Join the Scrumqueens prediction game!

One thing that British television screens are not short of is advertisements for bookmakers. On commercial television stations almost every other advert seems to be encouraging viewers to bet on ever more obscure events.

Given the apparent sporting knowledge on display, and the fact that you can already bet on next year's men's world cup,ScrumQueenswondered what odds bookmakers might be offering on the World Cup, which starts in barely eight days time.

We contacted several major bookmakers, and there was remarkable unanimity across the board. Not a single one was running a book on the tournament. A spokeman for PaddyPower admitted that he had vaguely heard that women play rugby, while BetFair and SkyBet promised that something might appear before the tournament (but we are now a week away, and there is still nothing).

Admittedly we were not that surprised. Bookmakers, it seems, very rarely have anything to do with women's sport - particularly team sport. They just do not want your money.

Nevertheless there is an alternative, if you want to demonstrate your prognostication skills. South African sports prediction website Superbru is running afree prediction gameon the world cup.

Once logged in, you can predict the winners (and winning margins) in all of the pool games, while entering yourself into leagues to see how you do against other supporters of your team, or friends (we've started aScrumQueens pool- just in case you wanted to show that you know more about the game than we do!). And, even more interesting, once you've entered your predictions you can see what everyone else has chosen.

There's nothing to be won beyond demonstrating your superior knowledge of the game (or not), but so far a remarkable 6,424 people have already entered. At present slightly more than half of these are South Africans, which may account for a few surprise results being predicted, so at the time of writing predicted match results would result in the following week-two match-ups:

Superbru Predictions (24.7.14)

Semi-finals:New Zealand v South AfricaEngland v Australia

Fifth-place play-offs:Ireland v USACanada v Samoa

Ninth-place play-offs:France v KazakhstanWales v Spain

So, dig out the crystal ball and see what if you can do better.