IZMIR, Turkey – The basketball world championships created more questions than they answered on Wednesday with three of the four groups going down to the wire.

In group A Serbia began the day by beating Australia 94-79 and guaranteed advancement along with Argentina, leaving Australia, Angola and Germany fighting it out for the remaining two spots.

Next up were Germany and Angola, with Angola needing to win to remain in contention. They did just that, holding off the Germans 92-88 in overtime on the back of 30 points from Olimpio Cipriano.

Argentina completed group A action beating Jordan 88-77. Jordan surprised the Argentineans who needed a 30 point haul from Luis Scola to get them up over the spirited Jordanians.

"The situation in our group is very complicated and it is not clear what will happen," Australian Matthew Nielsen (10 points) told reporters following his game.

One team that already knows it is going home is Tunisia, who were convincingly beaten 84-64 by Croatia in the opening game of group B.

But after the game Tunisian head coach Adel Tlatli remained positive: "I am very happy with my team. To lose by 20 points against a team like Croatia is a good result for us. I didn't think we could achieve that before the start of the tournament."

Next up in Group B were the USA who had no problems maintaining their unbeaten run with an 88-51 rout over Iran.

Slovenia guaranteed their spot in the second round alongside the USA, beating Brazil 80-77.

Brazil, Croatia and Iran are now left decide the remaining two spots. Iran must beat Slovenia to have any chance of going through ahead of the loser from the Brazil-Croatia game.

Following an 89-80 loss to Russia China now face the very real threat of not advancing from group C.

They need to pull of an unlikely victory over hosts Turkey or have the Ivory Coast pull of an upset over Puerto Rico to continue their campaign.

It is unlikely for the second scenario to play out with the Ivory Coast suffering another heavy loss on Wednesday, this time to Greece 60-97.

Turkey did however show some kinks in their armor, giving the Chinese some hope with Angel Vassallo (19 points) nearly getting his Puerto Rican side up to beat the Turks, who were lucky to hold on to win 79-77.

In group D Wednesday's matches confirmed that Spain, France, Lithuania and New Zealand will advance to the next round.

Thursday's games will simply decide in what order they will go through. The two unlucky teams going home are Canada and Lebanon.

New Zealand confirmed their spot with the other three teams, by beating the winless Canada 71-61.

Following the game Canadian Joel Anthony (13 points) summed up the feelings of the Canadian team who have experienced three close losses in Turkey.

He said: "It is really rough. It was another close game but we are not able to close them out. The experience here has definitely been good. The guys have learnt how to fight."

Lebanon was able to keep Spain in check for two quarters, before the latter pulled away in the second half to win easily 91-57. Marc Gasol led the Spaniards with 25 points.

In group D's final match of the day, the two unbeaten teams of the group, France and Lithuania came up against each other. Once again Lithuania rallied from behind with Janis Maciulis' 19 points helping his team to turn a 15 point deficit into a 69-55 victory.