Not As Good As Last Week (or the Week Before)

What to make of all that then?

Firstly, the Line Redux Fund has stumbled for the first time this season, winning just 1 of 3 bets, but still leaving all Investors with exposure to this Fund in profit. This weekend's results take the Line Redux Fund to 6-4 for the season, perilously close to a chance result.

And it's not as if I can claim 'near-thing' status since the Lions lost by 26.5 points and the Hawks lost by 53.5 points on handicap betting. Not even the most tenuously tenured of coaches has attributed a 9 goal loss to nothing more than the proverbial 'bounce of the ball'.

Thank heavens for the Swans. For the second time this season they've won outright when we've backed them with start.

Investors with Hope Fund exposure please note that things warm up next weekend as the Hope Fund joins the Line Redux Fund and goes live. Over the past 4 weeks, had I given it its head, the Hope Fund would've made 2 or 3 bets each week (with, if I'm honest - which I'm pathologically inclined to be, often regardless of the consequences - only marginal success).

On tipping, the bag was also decidedly mixed. No tipster managed better than 4 from 8 and only 3 favourites saluted the judge, which leaves us in the very odd position where 3 tipsters - Shadow, Silhouette and Short Term Memory II - lead BKB by a tip and a half. How strange to find a tipster underpinned by a mindless heuristic and dedicated to a non-existent dog leading one of the finest football minds on the planet. Clearly in a post GFC, climate-changing world, all the normal societal rules have been suspended. Or something.

Please note that we're now only a couple of weeks away from the Pick the Finishing positions competition. Look out for details this week.

Three More: It's Getting to be a Habit

The Line Redux Fund has so far this season acted with restraint and discernment. This week we've more evidence of that first characteristic; let's hope we also witness more of the second.

All of which is a cryptic way to introduce the fact that we've three line bets this weekend:

• Brisbane, giving Collingwood 9.5 points start on Friday night at the Gabba
• Sydney, receiving 8.5 points start from Carlton on Saturday afternoon at the SCG
• Hawthorn, giving Port Adelaide 23.5 points start on Saturday at the G

The latter two of these bets represent our 2nd bets on Hawthorn and on Sydney (both of the previous bets were winners). 

Moving next to tipping, we have:

• Unanimous support for the Lions over Collingwood, though ELO has only a 3 point margin, making this its Game of the Round
• Carlton tipped 11-2 over Sydney
• Port Adelaide tipped 9-4 over the Hawks, with the 9 including all the top-ranked tipsters bar BKB
• Unanimous support for St Kilda and the prediction of a blowout by BKB, Chi and ELO
• Geelong tipped 11-2 over Adelaide
• Essendon tipped 9-4 over the Roos, with the 9 once again including all the top-ranked tipsters bar BKB, and Chi tipping the Roos but by only a point, making this his Game of the Round
• Melbourne tipped 7-6 over Richmond, with Easily Impressed II the only top-ranked tipster siding with the Tigers and even then only doing so because they were more lightly flogged last weekend than were the Dees
• The Western Bulldogs tipped 11-2 over West Coast

(Note that we're once again waiting for the line market to go up for one game. I'll include the details in Monday's results.)

Line Redux Bags another Two from Three

Two more successful line bets from three attempts has the Line Redux Fund now priced at $1.125 and leaves those Investors with Line Redux exposure up by between about 2.2 and 2.5%. Perhaps the best thing about the weekend's performance is that the two winning bets won easily and the losing bet missed out by just a little over a goal.

Investors please note that I've changed the way I'm displaying your portfolio performance (see table at right). Rather than repeating the same number a dozen or so times, I'm now showing a single performance statistic for the Recommended portfolio. If your MIN is not shown separately it's because you have the Recommended portfolio; accordingly, the performance of that portfolio is the performance of your portfolio.

We still have one more week of Line Redux Fund langour before the madness begins when, firstly, the Hope Fund will be unleashed and allowed to fling cash for the first time. I've been tracking the bets that all the currently dormant Funds would have made had they not been in a period of enforced abstinence, and the Hope Fund is one that I'm glad has been kept away from Sportsbet. (The other is Chi-squared.) I'm assuming that this is a 'calibration' period ...

On tipping we have the extraordinary situation whereby BKB trails, albeit only by half a tip. This is down to the sterling performances of Shadow, Silhouette and Short-Term Memory II, each of which bagged 7 from 8 this week (see table at right) missing only the Hawks' win over the Roos. Chi has continued his poor run of tipping and managed just 5 this weekend to leave him tied for last with Home Sweet Home on just 14 from 24.

ELO tipping was acceptable at 6 from 8 but its line betting performance fell away dramatically from last weekend's 7 as it managed just 4 from 8 this weekend, with one of those being Adelaide who were favoured to win on line betting given their 6.5 points start yet even money head-to-head price.

Round 3 offers another trio

Three line bets again this weekend, giving start in two and receiving it in one, much as we did last weekend.

In Thursday's game - where we've 'corrected' the AFL and listed the Pies as the true home team - we've taken Collingwood with 19.5 points, playing Geelong. This is our second wager on the Pies this season.

Next, on Saturday, we've taken St Kilda giving 20.5 points start to West Coast at Docklands.

Finally, on Sunday, we're on Port Adelaide giving 30.5 points start to the early-season spoon favourites, the Dees.

On tipping we have:

• Geelong favoured 9 to 4, with Chi opting for a narrow Collingwood victory in his Game of the Round. Both of the Easily Impressed heuristics have gone with Collingwood too, each on the basis of Collingwood's sizeable victory margin last weekend.
• St Kilda favoured 12 to 1, with Easily Impressed I the only dissenting voice.
• The Lions favoured 7 to 6, though Sydney's support includes our current top 3 tipsters in CTL, EI I and FTS. ETO also favours Sydney but by only 1 point making this one of its Games of the Round.
• Essendon, the underdogs, favoured 7 to 6. However, two of the top three tipsters are on Carlton.
• Port Adelaide the unanimous choice, though not quite favoured to cover the 30.5 points spread by Chi and ELO.
• The Kangaroos tipped by all but ELO. Chi, ELO and BKB all have it as a less than two goal margin though.
• Adelaide tipped by all but Home Sweet Home and a fence-sitting BKB. ELO has this as its other Game of the Round.
• Western Bulldogs the unanimous tip, but with Chi tipping them to fail to cover the spread and ELO tipping them to cover.

ELO, as noted previously, has started well on line betting. Its line betting picks this week are: Collingwood, St Kilda, Sydney, Essendon, Melbourne, Roos and the Bulldogs. (There's no line market yet for the Fremantle v Adelaide game.)

Another Acceptable Week

A solid if not spectacular Round 2 for Investors, with 2 wins from 3 line bets once again increasing the wealth of those Investors with Line Redux Fund exposure.

Adelaide, the sole losing bet, never looked like covering the 10.5 points spread, trailed in absolute terms at every change before going on to lose handily. Collingwood also made Investors nervous, taking 3 quarters to provide any sign of solace, and finished at 3QT just one-half a point in advance of the spread before going on to cover by plenty. Sydney, in contrast, were always round about in terms of the spread and looked home on line betting by the end of the 3rd term. In the end, they won outright, making the 16.5 point start pleasingly redundant.

On the tipping front we now have the remarkable situation of three tipsters leading BKB: CTL, EI 1 and FTS (all on 12 from 16). BKB and a range of other tipsters are on 11. Home Sweet Home, which recorded the best score of the round with 7, still languishes on 10 from 16. Chi and ELO are now joint last on just 9 from 16.

Though ELO managed just 5 from 8 on tipping to go with its 4 from last week, it managed an extremely profitable 7 from 8 on line betting, moving it to 12 from 16 on line betting across the first two rounds.

ELO also continues to do well in terms of Mean Absolute Prediction Error. It's now at 30.1, a little ahead of Chi on 34.4 and a little behind BKB on 29.1.

On MARS ratings (see www.mafl-stats.blogspot.com for details), the big moves this weekend have seen Carlton move into the top 8 at the expense of Port Adelaide who, as a result of their loss to the Eagles, have dropped to 10th.

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)