by Dr Adrian Worton

We always look forward to the final round of group games, and they delivered some serious drama. In particular, Germany's desperate search for a goal against South Korea will live long in the memory, as will Iran's late surge to give the Portuguese a huge scare.

Out of the 16 teams to qualify for the finals, Portugal, Argentina and Japan were one goal away from being eliminated, whilst Spain and Mexico were a goal away from elimination until added time in their matches. Argentina take the crown of the team who sneaked into the qualification spots the latest, thanks to Marcos Rojo's improbable late goal.

by Dr Adrian Worton

What drama we are seeing at the World Cup! In particular, late shows from both Brazil and Germany have seen them finally get into a good position for qualification. Meanwhile, a ridiculous Argentinian implosion sees them on the brink of elimination...

​Or does it? Today we are going to look at all the permutations of the final rounds of group matches, and give a probability of each team progressing. 

by Dr Adrian Worton

I hope you're enjoying the World Cup as much as I have! I've been watching any game I can, and there's been some great stories. Particularly the growing trend of favourites struggling to get past smaller sides.

This leads to the question of will any big teams actually fail to get through the group stage? Well, in today's article I am going to use our World Cup model, with the latest odds, to give each team's probabilities for finishing in each position in the group.

by Dr Adrian Worton

Fire the fireworks, dance the dance and hide the slums - it's the start of the World Cup today! 

Of course, you already know what is (probably) going to happen, thanks to our World Cup simulator. You may need to slightly adjust those expectations, because today we've updated the odds within our model. In this episode we're going to go through the movers and the shakers within the odds.

by Dr Adrian Worton

We have created a World Cup simulator. This uses bookmaker odds to generate a result for the upcoming World Cup. However, no two simulations are likely to be the same (there are three outcomes for 64 matches, making this a wheat and chessboard scenario).

Therefore, in order to get an idea of which teams are the strongest according to our model, we need to run the simulator multiple times and count the results. That's what we've done, and here we'll give the results.

by Dr Adrian Worton

Thus far, we have focused on the technical side of our World Cup simulator - namely, how it has been created. 

​Today, we are going to look at individual odds for the tournament. We can use our methods for creating the simulator to see which individual markets appear to be good value.

by Dr Adrian Worton

Last week we unveiled the TGIAF World Cup 2018 simulator. This article will focus on the method we use to generate odds for the knockout rounds. By checking whether the results are sensible, this will allow us to look at high-value bets in future articles.

by Dr Adrian Worton

If you are a regular reader of TGIAF, you will be aware that our most unique output is our simulators. Personally, I think the ones created for the General Elections have been the most powerful, but it all started four years ago with our 2014 World Cup simulator. 

Well, it's time to pick your random numbers, because our World Cup simulator is back for Russia!