“I just followed my gut instinct”
And the cup goes to Poland: Mariusz Frukacz, a Post Doc in D-BAUG, won ETH Zurich’s World Cup predictor game.
“It was the first game of this kind that I’ve ever taken part in,” said Mariusz Frukacz, after the 37-year-old Post Doc at the Institute of Geodesy and Photogrammetry (D-BAUG) won the ETH community’s World Cup predictor game. The prizes for first place – a cup and an iPad – were presented to him last Tuesday.
In actual fact, Frukacz admits to being more interested in culture than sport. Although the Pole does like playing football in his spare time, he only rarely watches matches on television.
“But when I received the e-mail saying that there was going to be a World Cup predictor game at ETH, I thought it would be fun to enter a competition just against other members of ETH Zurich,” he said. Entering also gave him a reason for taking more of an interest in the World Cup, he said, despite the fact that Poland, twice bronze medal winners, failed to qualify this time round.
Stylish Germany
“When I noticed that I was doing quite well with my predictions, I started to analyse matches and read articles about them. But I always relied more on my gut instinct than on a strategy when making my predictions.”
Of course, a few times he was totally wide of the mark, for example with one of the bonus questions that had to be answered before the World Cup started: “I thought Brazil would win the World Cup, but even after their very first match I realised my prediction had been wrong.”
Frukacz had particularly liked the style of the German team, but thought that the Swiss played well too: “Perhaps not against France, but against Argentina they did very well.”
ETH’s predictor game a success
Frukacz plans to place the winner’s cup in his office for the time being. There were also prizes for those who came 2nd to 19th in the predictor game. Corporate Communications, which organised the competition, has notified the winners, who will be able to collect their ETH hoodies, T-shirts and pens from the ETH Store.
The predictor game for the ETH community proved a big success, with 1,400 members of ETH Zurich taking part. “Thanks a lot to the team for organizing the betting game, it was really a great idea,” wrote AVETH President Lars Büthe on the World Cup forum.
The large number of surprise results kept all the entrants on their toes throughout the whole tournament. After all, who would have thought that defending champions Spain or other major contenders such as Italy, Portugal and England would be packing their bags before the knock-out stages?