The 2024 European Football Championship has come to an end and has found a deserving winner in Spain. The European Championship was characterized by excitement, emotion and plenty of discussion - not only on the pitch, but also off it. Prediction games provided additional excitement in offices, clubs and circles of friends. This was also the case at PCG DACH.
More than 75 employees competed for the betting game crown. The exciting question: Who has the best intuition, the most soccer knowledge, but also the decisive bit of luck?
Surprise victory
The answer is both surprising and a little sobering. Surprising because first place went to Benny, someone who says of himself: "I'm not uninterested in soccer, but there are far bigger soccer fans than me."
Google Gemini beats them all
Sobering, because he admits: "I had technical help." Out of curiosity, he asked Google's AI solution Gemini for advice. With great success: 8 points ahead of the runner-up secured him a commanding victory, ahead of all the PCG soccer nerds and supposed experts.
The right prompt
Who will be the European champion? Who will reach the semi-finals? Who will win the group? Which team will have the player with the most goals? And of course: What will be the result of the next match? Gemini provided answers to all these questions. Benny predicted all the preliminary round matches in advance, and the other matches as soon as the pairings were known.
With the prompts "What's the most likely result?", "Be more specific?" and sometimes further persistent questions, Gemini finally made a prediction.
Trusting Gemini took effort, but it paid off
The biggest challenge for Benny was therefore not to commit to a result, but to trust Gemini and bet against his own sympathies. Benny: "It hurt a bit that I bet 2:1 on Spain against Germany in the quarter-finals. But it paid off in the end."
AI is more than a prediction based on betting odds
That proves it: AI now has amazing capabilities. It is particularly impressive that it can predict sporting events more successfully than human experts. And an experiment of the Fraunhofer Institut
shows that this is not an isolated case: an AI predicted Bundesliga matches and achieved remarkable success. Interestingly, the AI often successfully bet against the odds and took other factors into account.
The truth lies on the pitch
However, anyone who thinks they can make big money in betting shops with the help of AI is mistaken. Even as the winner of the betting game, Gemini "only" predicted the correct tendency (win, draw or loss) in just over half of the matches (55%). This means that the AI was completely wrong in 45% of cases.
Gemini also predicted England as European champions before the tournament. However, anyone who put their money on Harry Kane & Co. came away empty-handed - albeit narrowly. Somehow reassuring that sport is only predictable to a certain extent.
Conclusion - Not perfect, but better than humans
Google Gemini's victory in the PCG European Championship prediction game shows on the one hand that AI is a long way from making a perfect prediction. On the other hand, however, it is often better than humans. For companies, the use of AI therefore means being able to make more informed and better decisions that influence competitiveness.
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Benny doesn't want to take the prize
Although the help of AI was not explicitly forbidden in the betting game, Benny does not want to accept the prize for first place. "It doesn't feel right. Gemini won, not me. I'm happy to give my prize to the next person in line." So the best human tipster can look forward to an original jersey.