Is There a Signal in Head-to-Head Market Movements?

Watching the TAB markets as they've shifted across the course of a week I've often wondered if there might be something predictive in those movements. If the eventual favourite's price has shortened during the week, does it win more or less often than its closing price would suggest?

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Predicting Bookmaker Head-to-Head Prices : Five Years On

Recently, in light of the discussions about the validity of the season simulations written up over on the Simulations journal, I got to thinking about modelling the Bookmaker's price-setting behaviour and how it might be expected to respond to the outcomes of earlier games in the season. It's a topic I've investigated before, but not for a while.

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When Favourites Lose: Accuracy or Scoring Shot Production?

In today's post I'll review the performance of all the teams that have been assessed as favourites by the TAB in games played during the period 2006 to the end of Round 17 in 2015, excluding only those games where the TAB bookmaker installed equal-favourites.

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Winning Scores and Underdogs' Chances

Recently, I noted, somewhat in passing in this piece on close game and blowouts, the decline in overall team scoring, a topic that's receiving not a little attention within the football community at the moment, fuelled partly by some recent low-scoring games, in particular the Dees v Lions encounter.

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Best and Worst AFL Teams 2005 - 2015: A MoSSBOD Perspective

In the last blog on this part of the site I introduced the MoSSBOD Team Rating System, the defining characteristics of which were that it Rated teams based on Scoring Shot Production and Concession and that it provided both a Defensive and an Offensive Rating for all teams.

Today I want to explore the history of those Ratings across the last decade to see what MoSSBOD has to say about the strongest and weakest Offensive and Defensive teams across that period.

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A Few More Simulations: Losing With More Scoring Shots and Playing a Draw

The last few blogs here on the Statistical Analyses part of the website have used a model of team scoring that I fitted late last year to explore features of game scores and outcomes that we might expect to observe if that model is a reasonable approximation of reality.

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The Importance of Goal-Kicking Accuracy

So far this season, eight teams have lost after generating more scoring shots than their opponents and three more have been defeated despite matching their opponent's scoring shot production, which means that the outcome of over 15% of games might this year have been reversed had the losing team kicked straighter.

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Who's Best To Play At Home?

The 2015 AFL Schedule is imbalanced, as have been all AFL schedules since 1987 when the competition expanded to 14 teams,  by which I mean that not every team plays every other team at home and away during the regular season. As many have written, this is not an ideal situation since it distorts the relative opportunities of teams' playing in Finals. 

As we'll see in this blog, teams will have distinct preferences for how that imbalance is reflected in their draw.

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