2012 Round 14 Results : Saints Not Favourites

Favourites won the first eight contests of the weekend and looked set to with the ninth when the Saints led the Roos by over 3 goals at the first change late on Sunday afternoon. Even at half time, with the Saints' lead whittled to just 2 points, there were reasons for Investors to remain confident that the Saints would do enough to cover the 20.5 point spread and leave MAFL in the black for the weekend.

But an insipid and inaccurate 3rd term in which the Saints managed just 1.6 to the Roos' 4.2 left the pre-game favourites down by 2 goals, and a 5-goal final term was nowhere near enough to catch the Roos, who kicked 8 goals of their own to run out 33-point winners.

As a result, all Funds lost money over the weekend, the Head-to-Head Fund dropping almost 2c, the Line Fund 1.5c, and the Margin Fund, despite narrowly snagging a collect in the Crows v Richmond game, dropping 2.5c. When that's all added up, Overall Portfolios fall by just under 2c leaving them down by just under 10c on the season.

The strong showing by favourites was once again reflected in exemplary head-to-head tipping performances, with the MAFL Head-to-Head Tipsters averaging 7.7 from 9. Many tipped 8 - though none tipped all 9 - and even the worst amongst them, Silhouette, still correctly predicted the outcome of 6 contests.

Collectively those performances do nothing to break the logjam at the top of the Leaderboard, leaving H2H_U10 still 1 tip clear, now on 91 from 117 (78%), ahead of a dozen other Tipsters.

Though the winners were mostly expected, the victory margins were not, so the Margin Predictors' MAPEs for the round were generally high, with the all-Predictor average coming in at 35.65 points per game. Only one Predictor produced a sub-30 MAPE for the round, Bookie_3 with 29.95 points per game, and Combo_NN2 turned in a season-worst performance of 43.13 point per game, sufficient to consign it to 9th on the Leaderboard. Combo_7 scored a very respectable 31.5 points per game, which sees it atop that same Leaderboard, very narrowly ahead of Bookie_9.

As a group, the Margin Predictors also did poorly on line betting this week, averaging just 3.1 correct predictions from 9, the 2nd-lowest average for the season, ahead of only the 2.6 average from Round 2.

In the SuperMargin market, none of the Margin Predictors selected the correct bucket in more than one game, though a few managed to land within one bucket of the correct results in three contests. Still we have only 5 Predictors in profit based on wagering on their preferred bucket in every game, and only 4 in profit based on wagering on the preferred bucket and the buckets on either side.

From an ROI point of view, the best strategy so far this season would have been to wager on HU3's, HA3's or HA7's preferred bucket but only in those games where this bucket represented a Home team win or draw. Such a strategy would have made 76 wagers for 15 collects and a +49.3% ROI.

Head-to-Head probability scores for all four Head-to-Head Probability Predictors were strongly positive again this week. Best performed was ProPred, though the range between best and worst performances was so small as to render ranking largely an academic exercise. The TAB bookmaker still heads the Leaderboard, with ProPred now in 2nd, narrowly ahead of the two H2H Predictors. (So far this season, there's only been a need to adjust the Head-to-Head algorithm's probabilities in 2 games, and both these adjustments were only small, so the Adjusted and Unadjusted results are very similar).

Conversely, the Line Fund algorithm finished with a relatively poor round of probability scoring, the worst it's produced since Round 11 and the fifth-worst of the season.