Who Left the Dogs Out?

Freo's selectorial shenanigans of last weekend appear to have spooked the TAB Sportsbet bookie, so much so that he's not yet posted any of the line markets.

I expect he'll address this oversight sometime in the next 24 hours, in which case I'll post the week's wagering and tipping details tomorrow night.

In the meantime, here's a follow up blog on simulating the finals.

You'll recall from a previous blog that there are eight likely team orderings for the finals. They are the following:

In the earlier blog, I reported how little it mattered for any team's flag chances which of these orderings eventuated - no team's probability varied by more than 0.5% in the simulated results across all eight orderings.

What I didn't report there was how much each team's chances of playing in the Grand Final varied across these eight orderings. So, let's have a look at that.

The cells highlighted in green flag the ordering that maximises a particular team's chances of playing in the Grand Final. So, for example, finishing order A - the current ladder order - maximises Hawthorn's chances of running around in the Granny. Cells highlighted in red represent orderings that minimse a team's chances of playing in the Grand Final. St Kilda, for example, would least like ordering B, because it would probably see them play Carlton in Week 2 of the Finals, who are rated 1,009 on MARS.

Though individual team's chances of playing in the Grand Final do not vary by a great deal across the eight most likely orderings, we do see larger differences than we saw for team's flag chances - of the order of 1-2% for teams likely to finish in positions 3 to 8.

For Sydney, Freo, Hawthorn and Carlton - all teams with small absolute chances of winning the flag - differences of this magnitude are quite material. For example, Carlton's chances of winning the flag increase by almost 50% (from 3.6% to 5.3%) as we move from ordering F to ordering H.

In the earlier blog we found that the Dogs represented the only value wager in the flag market. TAB Sportsbet also offer a market for the Grand Final pairing. The following table sheds light on the value in this market. It shows the probability for each of the 28 possible Grand Final pairings, for each of the eight most likely orderings.

At the right of the table the range of fair value prices for each pairing is shown, based on the smallest and largest probability of that pairing occurring across the eight most likely final orderings.

Next to this range I've provided the latest prices on offer from TAB Sportsbet and flagged with a double-asterisk any pairing that represents value according to my simulated results.

As in the flag market, it's wagers involving the Dogs that seem to represent the greatest value in the GF pairings market: Grand Finals that have Geelong, Collingwood or Sydney facing the Dogs all look attractively priced based on current MARS Ratings.

Clearly, the TAB Sportsbet bookie rates the Dogs' chances very differently to MARS. He's significantly rerated the Dogs on the strength of their two most-recent outings. The Dogs have also seen their MARS Rating drop as a consequence of these two poor showings - by over 11.5 Ratings Points - but still lay claim to an impressive 1,031 MARS Rating.

It all comes down to how much weight you place on recent performance versus season-long pedigree.