Rules

General

Enter predictions for each match. You can change your predictions right up to kick-off time, but not after that. You are not to see other people's predictions until after kick-off.

Click here for the wikipedia entry regarding the rugy world cup, if you need help understanding its format.

Scoring

Each match can score a maximum of 20 points, split as follows:

Correct winner (10 pts)
Margin of victory (up to 6 pts)
Individual team's scores (up to 4 pts)

Correct winner is quite simple - 10 points if you pick the right winner, nothing if you don't. In the event of a draw, only people who predicted a draw will score the 10 points.

Margin of victory points are awrded as follows. The important thing to note here is that you can score points even if you get the wrong winner!

Victory within...	Prediction Points scored
3	6
6	5
9	4
12	3
15	2
18	1

Example - if you pick England to beat Wales by 2 points, but Wales beat England by 3 points, then you were 5 away from the correct margin of victory, so by the above table, you would score 5 points. Therefore, even though you got the winner wrong, and missed out on the big 10 points on offer, you still get some points as consolation, as you did correctly predict a close game.

Team's scores - maximum 4 points here. Compare your score for team A with how many team A actually scored, and award yourself...

2 prediction points if you were within 5 pts of the actual
1 prediction point if you were within 10 pts of the actual

Do this again for team B, and you've got yourself up to 4 points. For example, if you go for Scotland 24 - 10 Italy, and it is actually Scotland 19 - 17 Italy, then you will score 2 points for your Scotland prediction being within 5pts, and 1 point for your Italy prediction being within 10pts, s you'd get a total of 3 for this scoring category.

Examples of how scoring works

Let's assume that the actual result in this fixture was Wales 32 - 31 England.

Your prediction	Winner?	Margin	Team scores	Total points
Wal 45 - 22 Eng	10	0	0 + 1	11
Wal 26 - 30 Eng	0	5	1 + 2	8
Wal 27 - 23 Eng	10	6	2 + 1	19

Six phases for scoring purposes

The six phases are :

Phase 1 - first pool matches (9th Sep - 11th Sep)
Phase 2 - second pool matches (14th Sep - 17th Sep)
Phase 3 - third pool matches (18th Sep - 24th Sep)
Phase 4 - fourth pool matches (24th Sep - 28th Sep)
Phase 5 - fifth pool matches (30th Sep - 2nd Oct)
Phase 6 - knockout stage matches (8th Oct - 23rd Oct) - ALL POINTS COUNT DOUBLE

Tie-breaker