2012 Round 5 : Wagers for ANZAC Day

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Just a very quick note to let Investors know that they do have wagers on tomorrow's Collingwood v Essendon game, specifically: 

  • The Line Fund has 5% on the Pies -5.5 at $1.90
  • The Margin Fund has 2.5% on the Pies to win by 10-19 points at $7.50

 Three scenarios are possible:

  • The best of all possible worlds, where the Pies win by 10-19 points. Both wagers are therefore collects, the Line Fund rises by 4.5%, the Margin Fund rises by 16.25%, and Portfolios rise by 5.5%.
  • The world that's not quite as good but that's still better than the other possible world, where the Pies win by 6 points or more, but not by 10-19 points. In that case the Margin Fund falls by 2.5%, the Line Fund rises by 4.5%, and Portfolios rise by 1.8%
  • The most likely but least desirable world, where the Pies win by 5 points or less, draw or lose. Here, both bets are losers, the Margin Fund falls by 2.5%, the Line Fund falls by 5% and Portfolios fall by 3%. 

 

Is My SuperMargin Wager Doing Well?

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Wagering in the SuperMargin market this season has been as exasperating to me as it's been interesting since I've not known how to feel about a particular score at any point in the game. All I've found myself doing as the game progresses is hoping that the score doesn't stray too far from the required bucket, feeling pleased if it's in the correct bucket sometime in the final term, then rooting for a behind-a-thon from that point onwards. It feels a little like closing my eyes for the first 3000m of the Melbourne Cup then barracking for a short half-head victory by the favourite.
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2012 MARS Ratings After Round 3

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For the first few rounds of a new season, we know that team rankings based on MARS Ratings are heavily influenced by the Ratings that teams carried over from the previous season. Still, it's interesting to see what those Ratings and rankings currently are and the direction in which each team's Rating is headed.

Already, Carlton has emerged as the clear number 1 team, rated 1,029 ahead of four more teams that are Rated between 1,020 and 1,025. Another, arguably even bigger surprise in terms of Ratings change has been Collingwood, who've dropped almost 7 Ratings Points (RPs) across the season, 5 of them last week, and are now at risk of slipping back to 6th behind a Saints team with considerable momentum.

Overall, there's a high level of agreement between ranking based on MARS Ratings and positions on the Competition Ladder. For example, amongst the teams Rated in the top 8 based on MARS, 6 of them fill places in the top 8 on the Competition Ladder. At the level of the individual teams, the biggest discrepancies are for the Cats (MARS Rated 3rd but 10th on the Ladder) and the Pies (Rated 5th but 12th on the Ladder). No other team is Rated more than 5 places higher or lower than its Ladder position, and for 9 teams the discrepancy is no greater than 2 places.

Turning lastly to team momentum, measured here by a team's change in MARS Rating since the start of the season, Carlton's steep climb is apparent, but so too is that of the Eagles and, to a lesser extent, the Saints.

Six more teams have gained about 3 RPs or more across the 3 rounds of the season to date.

The Dees, the Dogs and the Suns have been the biggest shedders, each dropping over 10 RPs each, while Collingwood and GWS have proven to be solid secondary sources of RPs, each surrendering 6 to 7 points to the market.

Geelong and Brisbane have been the only other teams to offer up multiple RPs.

In coming weeks I'll start tracking teams' Massey and Colley Ratings too, and we'll return to the issue of competitive balance.

2012 Round 2 Results : A Little Surprisingly Unsurprising

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But for the Cats' remarkable victory on Monday afternoon, this round would have been remarkable most of all for its predictability. Even with the mildly surprising Cats win, the average surprisals per game, at just 0.436 bits, was the second-lowest we've seen in a home-and-away round in the past 12 months. That's what you get when 8 of 9 favourites win, 7 of them priced at $1.33 or less.
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2012 Round 1b : He's Done What to the Overround?

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Last week didn't really feel like the start of the season to me. Sure there was a game and goals counted only for six points regardless of their point of origin, but it still felt like an entree - an amuse bouche even. A mismatch that went to script and that, from a statistical point of view, told us little that we didn't already suspect about either of the participants save that, maybe, my Rating the Giants at 900 was a bit harsh. Hardly a game worthy of opening the season.
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2012 : Understanding the Tipsters, Margin Predictors and Fund Algorithms

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This week brought an e-mail, nestled amongst the spam-fest that is my inbox of recent times, from a visitor to the MAFL site asking about the details of the algorithms used in MAFL. In preparing what I thought would be a brief reply I realised just how scattered are the posts that you'd need to have read and retained to understand all of what goes into the weekly wagers and predictions that appear in this blog. With the increasing volume of new visitors to MAFL I thought it was time to provide all that information in a single blog.
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