2011 Round 16: Are We There Yet?

Three teams have the bye this week leaving us with just seven contests to consider for wagering worthiness. The Head-to-Head Fund likes five of them and the Line Fund four, though neither fancy the last two games, so our financial fortunes will be sealed by the middle of Sunday afternoon.

Here's the detail:

The big head-to-head bets are both on very short-priced favourites - 15% on the Hawks at $1.08 and 13.8% on the Pies at the same price. Of the remaining head-to-head bets only the 6.8% on the Dons at $1.50 is of any major consequence.

On line betting the Dons and Pies wagers are those of greatest moment, each sized 7% or more.

Here are the financial implications of all possible results this weekend:

So, a Dons win by 13 or more, a Pies by 47 or more, and a Hawks win by 40 or more offer the week's best profit opportunities, while a Roos win or draw, a Lions win or draw, and a Tigers win or draw represent the greatest risks.

On head-to-head tipping there's clarity amongst the Head-to-Head tipsters for all but the first two contests. In Friday night's game majority support is behind the Cats over the Eagles 9-4, and in Saturday's early game it's behind the underdog Lions 7-6 over the Hawks, a result that would be very bad news for Investors.

The Margin Predictors are unanimous in every game but the Eagles v Cats clash where, unlike the Head-to-Head tipsters, the majority support is with the Eagles. That said, the average predicted margin of victory is only 0.1 points and the largest predicted victory margin for the Eagles is just 4 points.

Not only is there an extraordinarily high level of agreement amongst the Margin Predictors in terms of which team will win, there's also a high level of concordance about the margin of victory - the highest standard deviation of the predicted victory margins for any one game is just 7 points.

Nonetheless there are some differences in each Margin Predictor's average standardised differences this round.

Bookie_3 and Bookie_9 are substantially more pro Away team this week than is usual for them, as are, relatively speaking, the ProPred and WinPred families and Combo_NN_2. Conversely, the Head-to-Head algorithms are more pro Home team, as is, relatively speaking, Combo_NN_1. Combo_7 is relatively pro Away team, to about the same extent that it usually is.

The Probability Predictors, as the Margin Predictors, are only in disagreement over the Eagles v Cats game. The TAB Sportsbet bookmaker has the Cats as narrow favourites, while ProPred, WinPred and H2H have the Eagles as equally narrow favourites. In the other games there's some minor quibbling about the chances of the favourites though not about their identity.

Four teams are rated 68% chances or greater by the Line Fund algorithm this week: Sydney (72%), Collingwood (70%), Essendon (69%), and St Kilda (68%). For the remaining games, Hawthorn's rated a 61% chance, Carlton a 58% chance, and West Coast just a 53% chance, little more than a coin toss.