Round 2 - An Entree, A Main Course and A Dessert

Investors with Line Redux Fund exposure can look forward to a little more action this week, with bets placed on Adelaide giving 10.5 points start to the Saints on Friday night, on Collingwood giving 32.5 points start the Dees on Saturday, and on Sydney receiving 16.5 points from the Hawks, also on Saturday.

On the tipping front:

• BKB, Chi, ELO and Home Sweet Home find themselves in the minority in tipping the Crows over the Saints
• There's unanimous support for the Cats who are playing the Tigers. ELO has the Cats as 40 point favourites; BKB has them as 44.5 point favourites
• There's further unanimity in the selection of the Pies to beat the Dees, with ELO and BKB again tipping large margins
• The Blues v Lions clash has split the tipsters, with seven opting for the Blues and six for the Lions. Chi, who's on the Blues, has this as one of his two Games of the Round
• Only Home Sweet Home see the Swans grabbing the points in their game against the Hawks. ELO, however, whilst tipping the Hawks, has them as just 3 point favourites
• All tipsters have the Dons finishing with their noses in front of the Dockers, but none of those tipsters who offer margin forecasts have more than about a goal in it. ELO has this as its Game of the Round; Chi has it as his alternate Game of the Round (he's a dog - he's not good at making definitive choices)
• Speaking of Dogs, they're the unanimous tipster choice in their matchup with the Roos. So strong are the Dogs' chance according to Chi and ELO that this is the only game in which they're both predicting that a favourite to cover the spread.
• Finally, in the Eagles v Port game, everyone except Home Sweet Home is on Port.

Had you used Chi's or ELO's tips and margins for line betting purposes last weekend, you'd have scored just 2 from 8 if you'd used Chi's, but a profitable 5 from 8 if you'd used ELO's. This week, if you were following Chi you'd take the teams receiving start in the first six games of the round, and the teams giving start in the last two. If, instead, you were following ELO, you'd swap Collingwood for Melbourne in game 3 and West Coast for Port Adelaide in Game 8.

In terms of Absolute Prediction Error (the absolute value of the difference between the actual margin and the tipped margin), Chi averaged 35.5 points per game last week, ELO averaged 30.9, and BKB averaged just 28.0. You just have to tip your hat to the bookies ...

Round 1: The Washup

All things considered, I'd take those Round 1 results every time.

For Investors, the finest of traditions has been continued and many of them are now a little more wealthy than they were on Thursday, thanks entirely to a stirring comeback from the Hawks that, while ultimately unsuccessful in landing the two points, was good enough to prevent the Cats from covering the spread.

BKB, CTL and most of the heuristic tipsters bagged 6 tips, Chi and ELO bagged 4 (Chi having been 0 from 3 and down at half-time in the next two), and only Home Sweet Home scored worse than chance, recording just 3 from 8.

So, onto Round 2 ...

Gone in Nine Hundred Seconds

So much fanfare for so little action.

Just one bet this weekend: Hawthorn +17.5 against Geelong at $1.90.

(You can download the details via the Wagers, Tips & Results link at right.)

We would - indeed should - also have been on the Lions at -23.5 against West Coast except that the value in the bet disappeared with extraordinary speed earlier today. The Line market went up at 11:49am and then, in the time during which I ran the models and cranked out our bets, which took about 15 minutes, the Line market for the Lions/Eagles game went from $1.90/$1.90 to $1.80/$2.00. Clearly, a bunch of savvy punters saw the opportunity and took it, depriving us of our own opportunity to share in the imbalance. A move of 10c in the first fifteen minutes of a Line market suggests that someone got something terribly wrong.

Had the starts in other games been a little less generous we'd have also been on the Pies and Port (which sounds a little like a desperately unhealthy meal), but 21.5 and 22.5 points start respectively just don't quite offer enough value to justify a nibble.

On the tipping front Richmond, the Lions and St Kilda enjoy unanimous support. Bear in mind that, amongst the heuristic tipsters, all but Home Sweet Home follow Consult the Ladder in Round 1, so the near unanimity amongst them is somewhat artificial.

Chi's Game of the Round is tomorrow night's Richmond v Carlton game in which he's plumped for the Tigers by just 1 point. ELO's Game of the Round is the Hawks v Cats matchup for which it's also predicting a 1 point result. Both are tipping something of a blowout in the Lions/Eagles clash.

(Note that at this point there's no Line market for Sunday's Freo v Bulldogs game. I'll update the download file once this information is available.)

Here's to continuing the tradition of MAFL Round 1 success.

An Important Message for All Investors

The information about each MAFL Fund that I've provided in the downloadable PDF includes how many bets each Fund can be expected to make during the course of the season and how big those bets are likely to be.

For clarity and to avoid surprising anyone, I thought it would be appropriate to re-present some of the data in the PDF from a weekly rather than a whole of season perspective. I've done this in the following table.

So, if you're investing in New Heritage, be aware that it will, if history's any guide, invest at least 25% of the Fund each week and as much as 70% of the Fund in the most extreme weeks. That is a large proportion of the Fund to put at risk but recognise that the average price of the teams on which the Fund wagers is just $1.57. At that price, firstly it's highly unlikely to lose a long string of bets and, secondly, the Fund needs to bet larger amounts in order to generate worthwhile profits.

Similarly, if you've some Chi-squared in your portfolio, be aware that you'll have 25% of the Fund in play about 4 weeks in 10 and around 55% in the most extreme weeks.

Even the Prudence, Hope and Line Redux Funds will occasionally splurge and have 25-35% of Funds at risk, although each of these these Funds will generally be much more sedate than this.

Bearing in mind that it'll only be the Line Redux Fund trading for the first 4 weeks of the season, if you're at all uncomfortable about your portfolio weightings now that you've read this blog you still have plenty of time to advise me of any changes that you'd like to make.

Otherwise, get ready to watch your money work much harder this year.

Welcome to MAFL Stats

Okay, here's a betting strategy - a heuristic if you will - that would have made money had you employed it in the previous three seasons, which is the only period over which I can reliably test it.

To use the strategy you need just three (arguably four) pieces of information about a game:

• which team is the home team (true or notional)?
• what's their price (and are they favourites)?
• are they higher up on the competition ladder?

The rule is that you bet one unit on the home team (true or notional) if:

• they're favourites, higher on the ladder than their opponents, and priced at $1.40 or more
• they're favourites, but lower on the ladder than their opponents, and priced at $1.70 or more
• they're not favourites, but are higher on the ladder than their opponents, and priced at $1.85 or more

If the home team (true or notional) is neither favourite nor higher on the ladder, don't bet.

You can use this strategy from Week 1 of the season, using the final home-and-away season ladder from 2008 to determine ladder positions for Round 1.

This strategy would have made between 45 and 47 bets in each of the previous three seasons, won between about 61% and 66% of them, and returned 5-10% of the amount outlayed.

I'm not promising anything for this year for this strategy, but its pedigree is as good as any of the MAFL Funds'. Consider it a gift.

The 2009 Tipsters Have Arrived

I'd like you to think for a moment about the most recent non-trivial decision you made.

Do you recall how you went about making it? Did you, as the textbooks suggest, gather every piece of information that you could about each available option, carefully weight these pieces of information based on your fully-enunciated preferences, and then make the obvious choice, glowing with the self-satisfaction that comes with making a choice that's rational, completely explicable and just plain right? Oh, you didn't? Well join the very long queue labelled "most of us".

What you almost certainly did instead was to employ what the academics call an "heuristic" and what the rest of us call a "rule of thumb", a way of intelligently using what you know - some of it highly relevant, some of it barely so - to arrive at a decision that is satisfactory and, in its own way, sensible.

This year I've retired from tipping all of the MM and SMM Models, the Uber Model and the Simplified Uber Model, and replaced them with heuristics. Some of these heuristics you'll recognise - BKB, CTL and Shadow - but the remainder are new. If you want to know more, right-click the "Tipsters" link above and download the PDF, which describes the heuristics we'll be following this year (along with a revamped Chi and another new tipster, ELO, which is based on the Team Rating System that I developed last year).

Happy New Year and Welcome to MAFL Online

Hi everyone and welcome to a new footy season and welcome to MAFL Online.

Right now I can't tell you exactly what will appear here or how it will differ from the e-mail newsletters that you received last year except to say that MAFL Online will be the place you'll come to get the week's tips, wagers and results.

There is, however, one important piece of information that's available now on this site: information about the Funds that will operate this year. It's a PDF and you can download it by right-clicking on the "Fund Descriptions" link in the top left-hand corner of the page. 

Almost certainly, a bit later in the year there'll be another website, MAFL Stats, that will carry other of the regular features such as the Alternative Premierships, Team Ratings, Surprisal information as well as the one-off pieces I occasionally write with a statistical flavour. I'll let you know when there's something on that site that's worth a look.

Until then, if you're thinking about investing this year please have a look at the PDF.

(BTW: I've turned on commenting for now, so feel free to leave a comment on the site if you'd like to)