Did you know that there are 40 possible point distributions for a group at the first round of the World Cup? I was wondering how many there are and with what probability they occur. So here are the results of my calculations: There are 729 (3^6) variations of the results of the six matches of the group stage, ignoring the actually scored goals and only considering if the first mentionend team wins, draws or loses.
By ordering the resulting point distribution by the number of points, the results can be reduced to 40 combinations, where the first digit belongs to the first placed team, the second to the second placed etc. There is only one variation, a streak of six consecutive draws, which leads to a point distribution with three points for every team (3333). On the other side, there are 36 possible sequences of match results that lead to the distributions 6443 and 7441.
But which point distributions have the highest probability? Well, that depends on the probability of match outcome. If a victory, a loss and a draw have the same probability, it can be calculated by simply dividing the number of variations for a certain distribution by the number of all possible variations. In case of 6443 this would be 36/729 or 4.94 percent. The assumption that all results occur with the same frequency in very unlikely. To calculate „empirical“ probabilities, I looked at the last five Wor