The following is a guest post by Concordia College sociology major Ryan Larson ’14 and continues his series predicting Olympic hockey results.

With the semi-finals set, I have indicated where I got predictions right and wrong. Keep in mind these are probabilities, and upsets are common in Olympic hockey (1980 anyone?). Recall that the models, at best, explained just under a third of the variance in probabilities. Therefore, getting more than 50% of the games correct would be a case of the model outperforming itself. These are probabilistic statements, and in the case of the Finland Russia game, we would expect each team to each win 50 games were 100 games between them to be played (In sum, it is no surprise that Finland won the game). Also, Slovenia’s defeat of Austria would have 30 times if 100 games were played (in theory), and that game Tuesday morning happened to be one of them. On the other hand, Latvia’s win was a bit more impressive considering their lack of NHL talent. Furthermore, the models are built to explain medal wins, not necessarily qualification playoffs.

In the following bracket, correct predictions are highlighted and incorrect forecasts are marked in red. Additionally, teams who were eliminated are crossed out. In terms of the semi-finals, Sweden’s probability of advancing to the gold medal game marginally increased with Finland’s defeat of host nation Russia. Predicting such rare events (Olympic medal wins), off of small sample sizes (only 4 previous games allowed NHL talent to participate), in a game with a lot of randomness is a difficult endeavor.