Fans the world over, the literature shows, like a little uncertainty in their sports. AFL fans are no different, as I recounted in a 2012 blog entitled Do Fans Really Want Close Games? in which I described regressions showing that crowds were larger at games where the level of expected surprisal or 'entropy' was higher.
Read MoreIf 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.
Read MoreAt the distinct risk of diving yet deeper into what was already a fairly esoteric topic, I'm going to return in this blog to the notion of entropy as it applies to VFL/AFL scoring, which I considered at some length in a previous blog. Consider yourself duly warned - this post is probably only for those of you who truly enjoyed that earlier blog.
Read MoreIt's been quite a year for upsets in the AFL so far. One of the ways of quantifying just how surprising these results have been is to use surprisals, about which I've written previously on a number of occasions
Read MoreThis year we'll once again be using surprisals as a way of quantifying how unpredictable the results of each round and each team have been.
In addition to measuring the surprisal of head-to-head results, which is what we did last year, we'll also look at how surprising each result has been from a line betting point of view - a measure of how accurately the bookies have been able to predict not just the winner but the margin too.
If you're interested in the details, please download this document.
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