What a great final! That was worth every pint. Kudos to Springboks Faf de Klerk and Handre Pollard, among many, many others.

I didn’t know what to expect when I used the World Rugby ratings to calculate fair odds for the Rugby World Cup. The ratings did really well. I posted fair odds for the 40 group stage games, using the pre-world cup ratings. I used their updated ratings to give you the 4 quarter final games and later the first place and third place games. I found 6 value bets from the 46 games, 4 of which cashed for an 81% profit on turnover. The winning bets included South Africa over England in the final. Earlier winning bets were when Japan beat Scotland, France beat Argentina and Wales beat Australia. Losing value bets were when the USA failed to beat Tonga and South Africa failed to beat New Zealand.

If you want to use the World Rugby ratings yourself for an international, just add three rating points to the home team rating. The probability of a team winning (after adjusting the home team rating) is

P = 0.5 + (team rating – opponent rating)/20.

Limit that to the range .5 to .95. The fair decimal odds would be 1/P.

Good luck to all,

Ray Stefani