Port Adelaide are the competition's Most Improved Team so far this season, according both to the ChiPS and the MARS Rating Systems, Port having risen seven places in each System after accumulating about 20 Ratings Points on both.
Read MoreI sometimes feel that I'd benefit from putting a little more time between the end of the weekend's last game and composing the related Results blog - but then, who'd want to read about the Round on the following Tuesday or Wednesday?
Read MoreThe Line Fund has wielded its new-found ability to inflict and suffer twice as much damage per game by constraining itself to only three wagers for Round 6, one on St Kilda giving the Lions 15.5 points start, another on the Dees basking in just over 7 goals start playing the Swans, and the third on Port Adelaide receiving 4.5 points start against the Cats.
Read MoreThis week I'm including the team rating opinions of the Colley, Massey and ODM Systems along with those of ChiPS and MARS.
Read MoreFor the second week in a row all three of the MatterOfStats Funds lost money, the Margin Fund most determinedly by shedding 5c, but the Head-to-Head and Line Funds with only slightly lesser and approximately equal alacrity, dropping 1.4c and 1.5c respectively. Combined the three Funds brought about a loss of just over 2c for the Recommended Portfolio, leaving it now down by a little less than 3c on the season.
Read MoreNext week the Line Fund doubles its bet size, and the week after that the Head-to-Head Fund does the same, so there's a sense of pausing in anticipation of bigger battles to come in this round's relatively subdued wagering.
Read MoreIt's cheap and easy - though, don't get me wrong, disturbingly satisfying nonetheless - to be wise after the event, but one of the more pleasing aspects of the season so far has been the vindication of MARS' and ChiPS' 2013 insistence that the Roos' final ladder position was a poor reflection of their underlying abilities.
Read MoreSave for a couple of very comfortable line betting wins on Port Adelaide and Geelong, Round 4 offered Investors absolutely nothing to cheer about.
Read MoreFor the first time this season the three MatterOfStats Funds have conspired to prevent Investors from enjoying any of the weekend's nine contests free from financial worry.
Read MoreIt's rare for the ChiPS Rating System to add 6 Ratings Points to a team's Rating on the basis of a single result. It's rarer still for MARS to do the same thing.
Read MoreNot a great weekend for Investors, mostly because of eight unsuccessful SuperMargin wagers, though the story could have been a little different had the Giants kicked a behind rather than a goal in the dying stages of their clash with the Dees.
Read MoreBased on the TAB Bookmaker's pre-game Round 3 prices, this week's results should be high in "information content". Or, put another way, they're likely to tell us more about the abilities of the 18 teams in the competition than we thought previous rounds would.
Read MoreBefore performing the analysis tonight I thought that team ChiPS Ratings would have been much more affected by the results of Round 2 than team MARS Ratings but, as it turns out, Ratings were similarly affected for both Ratings systems.
For only four teams are ChiPS Rankings more than a single place different from MARS Rankings:
Six more teams have ChiPS and MARS Rankings differing by a single spot - Richmond, the Kangaroos, Essendon, West Coast, the Brisbane Lions and the Gold Coast - while the remaining eight teams have identical ChiPS and MARS Rankings. Some of the gaps between teams are more or less assailable in a single round, but the rankings are remarkably consistent.
Lastly, the correlation between ChiPS and MARS Ratings increased a little this week, rising from +0.977 to +0.983. Team Rating Systems, it seems, have much in common.
This week only the Head-to-Head Fund took a backward step, unsuccessful in its lone wager and thereby surrendering just under 1c to the TAB bookmaker on a Dees outfit that scored 2 goals and 11 points fewer in the entire game than its opponents registered in the 1st quarter alone.
More than offsetting this loss from the Head-to-Head Fund was the Line Fund's two successful wagers from three, which added just under 1c to its value, and the Margin Fund's two additional successful wagers from eight, which added almost 9c to its value. Combined, these two Funds' results added almost 3c to the value of the Recommended Portfolio, leaving it up by 2c for the round and now 6.4c for the season.
Read MoreAll three MatterOfStats Funds are active once again this round, and the general wagering tone remains subdued. The Head-to-Head Fund's lone wager is a small one on the Dees, who are priced at $7.50 for their clash with the Eagles. Whilst not as speculative a wager as last round's Giants plunge, this small bet on the Dees doesn't exactly have "collect" written all over it either.
Read MoreAs I've written about before, MatterOfStats has an additional team rating system this season, called ChiPS, and designed so that the difference in the ratings of any pair of teams is a direct assessment of the margin of victory you'd expect to see were they to meet on a neutral ground.
Read MoreOn the face of it, Round 1 results were tough to pick, with only four of the nine pre-game TAB favourites running out victors. Seven of the winners, however, were teams that finished higher on the competition ladder than did their opponents at the end of the 2013 home-and-away season, which was great news for the MatterOfStats Heuristic Tipsters almost all of which adopt the Consult The Ladder approach in the first round of the season.
Read MoreIn last week's post I revealed MatterOfStats' wagers and tips for the entirety of the 1st round, none of which I'll be altering this week in light of the results from the first half of that round. Investors are reminded that they have only SuperMargin wagers to look forward to this weekend, which have as perhaps their only virtue the fact that they generally render all but the last few minutes of a contest largely moot.
Read MoreBased on the traffic to the MatterOfStats website today, I'm guessing that many regular visitors already know that the first four-ninths of Round 1 of the 2014 season has proven to be profitable for anyone holding the Recommended Portfolio.
The Head-to-Head Fund recorded two successful wagers from two attempts, most notably recognising the now-obvious value that subsisted in the Giants' $13 pre-game price-tag. This Fund is now up by over 9c on the season and is comfortably buttressed against a relatively extended period of ineptitude. The Line Fund also benefited from the Giants' strong showing, its wager with over 8 goals start never seeming to be seriously in danger.
Only the Margin Fund finished the weekend unfulfilled, with both of its Blues'-related wagers coming up short despite promising signs at the end of the first three quarters. It shed 2.5c as a consequence of its poor judgement.
So, all told, the Recommended Portfolio is up by almost 3c after just four games and never have I felt more compelled to remind myself that extrapolation almost always ends in tears.
On the tipping front, Home Sweet Home is enjoying a very rare period of relative accuracy, its 2 from 4 as good as any of the MatterOfStats (MOS) Head-to-Head Tipsters. It too, I suspect, should take heed of the pitfalls in extrapolation.
In other MOS contests, H2H_Unadj_3 leads all-comers amongst the Margin Predictors, although its 42.23 mean absolute prediction error is a long way from elevating it into MOS folklore, and H2H_Adj and H2H_Unadj have, jointly, the best Head-to-Head Probability Predictor performances.
As well, the Line Fund algorithm is enjoying a very rare period of net positive log probability scoring.
Of course, I'd do well to remember that five-ninths of a round is a long time in football ...
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