Monte Carlo event generators have traditionally been regarded as useful general-purpose simulation tools rather than precision instruments, with sufficient knobs to be tuned to fit any data, without necessarily having the right physics content. For some purposes, such as the estimation of detector corrections, this is fine. But for the coming era of searches for discrepancies with the Standard Model, the best possible precision will be
needed. Over the past decade, significant progress has been made in this direction, primarily by various types of matching to higher orders in perturbative QCD. I will review this work, with examples relevant to the LHC, concentrating on vector boson and heavy quark production. In particular, I will discuss the forward-backward asymmetry in top quark pair production (a next-to-leading-order effect in the SM), and the prospects for LHC confirmation (or not) of the anomaly in this quantity reported by the CDF collaboration.
