2015 - Round 11 : Two-Thirds of the Contests, Most of the Fun
/Round 11 is the first of three successive truncated rounds comprising just six games, and this limited opportunity for spotting value, however illusory, has predictably resulted in reduced exposure for Investors this week.
Still, we've three head-to-head and a single line wager that, collectively, put a fraction over 4% of the Overall Portfolio at risk.
The head-to-head wager on the Suns facing Freo on Saturday is indisputably the weekend's most speculative wager, though the small size of the bet means that the upside is only about 2c, the same as that for the larger Roos head-to-head bet at a much smaller price. The Port Adelaide line bet carries an upside about 75% as large as this, and the Collingwood head-to-head bet an upside only about 50% as large.
Small bets at high prices do have the virtue of offering tantalising upside without the harsh downside regret, which is why the Suns bet carries comfortably the round's lowest potential loss. Maximum downside for the round is tied instead to the sole line bet, the one on Port Adelaide giving the Cats 13.5 points start, and is about 1.5c. The Roos and Pies bets each harbour smaller downsides of around one-and-a-quarter cents each.
So, four preferred results promise 6c of return and four non-preferred results threaten 4.2c of loss.
TIPS AND PREDICTIONS
The Head-to-Head Tipsters, in aggregate, disagree more this week than they have since Round 5 and the third-most they've disagreed all season. Looking from a game-by-game viewpoint, it's the Roos v Swans game that's generating most disagreement with the Roos garnering nine minority supporters, mostly from the ProPred and H2H Tipster families.
There's considerable Tipster conjecture too though about the Saints v Dees contest where seven Tipsters have formed a holdout minority Dees supporter base, most of them from the H2H family. Four Tipsters comprise the minorities in the Port v Cats and Pies v Giants games, and just one - Home Sweet Home, of course - in the Suns v Freo clash. That leaves only the Eagles v Dons game in which we see unanimous opinion.
Disagreement from a Tipster-by-Tipster perspective comes mostly from the usual contrarians in Easily Impressed I, Home Sweet Home, and Easily Impressed II, though the almost-as-high Indexes of 30% for the H2H family of Tipsters are the highest for that block of Tipsters this season.
The Tipsters with the lowest Disagreement Indexes this week - and there are a number of them - are all those that have tipped the six favourites.
Amongst the top seven Tipsters on the MoS Leaderboard, only H2H_Unadj_10 has tipped other than those six favourites and will leap to joint-leadership if both the Roos and the Dees are successful on the weekend.
The Margin Predictors are also exhibiting fairly high levels of disagreement this week about likely final margins, though not quite as much as they exhibited last week. Their overall Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD) of 7.1 points per game per Predictor is the third-highest figure for the season.
For the Predictors it's the Eagles v Dons game that's eliciting the greatest divergence of opinion, the overall MAD of 11.6 points per Predictor driven partly by the extremes of Combo_NN2's 53-point margin prediction and ProPred_7's 2-point margin prediction. All 19 Predictors though are calling it an Eagles victory, however widely or narrowly.
Only one other contest has a MAD much above the all-game average and that's the Suns v Dockers game where the MAD is 9.5 points per Predictor. That MAD is heightened by the 50-point plus predictions of Bookie_3 and the two ENS Predictors and, at the other extreme, by the slew of 20- to 25-point predictions by, among others, the Win and H2H families of Predictors. In this game too though, all 19 Predictors are unanimous in their opinions about which team will win and bicker only about the margin.
Combo_NN2, for the second week running, has the round's high MAD, though this week Combo_NN1 has grabbed second having recorded roughly an average MAD last week. ProPred has taken third. Bookie_9 has the week's low MAD for the third time in a row, this week with a 2.4 points per game figure.
ENS_Linear, which is the new competition leader on MoS, has been boldest in its margin predictions in the Suns v Freo game, where its 53-point victory prediction for the Dockers is almost 20 points higher than the all-Predictor average. ENS_Greedy, which sits second, has been boldest too in its prediction for that same game, but in predicting a 33 point victory by the Eagles finds itself more than 11 points above the all-Predictor average in that game as well.
Head-to-Head Probability Predictors have produced their largest collective MAD (6.8% per Predictor per game) since Round 6 and their fourth-largest MAD of the season.
Their MAD is elevated in four games and stands at 7.6% per Predictor or higher in the Eagles v Dons, Roos v Swans, Pies v Giants, and Saints v Dees games. In the Roos v Swans game the Predictors actually span the 50% mark with three of the Predictors rating the Roos as better than 50% chances and five rating them as less than 50% chances.
ProPred has the round's highest MAD for only the second time this season, and WinPred has the round's second-highest MAD. Bookie-OE, who sits first on the MoS Leaderboard, has the round's low MAD, with Bookie-LPSO, who sits third, recording a virtually identical but slightly larger MAD.
The Line Fund algorithm likes especially the chances of Melbourne (64%), Gold Coast (57%) and Port Adelaide (55%) this week, and thinks the three other contests are close to a coin flip.
TIPSTER AND PREDICTOR DISAGREEMENT
For comparative purposes, here's how this week's Disagreement Indexes and MADs stack up against the season's history.
