The 2022 World Cup continues on Monday with two more games in the round of 16, and we're back with more projections and bets for these two fixtures.
My projections simulate each game 250,000 times and are powered by my colleague BJ Cunningham‘s offensive and defensive power ratings for each team. Using his power ratings, I use something called diagonal-inflated bivariate poisson to simulate the scoring distribution for each game.
Let’s dive into Monday's World Cup games.
Monday World Cup Projections
All bets are 1 unit unless stated otherwise
Round of 16: Japan vs. Croatia (10 a.m. ET)
- Croatia are 50.8% favorites to win in regulation and 58.9% to win prior to a possible penalty shootout.
- There’s a 15.0% chance this game goes to penalties.
- Overall, Croatia are favored to advance at 66.4%
- Japan upset both Spain and Germany in the group stage and it seems there's an overreaction to that from the market.
- Japan had a -1.5 xG differential in those two games, and Spain could take it easy knowing they were almost surely through.
- That's opened up value on Croatia, who only allowed 0.88 xG in their first two games before facing a desperate Belgian side.
- Best Bet: Croatia to Advance (-177 via BetRivers)
- Bet to: -185
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Round of 16: Brazil vs. South Korea (2 p.m. ET)
- Brazil are 72.6% favorites to win in regulation and 81.1% to win prior to a possible penalty shootout.
- There’s an 11.9% chance this game goes to penalties.
- Overall, Brazil are favored to advance at 87.0%.
- Brazil have the strongest defense in the world.
- Meanwhile, South Korea averaged only 1.9 xG per game this cycle against an average schedule.
- South Korea also have a strong defense and may make scoring difficult on Brazil.
- There's value on Brazil to win by a score of 1-0 or 2-0.
- Let's put 0.4 units on 1-0 and 0.6 units on 2-0.
- Best Bets: Correct Score 1-0 Brazil (+600 via DraftKings) | Correct Score 2-0 Brazil (+475 via at DraftKings)
- Bet to: +500 and +475 respectively
