About

For all the sport enthusiasts who wish to check their predictions skills with others, Lousy Bets project brings an opportunity to compete and be compared with same mind-oriented pals. Subscribe to competition, make your predictions and then discuss with your friends - those are three simple steps summarizing what it is all about. Currently Lousy Bets is focusing mainly on football, ice-hockey and basketball major events.

Competition formats

Match Results

Match Results format represents a competition where participants predict the match results in terms of score (goals, points, etc.). The predictions can be placed until indicated start of the match. Once the match has started, placing predictions is not allowed anymore.

Unless indicated otherwise, the prediction is made for a score after regular time. Score achieved in all types of additional stages (i.e. extra time, shoot-outs, etc.) is not considered.

Challenges

Challenges format represents a competition type where participants either agree or disagree with defined challenge. The challenges are created directly by participants themselves and they are defined in a form of a logical statement (with a help of expression builder). The creator of the challenge automatically 'agrees' with the challenge. It is not possible to create a challenge and disagree with it at the same time.

Challenges could be created up to 6 hours prior the official start of the match. The purpose of this limit is to allow enough time to participate on these challenges.

Currently, few limits are imposed on the number of challenges that could be created too:

• One participant can create maximum 4 challenges per PlayDay.
• Maximum 4 challenges are allowed per Match.
• Maximum 32 challenges are allowed per PlayDay all together.
• Each created challenge needs to be unique too.

Scoring mechanism

Match Results

In Match Results format, points are assigned using following logic:

• Correct Home Team Score: 1 point
• Correct Away Team Score: 1 point
• Correct Score Difference: 1 point
• Correct Win-Draw-Loose (1-X-2) Prediction: 2 points

These can be combined together, therefore if a correct prediction is made, participat can get max. 5 points for a single match.

Scoring examples:

• Prediction 2:5 vs. real score 2:1. User gets awarded 1 point for home team score.
• Prediction 2:2 vs. real score 3:3. User gets awarded 3 points. 2 points for draw prediction and 1 point for difference.
• Prediction 3:1 vs. real score 4:1. User gets awarded 3 points. 2 points for win of home team and 1 point for away team score.
• Prediction 4:2 vs. real score 2:0. User gets awarded 3 points. 2 points for win of home team and 1 point for goal difference.

For certain sports like basketball or rugby, there is a tolerance factor involved. This mean, that points for score are assigned if the prediction is within the given tolerance.
For tolerance +/- 2, the points could be obtained if user prediction is even 2 points less or 2 points more than the real result.

Tolerance Example (Basketbal: Tolerance +/- 2 points):

• Prediction 72:75 vs. real score 74:68. User get awarded 1 point for home team score within tolerance.
• Prediction 77:75 vs. real score 75:73. User get awarded 5 points. 1 point for home team score within tolerance, 1 point for away team score within tolerance, 1 point for difference and 2 points for win of home team.

Challenges

For Challenges competition format, the point assignment mechanism is using principle of a pot. All participants that answered the challenge either with 'Agree' or 'Disagree' option, contribute to the pot with 1 point. This pot is then divided equally between those who guessed correctly the challenge. The mechanism includes caping of the values in a case of unbalanced responses (too many one-sided responses) to either guarantee the minimum value (1 point) or not overpassing the maximum value (5 points). The shared part of pot is currently rounded to the closest integer by using the banking rounding.

Examples:

• 3 participants Agreed and 5 Disagreed with the proposed challenge. Value of pot will be 8 (3+5).
• If the correct answer was to agree, winners (3 users) take the pot value divided between number of correct answers (8 / 3) => 2.67 points which is then rounded to 3 points.
• If the correct answer was to disagree, winners (5 users) will take (8 / 5) => 1.6 points rounded to 2 points.

Examples with capping:

• In disproportional case, where 1 participant Agreed and 10 Disagreed, the value of pot will be 11 (1+10).
• If the correct answer was to agree, winner proportion will not be 11 divided by 1 (11 points), but it will be reduced to 5 points (maximum possible value).
• If the correct answer was to disagree, winners proportion will not be 1 divided by 11 (0.1 points) but it will be increased to guarantee the minimum possible value of 1 point instead.