MAFL 2010 : Round 6 Results

Regression to the mean is a bit like unprompted advice from a friend: not always welcome.

But a weekend of regression it ultimately was for Investors with the Recommended Portfolio, as their last-chance Eagles failed to capitalise on their early-game form and eventually went down to the Dockers by over six goals.

With MIN#002 losing also, the only Investor to show a profit on the weekend was MIN#017 who made a 0.55% gain.

Here are the details for all Investors:

Overall, Investors with the Recommended Portfolio profited from four games and made losses in the other four. The most disappointing loss, I felt, was the one on the Dogs, who looked set to take the competition points before a scrappy final term in which they kicked 0.2 to the Saints' 3.4 saw them fall just 3 points short.

Geelong, mercifully, fully justified their $1.01 price by obliterating the Tigers at Kardinia. So comprehensive was their victory, in fact, that they broke the scoring worm on the www.afl.com.au site:

(Apart from the Cats' escaping worm-orbit in that screen capture above, there's also something going on with the axis scaling, which seems to suggest that the Cats are in front by more than 150 points when their lead is actually 'only' 108. I think this is an example of what programmers would refer to as an 'edge case', basically a rare but pernicious eventuality that a programmer must recognise and code for.)

Here are the full details of the weekend's wagering:

On tipping, just five favourites were victorious, leaving a little room for other tipsters to outperform BKB, which Short Term Memory I, Silhouette and Consult The Ladder duly did in each bagging six.

That leaves Short Term Memory I in the outright lead on 35 (73%), and four tipsters - Silhouette, Consult The Ladder, Easily Impressed I and Follow The Streak - just one tip behind on 34 (71%).

It's a bizarre season indeed when members of the Easily Impressed and Short Term Memory heuristic families are vying for tipping supremacy.

Chi continues to deliver the sort of tipping performances that leave me glad that I retired the Chi Fund.

This week the Heuristic Fund dropped 2.2%, so Shadow is now just two further weeks of losses away from losing control of this Fund which, as things currently stand, would be handed over to Short Term Memory I. That'd be fun - having our money entrusted to an algorithm that is the statistical equivalent of a goldfish.

On MARS ratings, Geelong did enough, and the Saints didn't do quite enough, such that positions 1 and 2 have been reversed, with the Cats taking a 1.6 rating point lead. The only other changes were amongst the teams in the bottom third of the ratings ladder, the most dramatic of which were the Dons' rise from 15th to 12th, and the Dees' fall from 11th to 14th.

On margin predicting, BKB is now the only margin-tipper with a sub-30 mean APE, and is one of only two margin-tippers - HAMP being the other - to have a sub-30 median APE.

Consequently, BKB leads on both mean and median APE, with LAMP second on mean MAPE and HAMP second on median APE.

At this point in the season I'll confess to being surprised at the strong performances of HAMP and LAMP but, each being based solely on bookie prices, I guess they should be doing reasonably well given the even stronger performance of BKB.

I'm far less surprised with the performance of HELP, which managed just three correct line tips this weekend and essentially stood still in terms of the three probability score metrics. Richmond's failure to win on line betting despite a ten-goal start was particularly damaging to HELP's probability scores as it had attached an 80% probability to Richmond's preventing such an embarrassment.

The Eagles' poor showing in the final term that doomed many Investors to an unprofitable weekend was their sixth losing final term of the season. They now have an appalling 44.3 percentage in final terms but, amazingly, this is only the second-worst performance in the competition, eclipsed by the Crows' 40.7 percentage.

Only two teams now have a term that they've failed to lose all season. They are the Swans and the Dogs, who've each won all six of their second terms.