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Friday, March 13, 2009

My brackets after round 1

So the first round of the '09 WBC had its share of upsets, the Netherlands advancing to the second round obviously being the largest. How's my bracket holding up?

For each game played, I put a green box around it if I guessed the winner correctly (regardless of who the loser was), and a red box around it if I guessed wrong. And the results?
Not so good. :) That's 10 correct, 13 wrong. I can't count the first games in the Asian bracket because I posted this after those games started...but that's how I would have picked them, so maybe I can cheat and say I was 12-13? Oh, all right, nevermind.

Dominican is killing me, as I picked them to go all the way. And I was probably foolish to choose Canada over the USA in the first game of that bracket, but you gotta choose an upset now and then (right?) and I was hoping it would be Votto's team that did it.

What's amazing to me is that as bad as that went, the fact that the US lost to Venezuela in the seeding game of round 1 means that I actually have three games "correctly" forecasted to kick off round 2! That's the best I could possibly do given that two of the teams I thought would be in round two are no longer with us. I'm thinking we should up-weight round two games a little bit in the scoring. And given that I'm scoring against myself (i.e. no one else submitted a bracket, save Patriot), I don't have a problem with changing the rules mid-way through the tourney! :)

FWIW, my modified picks are that the Netherlands do not win again, and that the US will finish first in pool 2, with the runner up being Puerto Rico. Venezuela loses game 4 and will be out of the tourney. And I'm rooting for team USA the rest of the way, folks!

Update: Jeff Sackman loves the WBC. Bravo!

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