Are Some Games Harder to Predict Than Others?

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If you've ever had to enter tips for an office competition where the the sole objective was to predict the winner of each game, you'll intuitively recognise that the winners of some games are inherently harder to predict than others.

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The Predictability of Game Margins

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In a recent blog post I described how the results of games in 2013 have been more predictable than game results from previous seasons in the sense that the final victory margins have been, on average, closer to what you'd have expected them to be based on a reasonably constructed predictive model. In short, teams have this year won by margins closer to what an informed observer, like a Bookmaker, would have expected.
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Are the Victory Margins for Some Games Harder to Predict than for Others?

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It's unarguable that the winner of some games will be harder to predict than the winner of others. When genuine equal-favourites meet, for example, you've only a 50:50 chance of picking the winner, but you can give yourself a 90% chances of being right when a team with a 90% probability of victory meets a team with only a 10% chance. The nearer to equal-favouritism the two teams are, the more difficult the winner is to predict, and the further away we are from this situation the easier the game is to predict.
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Estimating Fair Head-to-Head Prices : Part I

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You'll recall that the total overround embedded in the head-to-head market, ignoring the possibility of a draw, is calculated by summing the reciprocal of the head-to-head prices for each team. So, for example, if the head-to-head prices for a game were $1.20 / $4.60, the overround would be 1/1.2 + 1/4.6, which is 105.1%. Some subtract 1 from this figure and would report this overround as 5.1%.
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