Measures of Game Competitiveness

All this analysis of victory margins, and a query from Dan about a recent blog post, has had me wondering about victory margin as a measure of the competitiveness of games. Within a given era - say 10 years or so - during which the average points scored per game won't vary by too much, victory margin seems to be a reasonable proxy for competitiveness, but if you want to consider a broader swathe of AFL history, it strikes me as being deficient.

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Margins of Victory Across the Seasons

This year MAFL Investors will be taking on the TAB bookmaker in a new arena by attempting to pick the final victory margin for each game within a 10-point range. Having not wagered in this market I've no bedrock of intuitions - nor misconceptions - about it yet; I thought I'd start with a little historical analysis.

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Cursory Mention of MAFL in New Scientist (Probably)

At the start of the year, Michael Schmidt, creator of the Eureqa application, mentioned that Justin Mullins from New Scientist was researching for a piece on Eureqa. I dropped an e-mail to Justin, received a polite reply and thought little more of it.

Turns out the final article included this paragraph:

"Today, the algorithm is called Eureqa and has thousands of users all over the world, with people using it for everything from financial forecasting to particle physics. One person even uses it to analyse the statistics of Australian rules football games."

(Various people have cut-and-pasted the full article, for example Transcurve and Kurzweilai, and you can access the original content directly via the New Scientist site if you're willing to create a free subscription.)

I can't be completely certain, but it's more likely than not that the last sentence refers to MAFL.

It'd be nice if the reference was a tad more direct - say with a name or a URL - but then again it'd be preferable if any wider awareness of MAFL's existence came at a time when the Funds were making rather than losing money. So, swings and roundabouts ... 

Explaining More of the Variability in the Victory Margin of Finals

This morning while out walking I got to wondering about two of the results from the latest post on the Wagers & Tips blog. First that teams from higher on the ladder have won 20 of the 22 Semi Finals between 2000 and 2010, and second that the TAB bookmaker has installed the winning team as favourite in only 64% of these contests. Putting those two facts together it's apparent that, in Semi Finals at least, the bookmaker's often favoured the team that finished lower on the ladder, and these teams have rarely won.

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MARS Ratings : How Important Are Teams' Initial Ratings?

It's been a few years since I chose the key parameters for the MARS Ratings System, which I selected on the basis that they maximised the predictive accuracy of the resulting System. One of those parameters - the percentage carryover of team Ratings from one season to the next - determines each team's initial MARS Rating for the season.

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