2026 - Round 1 Results - Surprised

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What started off looking like a disappointing Sunday afternoon, finished very acceptably - but more of that later.

Just six of the early week favourites were successful this round, but that wound up being the floor rather than the ceiling to the scores from the Head-to-Head Tipsters. The new MARS_Marg algorithm was again one of the outliers, this week snagging eight of the nine winners, just ahead of Home Sweet Home’s (sic) and the MoSH twins’ sevens.

Those scores left MARS_Marg now two tips ahead of the field on 12 from 14, and Home Sweet Home and MoSHPlay_Marg in joint second on 10 from 14.

The all-Tipster average score came in at 6.6 from 9, taking the season figure to 9.4 from 14 (68%).

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2026 - Round 1 : MoSHPlay

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UPDATE SUNDAY 5:40PM

MoSHPlay has ended at Suns by 46 points.

UPDATE SUNDAY 12:30PM

MoSHPlay has ended at Port Adelaide by 5 points and now has preliminary forecasts of Melbourne by 11 and Gold Coast by 47 points in today’s other two games.

UPDATE THURSDAY 7:15PM

MoSHPlay is staying with Carlton by 15 points, and now has some preliminary thoughts about the remaining games in the round.

UPDATE WEDNESDAY 7PM

MoSHPlay has it as Carlton by 15 points, which nestles it pretty thoroughly in amongst the other forecasters.

2026 - Round 1 : Bold

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Amongst this week’s full round of nine games we have five that are expected to be won by less than two goals, two more expected to be won by less than 20 points, and then the outliers with handicaps of 27.5 and 59.5 points. Combined, the average expected margin per game is 18.6 points.

There are six home favourites with an average expected victory margin of just under 22 points per game, and three away team favourites with an average expected victory margin of just under 15 points per game.

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2026 - Team Ratings After Round 0

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MoSHBODS changed the ranking of a dozen teams this week after which it had Western Bulldogs in 1st, Brisbane Lions in 2nd, and Gold Coast in 3rd, all of them having a higher offensive than defensive rating and the Gold Coast being only one of two teams rising by more than a single place. Geelong was the big faller, dropping three places into 4th.

MARS also moved a dozen teams and arrived at a Top 3 of Dogs, Lions, and Hawks. The Cats also suffered the largest decline on this System, dropping four places into 5th.

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2026 - Round 0 Results - Promising

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In some seasons, your start sets you up to play catch-up for at least the next few rounds. Mercifully, this season won’t be one of them.

Three of the early week favourites were successful this week, which saw all but three of our Head-to-Head Tipsters recording that score. The outliers were the new MARS_Marg algorithm who now leads the field on four, and Consult The Ladder and MoSHBODS_Marg who trail the field on two.

The all-Tipster average score came in at 2.9 from 5.

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2026 - Round 0 : Getting In Early

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Welcome to a new men’s AFL season. With so many AI-assisted changes, it’s hard not to be genuinely excited about watching how the year pans out and whether all the additional off-season work has been worth it.

We’re starting off slow again this season, with Round 0 - Origin Round - comprising only five games. Amongst them there are three home team favourites and two away team favourites, and all but one of the games has an expected victory margin of less than three goals. Even the least well-matched contest is only expected to be decided by about 3-and-a-half goals, so we should, in theory, be in for a round of close contests.

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2026 - The Year Ahead on MoS

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MoS is going around again for what is now its 21st year of operation, and there’s been a lot going on in the off-season, much of it assisted by AI, in particular ChatGPT.

I’m very aware of the ambivalence and sometimes clear hostility that many people feel about AI, and LLMs in particular, and can understand the outrage that artists and authors feel about their works being incorporated wholesale, with neither permission nor recompense, in the training material for LLMs.

Oddly, I think, there appears to be little or no backlash about the similar absorption of extant programming code into the corpuses of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini AI and others. There seems to be a collective agreement that such coding effort does not embody creativity, or at least not in the same way or to the same extent as does, say, a novel or a painting. This sells short the art of coding, I’d suggest, but it is what it is.

In any case, as I say, ChatGPT has been a very helpful companion for much of the new work I’m about to describe. My feeling at this stage is that AI represents a clear benefit for people at my level of coding ability, which allows me to craft prompts for coding efforts using the appropriate terminology and to intuit when the outputs of those prompts are likely in error. What those prompts create are outputs that would either take me orders of magnitude longer to produce or, in some cases, would not be possible for me to produce at all given my current knowledge.

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2025 - Round 28 Results (Finals Week 4) - Big Cats

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Regardless of who’s on the end of it or how well the victors played, it’s always a bit disheartening to witness a Grand Final that ends with such a large margin of victory.

That win by the Lions improves the record of 3rd v 2nd in Grand Finals to 4 and 1, and to teams from 3rd generally in Grand Finals to 8 and 5. Teams from 2nd are now 7 and 7. Across all Finals, however, teams from 2nd still have a better record than teams from 3rd.

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2025 - Round 28 : 2nd v 3rd

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There have been four Grand Finals since 2000 where 2nd on the ladder faced 3rd, and the teams from 3rd have won three of those contests but not the most recent, which occurred in 2018 and saw West Coast defeat Collingwood.

More generally, teams from 2nd on the ladder have seen themselves playing in the Grand Final in 13 of the 25 previous seasons, winning 7 and losing 6, with five of those seven victories coming in games against the minor premier.

Teams from 3rd have participated 12 times, winning seven and losing five with four of them to minor premiers.

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2025 - Team Ratings After Round 27 (Week 3 of the Finals)

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MoSSBODS moved the two winning Preliminary Finalists up a spot each - Geelong into 1st at the expense of Western Bulldogs, and Brisbane Lions into 3rd at the expense of Collingwood - while MoSHBODS just moved Brisbane Lions into 3rd ahead of Hawthorn.

That left both Systems with matching Top 3s of Geelong, Western Bulldogs, and Brisbane Lions.

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