2012 Round 15 - Wagers & Tips : Swans and Pies, Two For a Dozen

With one exception, Investors have wound up with the portfolio of seven Line and four SuperMargin wagers that I foreshadowed yesterday. The only difference is that, in addition to these 11 wagers, we've a tiny bet on the Saints (0.57% at $3.00) in the head-to-head market.

One of the line bets that I was expecting we'd make was on the Hawks, who I'd assumed would be asked to offer 99.5 points to their opponents, the Giants, on Sunday. Surprisingly, when the market was posted late today, the Hawks were only required to spot the Giants 90.5 points, which made the Line Fund's wager on them all the more emphatic, albeit no larger. 

In total, here's what we have:

So, we've two bets in four games, and a single bet in the remaining five games, meaning that once again we've managed to muster a financial interest in every contest.

The Sydney v Brisbane Lions game offers Investors the largest upside. Should the Swans win by between 50 and 59 points, over 7c will be added to the Overall Portfolio's price. Our next best result would be a Pies victory over the Blues by between 40 and 49 points, which would bump the Overall Portfolio price up over 5c. Most of the remaining games offer an upside of between about 2c and 3c, the exception being the Saints v Dons game where a Saints victory would add only about 0.3c to the Overall Portfolio price.

On the downside, seven games represent potential losses in the 2.5-3c range, while the Saints v Dons and Fremantle v Dogs matchups harbour worst-possible results that would knock only 0.5c or less off the Overall Portfolio price. 

Majority support amongst the Head-to-Head Tipsters this week is behind the favourites in all nine contests. In the cases of the Pies, Swans and Hawks, that support is unanimous, and in the cases of Essendon and Geelong it's only Home Sweet Home that holds a contrarian position. 

In the Roos v Eagles clash, Home Sweet Home is once again a contrarian, but in this game it is joined in its defiance by the near-equally poorly credentialled Ride Your Luck and Follow The Streak. Home Sweet Home is also in the minority for the Melbourne v Richmond, and Adelaide v Port Adelaide games, in the first of which it finds itself siding with Shadow and the two Short Term Memory heuristic tipsters, and in the second with Shadow, Short Term Memory II and Easily Impressed II. The cliche "in good company" will not be getting a run here.

That leaves only the Fremantle v Dogs contest to discuss. Here there are four dissenting voices and they belong to Shadow, Easily Impressed II and the two Short Term Memory tipsters - again, not exactly the A-list of MAFL Tipsters.

The Margin Predictors are of one voice in their selection of winners for all nine games again this week, as they were last week, and as they have been in all but 17 contests so far this season. Put another way, the 109 contests about which they've agreed entirely represents over 85% of this season's games so far, which is about 20% points higher than the level of unanimity we saw from the Margin Predictors in season 2011. In a season where favourites have done so well, I guess it's inevitable that the learning algorithms that underpin much of MAFL should start to fancy favourites' chances even more. 

Upsets, if any are to be had this week, appear to be most likely in the Roos v Eagles and Saints v Dons matchups, the two games in which Combo_NN1 most notably has plumped for only narrow wins by the favourites.

(This week, for those Predictors and algorithms that require head-to-head prices in order to arrive at a prediction, I've assumed prices of $1.01/$21 for the Hawthorn v GWS game. I've needed to do this because, as I write this, the TAB has yet to post actual head-to-head prices for this game.)

The Head-to-Head Probability Predictors also all agree about which teams should be favourites this weekend. Comparing ProPred, WinPred and H2H with the TAB Bookmaker we find ProPred rating the Pies', Eagles', Dees', Swans', Saints' and Dogs' chances as being at least 5% points greater than that assessed by the TAB; WinPred doing the same for the Eagles, Swans, Dons, Port and Fremantle; and H2H doing the same for the Eagles and Swans.

The Line Fund algorithm rates Gold Coast as the team most likely to win on line betting, and also rates the Pies, Roos, Swans, Hawks and Dogs as 55% chances or better in their respective line contests. It really is time that the Line Fund algorithm starts doing what it's done in the second half of more-recent seasons: picking a lot more winners than losers.