S15M12: Snoods out for the lads

As is tradition, post-international break blogs are short. Mainly because I can't remember what happened, outside of one specific match.

I'm not really one for international football but my word did my Irish & Scottish heritage kick in this week. By which I mean trips to both countries to sample their liquid culture. Wonderful stuff. Troy Parrott should now retire as he'll never have a better week, and I can't decide which Scottish worldie is my fav goal - McTominaldo's overheard, KT inverting to curve one past klubmate Kaspar from 20 yards or the pump-fake from halfway. Obviously, given my real heritage, which is Set Piece FC, I'm going for their second goal...class

But we're back in it now. Temperature drops. Passions rise. Lezgo....

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Let's get statty:

This week, 22 people played
Most popular predicted result: Chelsea WIN (21/22)
Most disputed predicted result: Spurs vs Man Utd (10-7-5 split respectively)

Highest odds: AFM (6,632/1)
Lowest odds: Josh Daniels (1,434/1)
Average odds: 3,301/1

Best predictor: David Brickman (8/10)
Worst predictor: Hannah Daniels (2/10)
Average score: 5.14/10

Best predicted result: Chelsea WIN (21/22)
Worst predicted result: Sunderland vs Arsenal DRAW (2/21)

Everyone's score:

Leaderboard (>2/3; 8/11)

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To this week's predos:

Good luck all

S15M11: We're safe (for now)

Its's 2025. I'm a busy man. So I did what anybody would do. I asked ChatGPT to lighten my load.

My load is not lightened.

After four attempts, it’s clear that asking ChatGPT to write a football blog is like asking a goldfish to explain offside. The enthusiasm’s there — lots of words, plenty of confidence — but somewhere between the algorithmic optimism and the “irreverent tone” brief, it loses the plot. One version started musing about kettles, another reviewed imaginary teams, and by the third, we’d entered full existential crisis territory. So, rather than risk another 400 words of synthetic banter and misplaced metaphor, we’re cutting our losses. The AI’s gone back to its data cave, and we’re sticking to what it can’t ruin — the results. Cold, clean, factual results. No tangents, no tortured analogies, no leaf-clearing philosophy. Just the scores, as they happened, free from poetic interpretation or robotic rambling. Sometimes you have to admit defeat, whistle for full-time, and take the point. Now, on to the football.

This weekend saw an interesting series of events where all the models (av 7.1) outperformed the normal, regular joes (av 5.5) by quite a bit. This isn't quite an AI thing, but made me think about how expertise has been reviewed in isolation, and what a collated model might be, One for the off season perhaps...