Prediction. Forecast. World Cup in Africa!

The first World Cup in Africa has its first African winner. Ghana stunned Serbia when Asamoah Gyan scored on an 84th-minute penalty kick Sunday for a 1-0 victory in Group D. The win set off celebrations not only on the Loftus Versfeld pitch, but throughout the continent. With his 11th career World Cup goal, Miroslav Klose of Germany moved into a tie for fifth overall with countryman Juergen Klinsmann and Hungary’s Sandor Kocsis.Three red cards were handed out Sunday, and all of them were given by referees from Latin America. Two players were ejected with a pair of yellows, while Tim Cahill of Australia got a direct red against Germany.Cahill was ejected by Marco Rodriguez of Mexico in a 4-0 loss to Germany. Serbia’s Aleksandar Lukovic received two yellows from Hector Baldassi of Argentina in a 1-0 defeat against Ghana. Abdelkader Ghezzal of Algeria drew two yellows from Carlos Batres of Guatemala.Slovenia captain Robert Koren struck a long-range shot that Algeria goalkeeper Fawzi Chaouchi misjudged and allowed to bounce into the net off his arm in the 79th minute for a 1-0 victory.”It was a mental victory,” said Slovenian coach Matjaz Kek. “We wanted to win so much, so it’s great for our confidence to get that win.”

And what about you? Do you want to win today? Or every day ? or as ever, as always?

Here we compare the forecast accuracy of different methods, namely, prediction markets, tipsters and betting odds, as well as weighting-based and rule-based combinations of those forecasts. The results indicate that PMs and betting odds yield a comparable and good forecast accuracy. Prediction Markets would allow punters to make more money on the betting market if the betting company does not charge fees or at least does not charge monopolistic fees. In contrast, tipsters’ forecasts are poor, in support of the results of previous studies. Our findings also support results cited by, among others, who show that betting odds and prediction markets provide very good forecasts. These previous studies do not, however, compare the forecasting accuracy of those methods and tipsters, whereas we show that PMs and betting odds forecast equally well and clearly outperform tipsters. Interestingly, Prediction Markets forecasts could yields profits from betting if the betting market charged moderate fees. A weighting-based combination of the forecasts of Prediction Markets and betting odds leads to a slightly higher forecast accuracy, whereas rule-based combined forecasts improve forecast accuracy substantially. However, the latter comes at a cost: It predicts the results of fewer games. Still, our results show that PMs can enhance the accuracy of sports forecasting.