World Cup Pool

Came from never finding a World Cup pool that worked the way I had in my head: bracket pools are over by the first knockout weekend, and pick'em pools just reward whoever grabbed the favorites. So I built my own. Everyone drafts twelve teams, one from each odds tier, and a live engine scores the whole tournament, with goal points and upset bonuses keeping the back of your roster dangerous. A Monte Carlo simulation rates everyone's chances after every match, and Claude writes up each day's action for a 7am digest.

It ran for 39 days without me touching it, and the format delivered: the lead changed hands among eight people, the eventual winner sat 26th with two weeks to go, and the whole pool came down to a 148 to 148 tie, split by an underdog tiebreaker written into the rules on day one. The finished pool is frozen as a browsable archive. Built end to end with Claude Code.