A very wayward Carlton, in going down to Essendon 9.22 to 12.10 on Saturday became only the 3rd team in the last decade to lose a game despite kicking as many or more behinds as their opponent had scoring shots.

The Head-to-Head Fund has yet another wager on a longshot this week, but that bet is at least somewhat balanced by a more sizeable wager on the short-priced favourite Lions and by a more modest wager on the underdog Roos.

Wins by each of the competition's and MARS Rating's four top teams ensured that there was no changes at the top of the MARS Leaderboard this week.

St Kilda's two final scoring shots weren't good for my mental state on Sunday afternoon, coming as they did with the Swans holding a 61-point lead, barely sufficient to cover the 57.5 points start we were contractually obliged to offer the Saints as our part of the line bet. Had either scoring shot been a goal rather than, as both turned out, behinds, Investors would have finished the round with a much more substantial loss (and my Sunday dinner would have tasted much worse).

Right now must be a challenging time to be a bookmaker. Just how do you price a team whose coach, assistant coach, head doctor and football manager are the subject of charges by the AFL Commission, none of which will be resolved for a couple of weeks?

Geelong and Sydney traded places on the MARS Rating ladder this week, as did the Tigers and the Roos, and the Blues and the Crows, each swap representing a change of just a single ladder position. The round's only other movements were both more significant, each a two-position move, with West Coast climbing up into 8th, and Essendon sliding down into 11th.

Joy at the start of the round, joy at the end; no joy in between. That was the story of Round 20 wagering for Investors.

Only Sunday's Crows v Roos game has escaped the collective attention of the MAFL Funds this week, the Head-to-Head Fund venturing a single wager on the Saints, the round's only clear home team underdog, the Line Fund also lining up behind the Saints but as well behind four home team favourites, and the Margin Fund strafing the schedule with SuperMargin wagers in seven games.

Despite shedding over 5 Rating Points (RPs) this week, Hawthorn remain the top-ranked team on MARS Ratings, though they now enjoy a lead of only about 3 RPs over the Swans. Further down the table, four pairs of teams swapped places as the Pies, Tigers, Eagles and Lions clambered, respectively, over the Roos, Blues, Crows and Saints.

It was pleasant to wake up on Sunday morning knowing that, whatever the day's football brought, a profit for the round was assured. As it turned out, Sunday wasn't kind to Investors, though the Dogs offered hope for an unlikely victory and an equally unlikely collect on our head-to-head wager at $8 for longer than we might reasonably have expected.

If MAFL had a bucket list, one thing still on it would be a successful wager on a drawn outcome, a feat that it has gone desperately close to achieving on a couple of occasions already this season when games on which the Margin Fund has opted for such a wager have been tied up deep into time-on in the final quarter. Not merely content, it seems, with going close, the Margin Fund has ventured not one but two such wagers for this weekend.

The action on the MARS Leaderboard is, once again, mid-table this week, with the seven teams ranked 5th to 11th swapping ladder positions on the basis of the most-recent results.

Well the streak is over - regression to the mean and all that - but, in truth, I'm not all that much discouraged by the weekend's wagering results.

After its four-bet flurry of last week, the Head-to-Head Fund has returned to the strategy it deployed for the five rounds prior, venturing just a single wager on an underdog. This time it's on the Dees who, I must admit, do seem generously priced at $17 taking on the seemingly win-averse Roos.

As topsy-turvy as the weekend's results were, only five team's MARS Ranking changed, three of them by only a single place.

Weekends like the one we just had are the reason I keep doing this.

Today, for the first time ever, the TAB refused to accept a MAFL bet.

The results from Round 16, as predictable as they were, led to changes in the MARS Rankings of only five teams this week, three of them by just a single place.

The streak's alive - but only just.

For the sixth week in a row the Head-to-Head Fund has seen fit to make just a single wager, and for the third time during this self-enforced period of restraint, its lone wager is on Port Adelaide. That head-to-head wager is joined by three Line bets, all on home team favourites facing between 20.5 and 74.5 points start, and by 10 SuperMargin wagers, two of them priced at an unfamiliar $17. Those two longshot SuperMargin gambles are down to Combo_NN2, which, as is its wont, is predicting unfashionably small victories by teams priced in the head-to-head market at $1.01.