2013 : Round 2 - Results

There was a lot to be happy about in this week's results, not least the breaking of the long drought in the collect history of the Margin Fund. Combo_NN2 was responsible for two successful SuperMargin wagers, and Bookie_9 was the source of another and was within a kick of landing two more. These successful wagers have left the Margin Fund up by 10c on the season to date. Shame I reduced the weighting of this Fund this season ...

The other Funds weren't as successful, the Line Fund landing 2 from 3 to make a small profit - though not enough to fully recoup last round's losses - and the Head-to-Head Fund losing its sole wager. That leaves the Recommended Portfolio up by a little under 2c on the round but down by the same amount on the season.

TIPS AND PREDICTIONS

Pleasing too were the results for a number of the Tipsters and Predictors.

Combo_NN2 had a particularly spectacular round, tipping all 9 victors including the narrow-underdog Hawks and margin-predicting with a 25.6 points per game MAPE, that despite the potentially MAPE-destroying 148-point victory by the Dons. This performance has left Combo_NN2 atop both the Head-to-Head Tipster and the Margin Predictor portions of the Leaderboard.

What I'm also encouraged by is the margin predicting performance of this season's new Margin Predictors in the shape of the two RSMP variants and the Bookie variant based on the LPSO approach to deriving implied probability. (For details on these predictors follows the links in this blog post.) The two RSMP Predictors are also showing promising early talent in predicting line betting results, each having correctly chosen in 78% of games so far.

 In probability prediction, the TAB Bookmaker is proving difficult to beat once again, but what's pleasing there is that the Risk-Equalising approach to deriving Bookmaker probabilities from market prices is proving very-slightly superior to our previous, Overround-Equalising approach. (Details on the distinction are also available in the blog post I linked to earlier.) 

2013 : Round 2 - Wagers & Tips

This week Investors have a single Head-to-Head, three Line and ten SuperMargin wagers. The SuperMargin bets are arrayed as two bets - one based on Combo_NN2's opinion and the other on Bookie_9's - on five games. For the first time this week these two opinions differ sufficiently to have us selecting different buckets to wager on in the same game, so we'll have an opportunity to assess the efficacy of the Bookie_9-as-backup strategy that I've concocted for this season.

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2013 : Round 1B - Results

At this point in the season all but the Margin Fund wager smaller amounts than they'll wager later in the year. This is because statistical analysis of historical data suggests that the various algorithms tend to perform less well in these earlier rounds; Round 1 of 2013 has provided ample additional evidence for such hypotheses.

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2013 : Round 1B - Wagers & Tips (Who Knows?)

Today I found myself, if only briefly, feeling something approximating sympathy for bookmakers the world over as they fielded markets on the remaining games in the 1st round of the AFL based, surely, on nothing more than pre-season form, rumour, perhaps a little insider-knowledge, and Ablett-only-knows what else.

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2013 : Round 1A - Results

Forget the Draft, the talk of tanking and peptides, forget the pre-season contest with its quirky scoring, rule-changes, and surprise results; you can only feel assured that a new season has truly commenced once the www.afl.com.au website has buckled under the apparently startling load.

To be fair, the AFL site was accepting visitors come the second quarter of Friday night's game, but by then I'd found the reliability of other websites more compelling, so I can't vouch for its availability thereafter. You'd reckon the AFL might do a little more to ensure that its online porch-light was blazing - or, at the very least, turned on - for the first game of the season.

None of the sites I visited though was providing the view I was hoping for on Friday night, as the Crows squandered an early 4-goal lead to eventually go down to the Dons by 35 points, failing expansively to cover the 15.5 point handicap they - and by financial contagion we - were offering. Freo's 28-point win on Saturday night evened our line-betting win-loss ledger and reduced our Line Fund losses, but the Crows' loss on the Line and SuperMargin markets still left us down by three-tenths of a cent on the weekend.

With both favourites finishing winless, all but one of the Head-to-Head Tipsters is currently on 0 from 2, HSH being the exception and benefitting from the Dockers' designation as the Home team in its derby with the Eagles.

Amongst the Margin Predictors, only CNN1's tip that Fremantle would win by 3 goals stands out as particularly prescient, while scanning the Head-to-Head Probability Predictors we find that it's the Bookmaker-based Predictors whose caution has proven wisest.

There's still seven games to go though before we draw a cliched line under the 1st round ...