only two games were decided by two or more goals whereas Lawrenson picked five games to be decided by that kind of margin.  Not that he knows that we are competing, but I suspect that if he continues to pick half the games to be decided by big margins while I never pick anyone to win by more than one goal, he will be the worse for the comparison.

I am going to do at least one more round of predictions.  I will be using the same rules outlined here. 

Based upon my system my picks are

West Brom-Arsenal        1-1

Burnley-AV                       1-1

Liverpool-Stoke               1-1

Manchester U-Hull         2-1

QPR-Leicester                  1-1

Swansea-Palace              2-1

West Ham-Newcastle    1-1

Sunderland-Chelsea       0-1

Southampton-Man C     2-1

Spurs-Everton                 1-1

I seem to have predicted a lot of draws because there are a lot of games where the home club is just below the visitor in the table.  If I were doing this subjectively, I would not pick six draws in one week, but the lack of subjectivity is the whole point of my system—other than the subjectivity in setting up the rules, of course.  (If I were going to slightly modify the system subjectively, I would just add one goal to Chelsea’s predicted total each week.  This would mean that I would never predict Chelsea to lose—a result I would be comfortable with.)