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Splash has some awesome contests for the World Cup, with the flagship contest featuring a $2 million prize to first. So naturally, we went very hard with our analysis. When it comes to Survivor, you also have to make sure you have one team from each side available in the semifinals, so you’ll have one remaining in the Finals. The contest requires you to pick 4 teams to advance out of pool play, and then 8 teams during the knockout rounds. You’ll pick 2 teams in the Round of 32, Round of 16, and Quarterfinals (Round of 8). Then in the Semifinals and Final, you pick just 1 team.
What this means is that you may have to pick the Final 4 exactly right. You’ll at least need to pick 2 teams that are in it, and then the other two that make it have to be teams you haven’t used. Then you need both those teams to win so you’ll have one of them available in the Finals. It’s not going to be easy, but that’s why there’s a $2 million prize to first in the big contest. Now that prize may get chopped up many ways if chalk makes the finals, but if there’s a longshot that makes a run it could end up being a lot of money for just a couple people. In smaller contests, it’s possible that you could win before the Finals if upsets happen, but you should always be planning your entry to make it through the Finals.
All we need to worry about at this juncture is our 4 picks for the Group Stage. After the Group Stage, the bracket will be set, and then we can plan out our 8 knockout picks. For now, we want to use teams that we don’t expect to get very far after the Group Stage. We think the optimal approach is to look for teams with high odds of advancing out of Group Stage, but low odds to make the Quarterfinals. We’ve blended the odds across some sharp books and converted them into probabilities to give us an unbiased ranking based on the market consensus.
First I took the odds to advance out of Group Stage, and then I added in the odds to make the quarterfinals, and looked or the highest deltas. I blended the odds from the sharpest European sportsbooks where I believe the soccer odds to be most predictive, and then removed the vig to arrive at these numbers. The best way to play this, in my opinion, is to find the largest deltas between these two odds and that tells you which teams are safest to play in the Group Stage and most likely to get out of your way pretty quickly in the knockout stage. Here are the teams I think are worth considering, sorted by Delta.
| Team | Group Stage % | Quarterfinal % | Delta |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ivory Coast | 80.7% | 10.7% | 70.0% |
| Canada | 84.5% | 14.7% | 69.8% |
| Ecuador | 86.7% | 17.0% | 69.7% |
| Austria | 81.2% | 13.0% | 68.2% |
| Switzerland | 91.1% | 24.9% | 66.2% |
| Uruguay | 86.0% | 20.3% | 65.7% |
| Mexico | 88.8% | 23.5% | 65.3% |
| Morocco | 85.3% | 20.7% | 64.6% |
| Egypt | 72.4% | 8.1% | 64.3% |
| Croatia | 80.3% | 17.0% | 63.3% |
| South Korea | 69.7% | 8.2% | 61.5% |
| Czechia | 69.2% | 8.2% | 61.0% |
| USA | 82.9% | 22.2% | 60.7% |
| Colombia | 87.9% | 27.5% | 60.4% |
| Algeria | 65.6% | 7.8% | 57.8% |
| Bosnia & Herzegovina | 64.9% | 7.1% | 57.8% |
| Iran | 61.9% | 4.9% | 57.0% |
| Belgium | 93.4% | 36.5% | 56.9% |
| Japan | 76.8% | 20.2% | 56.6% |
| Germany | 95.8% | 39.8% | 56.0% |
| Senegal | 69.7% | 14.2% | 55.5% |
| Norway | 84.3% | 30.6% | 53.7% |
| Paraguay | 63.2% | 10.0% | 53.2% |
| Netherlands | 88.6% | 38.0% | 50.6% |
| Brazil | 96.2% | 46.5% | 49.7% |
| Portugal | 93.5% | 45.9% | 47.6% |
| South Africa | 38.7% | 3.4% | 35.3% |
| Ghana | 51.3% | 5.3% | 46.0% |
| Argentina | 95.0% | 51.2% | 43.8% |
| Australia | 46.6% | 4.8% | 41.8% |
| England | 94.6% | 54.3% | 40.3% |
| France | 95.8% | 56.1% | 39.7% |
| Spain | 96.8% | 58.4% | 38.4% |
| DR Congo | 43.0% | 3.3% | 39.7% |
I think for your Group Stage picks you should avoid burning teams with more than a 25% chance of making the quarterfinals, because you have an abundance of other options so there’s just no need to do that. Your top 4 in this chart are the clear optimal plays. Ecuador, Austria, Canada, and Ivory Coast are all over 80% to advance out of the Group Stage, and all just 10-17% to make the quarterfinals. We think Ecuador is a great dark horse pick to make a run, so we’d save them and/or Canada if dipping out of the optimal plays and into the more GPP options. For the 5th and 6th optimal plays, it’s probably Uruguay and Croatia. Then we get into more GPP choices that have lower odds to advance, but will be low owned and very likely to be eliminated in the knockout stage if they do advance. Your entry will be advantaged if you make it through by using some of these teams. South Korea is a good GPP play, as is Egypt, Czechia, Boznia, and Algeria.