Who is Paul?

WisePaul’s Paul was inspired by a real octopus. In 2010, an octopus called Paul at the Sea Life aquarium in Oberhausen, Germany, became a global celebrity for picking the results of the World Cup.

The method was simple: two clear boxes of food, each marked with a team’s flag. The first one he opened was his pick. There were no draws: it was one or the other.

He got all eight of his 2010 World Cup picks right, the final included, and finished with 12 correct out of 14 once Euro 2008 is counted. Some saw magic; statisticians likened the streak to tossing coins, with two options in every match. Either way, the story shows why predicting football is so much fun: nobody knows, everyone has an opinion and luck gets a vote.

In 2010 all it took was an octopus and two boxes to get everyone arguing about who would win. Today, in an age when people ask artificial intelligence about everything, WisePaul is Paul the digital way, and the Paul who fronts the platform on the website and in the app: the same love of making a call, minus the mussels and the aquarium.

Unlike the original, our Paul doesn’t make your predictions for you, and we’re not an artificial intelligence guessing results: the predictions are yours, match by match, and that’s what makes them fun. They save by themselves and you can change them until kick-off or the deadline. What the technology does is the boring work: locking predictions at kick-off, receiving the results by itself, updating the table without anyone doing the maths and only showing other people’s predictions once the match locks, so nobody can copy.

And since Paul has no idea what a bet is, neither does WisePaul: here you play for glory. The platform takes no bets and handles no money or prizes.

The aquarium changes, the fun doesn’t: having a prediction and the nerve to stand by it.