FATE · World Cup 2026 · tournament complete
World Cup 2026 — Final Report
All 104 fixtures played and graded. This page freezes the campaign record: what the model published, what it hit, what the owner's account made, and exactly what that does — and does not — prove. Record frozen 2026-07-21.
REVIEW ONLY — not betting advice, no edge claimed, 0 PLAYABLE.
Page served 2026-07-28 13:10 UTC · if this time is old you are seeing a cached copy — hard-refresh.
Lane 1 · OFFICIAL AUTOMATED LEDGER
The official FATE record
42 settled Asian Handicap watches (pre-kickoff published receipts only): 25 full wins · 2 half wins · 4 pushes · 0 half losses · 11 full losses — 71.1% hit rate excluding pushes (27 of 38 decisive; 95% confidence interval 55.2–83.0%).
Secondary 90-minute winner lean across all 104 matches: 68–36 (65.4%) — counts only, no odds ledger.
The campaign closed strong: both semifinal watches won (Spain 0 · Argentina 0), and the final watch — Spain 0 in Spain 1–0 Argentina — settled as a full win. The third-place watch (France 0, 4–6 England) was the last loss.
| Stage | Settled | Full win | Half win | Push | Half loss | Full loss | Hit rate* |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Group stage | 14 | 8 | 1 | 3 | 0 | 2 | 81.8% |
| Round of 32 | 12 | 8 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 72.7% |
| Round of 16 | 8 | 4 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 62.5% |
| Quarterfinals | 4 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 50.0% |
| Semifinals | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 100% |
| Third place | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0% |
| Final | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 100% |
| Total | 42 | 25 | 2 | 4 | 0 | 11 | 71.1% |
*Hit rate = (full + half wins) / settled excluding pushes. Splits at n≤4 are anecdotes, not signals.
Was the “34-watch ledger” the final record? No. 34 settled (20-2-4-0-8) was the interim checkpoint published 2026-07-08, before the quarterfinals; the tournament then added 8 knockout watches (went 5–3). The final official count is 42.
Integrity: every one of the 42 graded watches equals the candidate in its last pre-kickoff published snapshot (42/42, receipts locked a median 3 minutes before kickoff), and independent re-settlement from verified final scores reproduces all 42 grades exactly. 62 of 104 matches sit outside the receipt gate: 58 have no pre-kickoff candidate snapshot at all (mostly played before the snapshot layer went live mid-group-stage), and 4 first-evening fixtures (Curaçao–Ivory Coast, Ecuador–Germany, Japan–Sweden, Tunisia–Netherlands, 2026-06-25) have on-time pre-kickoff snapshots in the older data format only, without the current-schema candidate field the grader requires — counting those 4 as well would give 46 watches at 71.4%, virtually the same rate. All 62 are permanently excluded from this ledger.
Lane 2 · OWNER-REPORTED — SEPARATE FROM THE AUTOMATED LEDGER
The owner's account result
Rio bet his own account through the tournament, following almost every FATE lean (not only the 42 receipt-gated watches), at his own stakes and real bookmaker prices. Owner-reported result, 2026-07-21:
≈500,000 wagered → ≈+72,000 net profit → +14.4% return on turnover — +14.40 for every 100 wagered.
By the owner's report: a real, disciplined, month-long campaign that finished firmly in profit — the strongest practical run this project has had.
Label, in full: this figure is reported by the owner and is trusted as such. It is not produced by the automated ledger, there is no per-bet list in FATE's stores to audit it against, and it is never merged into the official record above. It is also not, by itself, proof of a repeatable edge — see the research verdict below.
Lane 3 · VERIFIED PRICING COVERAGE — THE MONEY TRUTH
What the official ledger can prove in dollars
The ledger converts results into money ONLY when a real market price was captured before kickoff for the exact side and line. That standard was met once in 42: Australia +0 vs Egypt @ HK 1.429 (owner-checked bookmaker quote) — the match ended 1–1, the watch pushed, and the verified P&L of the official campaign is exactly $0.00 on $100 staked.
The other 41 watches are counted in the record but never dollared: price capture matured mid-tournament (manual quotes → owner ladder + structured spreads → Asian consensus feed), too late for the bulk of the campaign. From the Round of 16 onward the automated close-capture layer verified 9 closing lines — proof the measurement pipeline works, but far short of a money sample.
Clearly-labelled estimate (NOT the official P&L, NOT a verification of the owner result): if every one of the 42 watches had been priced at a uniform HK 0.80–1.00 at flat $100, the record would compute to roughly +23 to +36 per 100 staked. Real prices varied and were mostly not captured; this row exists to size the record, not to claim it.
Lane 4 · LIMITATIONS — READ BEFORE QUOTING
Limitations
• 38 decisive watches is a small sample: the 95% interval on the hit rate spans 55–83%. Great runs at this size happen by variance alone.
• 62 of 104 fixtures fail the ledger's receipt gate (the snapshot layer shipped mid-group-stage; 4 of the 62 do carry older-format pre-kickoff picks — counting those too gives 46 watches at 71.4%, virtually unchanged). Settling the frozen model lean for ALL 104 fixtures scores 68.7% ex-push vs the official 71.1% — no evidence the gate flattered the record, though small samples cannot prove selection integrity by themselves; the pre-kickoff receipts carry that burden.
• The owner result cannot be decomposed bet-by-bet from FATE's stores; it is reported, labelled, and kept separate.
• With 1 verified-priced watch, profit and closing-line-value measurement never reached sample size in this tournament. The REVIEW-ONLY graduation gate requires 50 verified-priced settled watches; the count stands at 1.
Lane 5 · LONG-TERM RESEARCH VERDICT — UNCHANGED
What this run proves — and what it does not
It proves the campaign was real: a 71.1% official hit rate, a 65.4% winner-lean record, and a +14.4% owner-reported account return over ~500k of turnover.
It does not prove a repeatable market edge. The historical research program stands: a 25,240-match profitability sandbox found zero surviving betting policies across ~150 pre-registered tests; walk-forward fitting chose the pure market price over the model at every single refit; model-vs-market disagreement measures as model error, not hidden value; and the soft-book shortcut failed its backtest. The live paper pilot (1 settled trade this tournament) keeps collecting into EPL 2026/27 under a pre-registered auto-kill rule.
Both truths, together: celebrate the campaign — and do not re-open the betting angle on the strength of one tournament. FATE remains a market-comparison and education product: reference only, no betting instructions, no edge claim.
REVIEW ONLY — not betting advice, no edge claimed, 0 PLAYABLE.
Full methodology, watch-by-watch appendix and audit trail: docs/WC2026_RETROSPECTIVE.md in the FATE repository (data pack proof/wc2026_retrospective_20260721).