At TGIAF we have created quite a few Simulators, with varying success. Generally, those that have been successful are those where odds for the whole contest is available; such as with the General Election and the Oscars. Our World Cup simulator was built on odds for the entire group stage (75% of matches) whilst our least successful effort, the Premier League simulator, used past results to generate probabilities for the upcoming season, therefore using no current odds.
Method
Using our usual odds-conversion method, we can easily get probabilities for the fifteen Six Nations matches, which can be seen on the page for this simulator.
One way to see the predictions from this model is to look at the expected points tally for each side. This is calculated by multiply each probability by the number of points it would give a particular team, and summing across all matches.
So for example, say we are looking at France, their opening match against Italy has the following probabilities:
- France win - 88.4%
- Draw - 2.3%
- Italy win - 9.3%
2 x 0.884 + 0.023 + 0
Looking at the full tournament we get the following expected tallies:
However, this method does not necessarily mean that England are expected to win. As a stochastic model the only real way to get an idea of its predictions is to look at repeated simulations, as we did with the football World Cup.
Summing Simulations
By observing the results from 1,000 simulations, we can get an idea of how the model really works. Firstly, the graph below shows the average points score across the simulations:
Meanwhile at the bottom it appears to be a fight between Italy and Scotland, as it often has lately. However, it is interesting that all six teams finished bottom in at least 1% of simulations.
Summary
As with our previous simulators, we can now use this to tease apart interesting facts about the tournament and about the way odds are created for it, which will hopefully appear in upcoming articles.
And you can play with the full simulator yourself on this page.