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Elo Rankings: The Prediction Bracket

By Joshua Mansfield
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Updated: April 7, 2017

Credit: Jessica Jiamin Lang

Earlier this week, we published an Elo-focused breakdown of the teams going into US Quidditch Cup 10 and their chances of qualifying for day two. One of the most valuable functions of the Elo rating system is that it is able to quantify not only ranking order of teams, but exactly how much better one team is than another. Because of this, we are able to make predictions of teams’s future performances using their Elo rankings. These predictions may not always be perfect—teams could be missing key players and played a relatively few amount of games or the scores might not be perfectly calibrated to reflect the accurate quality of a team. However, as an objective rating system, Elo provides a tool that we can use in conjunction with subjective opinion to gain a better view of the quality of teams.

This year, The Eighth Man will be providing an Elo-exclusive prediction bracket for US Quidditch Cup 10 that will provide the odds of each team making each round of bracket, starting once seeds are announced Saturday night. For the time being, we’ve generated a mock bracket to test this feature that you can find linked below. The seeds for this bracket were determined by taking the top 36 teams most-likely to make bracket play (per our previous article) and ranking them from No. 1 to No. 36. From there, we can plug them into our program that will simulate the ~34 billion potential matchups that could arise in bracket play and generate the odds of each team making each round. According to this model, Quidditch Club Boston currently has a 24 percent chance of winning US Quidditch Cup 10, though as scores and results come in Saturday, these odds will almost certainly change. You can check out The Eighth Man Elo Prediction Bracket at the link below, and stay tuned for the actual bracket with updated Elo scores Saturday night.