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Every time a WWE pay-per-view (PPV) event is on the horizon, the staff of Cageside Seats offers predictions for all of the advertised matches on the card. This data can be used to calculate a simple predictability rating for any event.
Five different staff members predicted the winners for the matches that took place at Royal Rumble 2018 (Sun., Jan. 28, 2018) from the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Staff members received credit for a correct prediction of the winner of any match, even if they were wrong about the context of that victory.
The Cageside Seats match preview articles for Royal Rumble 2018 also offered polls allowing Cagesiders the chance to weigh in with their predictions.
The following chart contains the prediction results for every match. The leftmost column includes the full match list. Below each staff member's name, the number "1" is a correct prediction and the number "0" is an incorrect prediction. The rightmost column contains the overall predictability rating for every match, and the very last row shows the overall accuracy of each individual staff member.
The entire pre-show is omitted because those three matches were not advertised at the time these staff predictions were written.
The line for Sami Zayn’s match can be interpreted as follows: “5 out of 6 predictions for Zayn’s match were correct, which is a predictability rating of 83.3%.”
Staff Predictions for Royal Rumble 2018
| Match | Geno | Sean | Cain | Rev | Kyle | Polls | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Match | Geno | Sean | Cain | Rev | Kyle | Polls | Total |
| Styles vs. Owens & Zayn | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 83.3 |
| Usos vs. Gable & Benjamin | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 33.3 |
| Men's Royal Rumble | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 33.3 |
| Rollins & Jordan vs. The Bar | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 50.0 |
| Lesnar vs. Strowman vs. Kane | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 66.7 |
| Women's Royal Rumble | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 50.0 |
| 16.7 | 33.3 | 66.7 | 50.0 | 66.7 | 83.3 | 52.8 |
These numbers add up to 19 correct predictions and 17 incorrect predictions, which means the overall predictability rating for Royal Rumble 2018 is 52.8%.
For comparison's sake, the overall predictability rating for 2015 WWE PPVs was 63.4%, in 2016 it was 61.1%, and in 2017 it was 61.6%.
The staff of Cageside Seats struggled with predicting the winners at Royal Rumble 2018. How did you fare, Cagesiders?