And the winners are:

1. Katrin
2. Simon
3. Ariane

With impressive stats, being sole leader for 62 out of 64 matches and with five point ahead of the second place, Katrin surely deserves the title. Also between the second and the third place is a comfortable margin of four points. Finally third on the podium and with 32 result points the best better in terms of tendencies is Ariane, who also holds the record for most correct tendencies in a row (7).

Congratz to all winner …
The prizes will be handed over soon ;)

Only eight teams left and 54 matches played in the 2010 World Cup, time for another short summary:
Katrin is still far beyond a little strange, though looking at the 2006 World Cup (picture above) it seems that she is performing normal and everybody else just sucks this year!?
The top ten betters had on average 45 points in 2006 while it’s only 39 points this year.
Due to the lower scores and small spread amongst betters in this year’s World Cup, more contestants have a chance to still reach the winners’ podium (maybe leaving the first place aside, for which I dare to go out on a limb and say that only Katrin has good chances).

After all teams have played their first match, it’s time for a little wrap up!

Well seems like Katrin found a bug in my code and used it to rule the game …
Katrin you are hereby disqualified!!!
Okay … just kiddin’, well done job I gotta say. But there is plenty of points left to be earned!

Some stats for now:

• the average number of points is slightly lower than during the last World Cup
• also the spread amongst the first ten is larger this year
• the maximum (thanks to Katrin) is six points higher this year
• for now Sigrid has the most correct tendencies in a row (in total 5 matches)
• Katrin is the most frequent sole leader (in total 14 matches)
• Marcello earned the most result points (10 points)
• and (no surprise) Katrin got the most score points (12 points)

And there is some new features to be presented ;)

1. as of today the scoreboard features a (hopefully) much nicer colour scheme
2. the scoregraph now features individual (non-overlapping) graphs for each person
3. the standings page features some more stats compared to previous events
4. you auto-fill your bets using various (random) algorithms
5. there are some imaginary players called Dirk-1 to Dirk-4 taking part in the game, using exactly one random representation of each of the algorithms
6. the webpage design and more important the backend has been redone in part and features XHTML 1.0 strict and CSS 2.1 compatibility for all pages but the weblog one
   which makes the pages show up nicely on mobile devices, at least on mine ;)