The league is over for another year, and so our attention now turns to the 2017 All-Ireland Championship. To mark the occasion, a new simulation has been built in order to try to predict who will win. While the results are interesting in of themselves, they have also drawn attention to certain aspects of the championship which could be worth criticising.

The simulation

The simulation is based on the site’s rating of each team, based on their rating before their opening match, and works in more or less the same way as our league preview did (That particular simulation had eventual winners Galway as the third most likely to win, with runners-up Tipperary second most likely, so not a terrible result from that perspective, though it definitely underrated Wexford, giving them only a 10% chance of promotion). The simulation was run 1,000,000 times, and each team’s performance was recorded in each run of it. However, the championship has a few unusual traits which made it trickier to predict accurately, and trickier to simulate overall:

Firstly, we don’t actually know all the teams involved in this year’s championship. Due to a new rule change, the winners of the Christy Ring now play a pre-qualifier match with one of the Leinster quarter-finalists, as well as entering next year’s round robin. This meant that the Christy Ring championship also had to be simulated.

Secondly, the Leinster round robin is a different format to the simple knockout-style of much of the championship. Like the league, the simulation needed a criteria by which to decide between three teams on the same number of points, all of whom had won and lost to one of the other two. Though this was an issue in the league too, the reduced number of games make this tie-break scenario much more likely.

Thirdly, there is a lot of randomisation with who plays who in the qualifier rounds. Even if the simulation correctly guesses who loses each match in Leinster or Munster, it may not predict who then goes on to play against one another in each qualifier round match. Additionally, many venues are not yet decided, so in these cases the simulation either needs to guess at which county’s home venue it’ll be, or if it will be at a neutral location.

Finally, not all teams have the same number of matches, and not all teams reach the quarter or semi finals through the same means. More on that later, but for now: our predictions.

Initial pre-tournament predictions

The charts below display how likely the simulation felt each team was to win the Christy Ring, Munster, Leinster and All-Ireland championships, prior to their first match. As mentioned above, the Christy Ring winner now also has the opportunity to compete for the All-Ireland in the same year, hence its inclusion in the relevent 'feeder' tournaments.