2013 : Round 1A - Results

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Forget the Draft, the talk of tanking and peptides, forget the pre-season contest with its quirky scoring, rule-changes, and surprise results; you can only feel assured that a new season has truly commenced once the www.afl.com.au website has buckled under the apparently startling load.

To be fair, the AFL site was accepting visitors come the second quarter of Friday night's game, but by then I'd found the reliability of other websites more compelling, so I can't vouch for its availability thereafter. You'd reckon the AFL might do a little more to ensure that its online porch-light was blazing - or, at the very least, turned on - for the first game of the season.

None of the sites I visited though was providing the view I was hoping for on Friday night, as the Crows squandered an early 4-goal lead to eventually go down to the Dons by 35 points, failing expansively to cover the 15.5 point handicap they - and by financial contagion we - were offering. Freo's 28-point win on Saturday night evened our line-betting win-loss ledger and reduced our Line Fund losses, but the Crows' loss on the Line and SuperMargin markets still left us down by three-tenths of a cent on the weekend.

With both favourites finishing winless, all but one of the Head-to-Head Tipsters is currently on 0 from 2, HSH being the exception and benefitting from the Dockers' designation as the Home team in its derby with the Eagles.

Amongst the Margin Predictors, only CNN1's tip that Fremantle would win by 3 goals stands out as particularly prescient, while scanning the Head-to-Head Probability Predictors we find that it's the Bookmaker-based Predictors whose caution has proven wisest.

There's still seven games to go though before we draw a cliched line under the 1st round ...

2013 : Round 1A - Wagers & Tips (A Few Wagers, Lots of Tips)

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It puzzles me still why the AFL would choose to start the season not with a bang, but with a whimper, but whimper it is as just two games are scheduled for the first week of the first round of the season. And it's not as if either game could credibly wear the tag "blockbluster". Friday night sees Adelaide take on Essendon at Football Park, while Saturday promises a Fremantle v West Coast Derby at Subiaco. Interesting? Sure. But season-opening? I don't think so.
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2013 : Understanding the Tipsters, Margin Predictors and Fund Algorithms

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Compared to most previous seasons, the number of changes to MAFL Funds and algorithms this year has been very small. Consequently, this post from last year remains a good source of general information about how MAFL works. 

The only information I'd add by way of update would be that:

  • Many algorithms now use a slightly different version of Implicit Bookmaker Probabilities. The differences between the Implicit Probabilities we'll use now and those we'd use previously given the same market prices are always small, but using the new version of the probabilities does seem to generally improve the predictive powers of the algorithms.
  • There are some changes to the MAFL Funds and their underlying algorithms and wagering strategies, which you can read about in this blog. Probably the greatest change is that all Funds will now wager all season long.

For those of you who would like to know even more about the algorithms used in MAFL, I've also created a downloadable PDF with details of each algorithm's inputs, outputs, type/method of creation and purpose, as well as, in some cases, the actual equations themselves. MAFL is nothing if not transparent.

2012 Final MARS Ratings

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Hawthorn's loss to the Swans was enough to see it shed almost 2 Ratings Points but nowhere near enough to cause it to surrender its number 1 ranking on the MARS Ladder.

In finishing the season Rated 1,053.8, Hawthorn joins the Pies (2011) and the Cats (2008) as the only losing Grand Finalists since 1999 - which is when MARS Ratings currently commence - to finish a season Rated over 1,050. 

2012 Finals Week 4 Results: No Collect, Not Much Surprise

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When the Hawks goalled (one 'l' or two? It's so hard to know for these verbed nouns) near the end of the first term to finish it leading by 19 points, our SuperMargin wager looked promising, at risk mostly from a rampaging Hawks dominating the second term and establishing a lead that would put our preferred 30 to 39 point victory margin out of range. But then the Swans did as the Swans usually do, finding a way to shut down the opposition and work their way back into the contest. So effective were they, in fact, that they eventually established a 27-point lead just over 8 minutes into the third term.
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2012 Finals Week 4 - Wagers & Tips : We're Cheering For a Margin, Not a Team

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I wish it were different. The Line Fund's disinterested, the Head-to-Head Fund's prohibited, while the Margin Fund's oblivious to its long losing streak. So it is that Investors find themselves with a single wager on the Grand Final: the Hawks to win by 30 to 39 points for 2.5% of the Margin Fund at $8. The difference between the success and failure of that single bet is 4c, the upside a 3.5c gain and the downside an all-too-familiar 0.5c loss.
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2012 Finals Week 3 - Wagers & Tips : Swans by a Few and Hawks by a Lot

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I'm beginning to wonder if I should file a missing persons report with the police about the Line Fund, which has yet again failed to submit a wager, thereby ensuring it will enter Grand Final week with a perfectly imperfect 0 and 0 record. There's no such reticence from the Head-to-Head Fund, however, as it's made a wager of over 5% of the Fund on the only home team (the Swans) that its rules allowed given prevailing market prices, and there's even less coyness from the Margin Fund, which has wagered once more on both contests on offer, preserving its record of having wagered on every contest in the Finals so far.
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2012 Finals Week 2 Results: Better But Still Not Super

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It's legitimate now, I think, to feel aggrieved by our run of outs on SuperMargin betting. Our two wagers this weekend missed by just 1 and 4 points, meaning that the current sequence of 36 losses in a row now includes 6 losses by less than a goal and 2 more of only single digit proportions. Across the entire season we've now missed 14 SuperMargin wagers by less than a goal and 21 by fewer than 10 points. Small wonder then that the Margin Fund is down by 80c on the season, making it responsible for 16c of the 19c that Overall Portfolios have lost this year.
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