Theoretical Physics World Cup 2018 Competition

The rules:

The basic idea is to buy "shares" in teams. Every time a team wins a match, it gets a certain number of points. These points are divided among the shareholders according to the number of shares they own.
You have 10 shares, which you use to pick teams. You can choose how you spread them between the teams, but you can take at most only 4 shares in any one team. The number of shares per team is not fixed; the better teams will earn more points, but those points are likely to be spread among more shares. You must decide on your shares before the kick-off of the first match, and it is not possible to change them after that.
The number of points a team gets by winning a match depends on the stage of the tournament
- 1 for the group stage matches (and 0.5 for a draw)
- 1 for getting into to the playoff stage
- 2 for the first round of playoffs
- 4 for the quarter finals
- 8 for the semi finals
- 4 for the third place
- 12 for the final
```
    the number of points you get= 
         (the number of points the team got) 
       * (the number of shares you own in the team)
       / (the total number of shares in the team)
```
The winner is the player who has the most points after the tournament. In case of a draw, the player who owns a bigger share in the winning team wins (or if those are equal then the runner-up and so on.)
No money will be involved: The winner's prize will be eternal glory. In addition, the losers may feel a moral obligation to buy the winner a beer or some alternative non-alcoholic drink should an opportunity to this arise.

How to Participate:

Send your entry by e-mail to a.rajantie@imperial.ac.uk before the kickoff of the first match of the tournament (18:00 Russian time on Thursday 14 June). Use this format in your message:

Name
Institution              
Nationality
XXX
XXX
XXX
XXX
XXX
XXX
XXX
XXX
XXX
XXX

Here XXX are the three-letter country codes of the teams you want to buy shares in. The list of the codes of the participating countries can be found below. Please note that the FIFA country codes can differ from the ones used by broadcasters such as BBC, so make sure you use the correct ones. Otherwise the automatic scripts will not recognise them. You may repeat the same country code at most four times, and there have to be in total 10 of them. Please make sure that you follow these rules, because otherwise you may be excluded from the competition. Because all players may not know each other, I'm also asking you to give your institution and nationality, which will be listed on the web site. If you don't want them to be listed, just leave those lines empty.

An example of an entry email:
`Paul Dirac Cambridge English ARG ARG BRA BRA ENG ESP ESP SUI SUI SUI`

Country Codes:

Code Name FIFA Ranking RUS Russia 70 KSA Saudi Arabia 67 EGY Egypt 45 URU Uruguay 14 POR Portugal 4 ESP Spain 10 MAR Morocco 41 IRN Iran 37 FRA France 7 AUS Australia 36 PER Peru 11 DEN Denmark 12 ARG Argentina 5 ISL Iceland 22 CRO Croatia 20 NGA Nigeria 48 BRA Brazil 2 SUI Switzerland 6 CRC Costa Rica 23 SRB Serbia 34 GER Germany 1 MEX Mexico 15 SWE Sweden 24 KOR South Korea 57 BEL Belgium 3 PAN Panama 55 TUN Tunisia 21 ENG England 12 POL Poland 8 SEN Senegal 27 COL Colombia 16 JPN Japan 61

History:

This competition was first run for the 2002 World Cup by Rob Crittenden, Arttu Rajantie and Jochen Weller, who were postdocs at DAMTP in Cambridge at the time. Then the partipants were mainly from Cambridge, but during the years the competition has grown both in numbers and in geographical coverage. The past winners are:

World Cup 2002	Rob Crittenden
Euro 2004	Peter Johansson
World Cup 2006	Gianpaolo Procopio
Euro 2008	Benoit Vicedo
World Cup 2010	Adam Amara
Euro 2012	Adam Christopherson
World Cup 2014	James Fergusson
Euro 2016	Adam Ritz

Links:

Arttu Rajantie