2011 MARS Ratings After Round 23
/This week, four pairs of teams swapped ladder positions on the MARS Ratings Leaderboard, half of them teams from MARS' top 8.
Read More2011 Round 23 Results: Bird Eats Cat
/It's a fraught time of year to be wagering on teams whose places in the finals have largely been determined and I can't but help feel that Investors were bitten by this fact over the weekend with the Cats perhaps 1% off their game and consequently going down to a determined Swans team playing finals footy, and the Dons doing just enough to beat Port Adelaide but nowhere near enough to cover a 70.5 points spread.
Read More2011 : Impact of the Unbalanced Draw
/I've railed in the past about the iniquity of the so-called "unbalanced draw", that is, the fact that teams don't get a chance to play every other team at home and away over the course of the season. Here on MAFL, railing requires empirical justification, so it's time I estimated the likely impact of this imbalance.
Read More2011 Round 23: Negatively Marked
/I can acknowledge the beauty in them but I find it difficult to watch Olympic events such as the Ice-Skating, Gymnastics and the Diving, where the final marks are essentially deductions from perfection rather than accumulations from zero. It's for similar reasons that I loathe wagering weekends like the one we Investors are facing this week where success is largely about avoiding losses rather than about totting up gains.
Read More2011 MARS Ratings After Round 22
/More ripples rather than ructions on the MARS Ratings Leaderboard this week, as the West Coast and St Kilda, the Roos and the Swans, and the Lions and the Tigers traded places.
Read More2011 Round 22 Results: Not Quite
/The weekend's perfect 3 from 3 wagering performance by the Head-to-Head Fund wasn't enough to overcome the 0 and 3 performance from the Line Fund, resulting in a 5.5c decline in the Portfolio price, sending it to 92c.
Read MoreHeuristics + Patience + Home Teams = Profit
/At the start of the season I wrote about the impressive aggregate performance of the (revamped, bye-accommodating) MAFL Heuristics over the period 2006 to 2010. This year the MAFL Head-to-Head Fund has recorded a significant loss - would any of the Heuristics have done better?
Read More2011 Round 22: Finely Balanced
/Investors can look forward to far more wagering action this weekend, starting with the first and ending with the final game of the round. In all, six of the round's eight games will have a bearing on Portfolios.
Read More2011 MARS Ratings After Round 21
/Lots of jostling for minor placings this week as the teams from positions 8 through 15 participated in four games of pairwise leapfrog. The Gold Coast, meantime, shed a further 4.5 Ratings Points to put them just one decent shellacking away from emphatically claiming the title of lowest MARS rated team of all-time, an honour currently lumped upon the St Kilda team of 2001, which finished that season with a MARS Rating of 947.21.
Read More2011 A Review of Wagering To Date
/I've been planning to play with the cascade charts function of this Excel sparklines add-in for some time, and this weekend's relatively wager-free status gave me the opportunity.
Read More2011 Round 20 Results: Reminders of Profit Past and Promises of Profit to Come
/At least this week I can claim that Investor Portfolios were in profit at the end of a game.
Read More2011 Round 21: Eggs, All of You, Meet Basket
/It's all about Saturday for Investors this week as we've no wagers on the Friday night game nor any on Sunday's fare, which leaves us beholden to the Hawks, Freo and the Dogs.
Read More2011 MARS Ratings After Round 20
/I suppose after 19 rounds you'd hope to have a bead on teams' abilities. If that's the case then it's no great surprise that we saw only 3 pairs of swaps on the MARS Ratings ladder this week, with two of those pair swaps merely clarifying the relative ineptitude of the teams that will already be making other plans for September.
Read More2011 Round 20 Results: Winning the One (and, More Importantly, Five) Percenters
/Yet another good week for Investors, whatever your metric, sees Investor Portfolios at 99.3c thanks to a 5.7c gain by the Head-to-Head Fund and a 7.3c gain from the Line Fund, its sixth profitable round in a row.
Read More2011 Round 20: No Cavities; Healthy Gums - See You in Six Months (Remember to Floss)
/This week's portfolio of wagers reminds me of the archetypical visit to the dentist: little prospect of anything positive, probably a little pain, and the real possibility of lasting physical, psychic and financial trauma.
Read More2011 MARS Ratings After Round 19
/Near stasis again on the MAFL Ratings Leaderboard with only the teams rated last and second-last landing blows in the contest to avoid being labelled the Worst Team of 2011. Meantime Collingwood, now rated 1,065.9, have elevated themselves to be just over 2 points shy of the high-water mark set by the Dons of 2000 of 1,068.1 Ratings Points, the highest Rating achieved by any team in the time for which Ratings have been calculated (1999 to the present).
Read More2011 Round 19 Results: Another Assortment of Favourites
/For a fleeting few minutes on Saturday afternoon as the Dogs seemed destined to secure the most remarkable of comebacks, MAFL was notionally in profit. But the Eagles rebounded, kicking the last 14 points, compounding Investor disappointment by not just winning but by covering the spread as well. Then, later that night, Freo capitulated to the Hawks, leaving it all up to the Pies and the Crows to salvage the round.
Read MoreSome bit.ly links for MAFL
/The URL www.maflonline.squarespace.com is long and, if my weblogs are anything to go by, difficult to remember.
So, I've just used the bit.ly service to create redirects for the following URLs:
- bit.ly/MAFLO
- bit.ly/maflo
- bit.ly/MAFLONLINE
- bit.ly/maflonline
- bit.ly/MAFLOnline
Typing any of these into your browser should now deliver you to the home page of the MAFLOnline website.
(I did try to get bit.ly/MAFL and bit.ly/mafl, but both were already taken.)
2011 Round 19: 1 point for an 11% swing
/We've another short round this week comprising only seven games and Investors have a financial interest in just five of them, skipping the Friday night Roos v Blues matchup and the Saturday Suns and Saints fixture.
Read More2011 MARS Ratings After Round 18
/There was no change at all on MARS Rankings this week, though the gap between the teams ranked 4th and 14th grew to a season-high 57.8 Ratings Points and that between 4th and 8th to a near season-high 24.5 Ratings Points, just 0.07 Ratings Points less than the record.
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