What's More Important: Who You Play or Where You Play Them?

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The benefits of playing at home have been extensively investigated both here on MAFL for Australian Rules football and more generally within the sports prediction community for this and other sports. Put simply, teams that play at home win more often and score more points than you'd otherwise expect them to after adjusting for the quality of the opponents they face.
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Do Bookies Undervalue Team Performance Metrics?

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In 2003 Michael Lewis' Moneyball was published, in which he related the story of Billy Beane, Oakland A's General Manager, and his discovery that the market for baseball players mispriced particular skills. Some skills that could be shown, statistically, as being associated with greater team success weren't recognised as valuable (for example, getting on base, as measured by On-Base Percentage), while other skills were over-valued because of an historical belief that they were related to success (for example, batting in runs, as measured by RBI).
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In-Running Models: Confidence Intervals for Probability Estimates

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In a previous blog on the in-running models I generated point estimates for the Home team's victory probability at different stages in the game under a variety of different lead scenarios. In this blog I'll review the level of confidence we should have in some of those forecasts. More formally, I'll generate 95% confidence intervals for some of those point forecasts.
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Explaining More of the Variability in the Victory Margin of Finals

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This morning while out walking I got to wondering about two of the results from the latest post on the Wagers & Tips blog. First that teams from higher on the ladder have won 20 of the 22 Semi Finals between 2000 and 2010, and second that the TAB bookmaker has installed the winning team as favourite in only 64% of these contests. Putting those two facts together it's apparent that, in Semi Finals at least, the bookmaker's often favoured the team that finished lower on the ladder, and these teams have rarely won.
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Hanging Onto a Favourite: Assessing a Favourite's In-Running Chances of Victory

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Over the weekend I was paying particular attention to the in-running odds being offered on various games and remain convinced that punters overestimate the probability of the favourite ultimately winning, especially when the favourite trails.
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Predicting a Team's Winning Percentage for the Season

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In recent blogs where I've been posting about a win production function the goal has been to fit a team's season-long winning percentage as a function of its scoring statistics for that same season. What if, instead, our goal was to predict a team's winning percentage at the start of a season, using only scoring statistics from previous seasons?
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