Look, just flip a 3 sided coin

Last week was a bit rough for the prediction tool. Poor thing. I think maybe everyone had a bit of a rough go though, so I'm not feeling that bad. There's no listing for the midweek Expert picks on mlssoccer.com, but in browsing their last round it looks like most of em did about as poor as I did.

Right now the spreadsheet is sitting on 44.8% correct, 12.5% exactly wrong, and 42.7% mixed (picked a winner when the match was a draw, or picked a draw and there was a winner). So still not too terrible.

This week I'm gonna try something new and add a column for "confidence" based on how one sided a predicted win is, or how close the betting is for a draw.  You'll get 100% confidence if either everyone picks one team to one or if the betting is exactly split between the two teams. Note that this is still different from model accuracy, just a measure of how confident the model is in it's prediction of that result. Maybe some day I'll even look at how the confident results compare to actual results (i.e. does model confidence correlate with actual outcomes, so more confident matches are more likely to be picked correctly?), but that's for later when I've got more time.

Oh, and I actually figured out an easy way to drop people out who only bet on the early matches. It made a difference in the GD predictions for a few matches. It was easy. I'm not going to discuss it because it makes me feel dumb, but it involves something called the "delete key".

Anyway, now, predictions, which I actually am getting in on time this week and am very proud of myself for. In fact, we're even going to drop it in in table form. Because I'm lazy and copy and paste is easy.

Team	Result	GD	Confidence
Houston	WIN	+2	97.5%
Portland	LOSS	-2	97.5%
DC	WIN	+2	78.0%
Colorado	LOSS	-2	78.0%
Vancouver	DRAW	0	94.7%
Seattle	DRAW	0	94.7%
Montreal	DRAW	0	73.9%
New York	DRAW	0	73.9%
DC	WIN	+2	88.3%
Toronto	LOSS	-2	88.3%
New England	WIN	+1	90.5%
Houston	LOSS	-1	90.0%
Dallas	WIN	+2	100.0%
Philadelphia	LOSS	-2	100.0%
Colorado	DRAW	0	95.7%
Kansas City	DRAW	0	95.7%
Chivas	LOSS	-1	62.8%
LA	WIN	+1	62.8%
San Jose	WIN	+2	100.0%
Columbus	LOSS	-2	100.0%
Portland	WIN	+2	55.4%
Chicago	LOSS	-2	55.4%