What a pleasant weekend's wagering that was.

On Saturday, Collingwood looked comfortable from the off and eventually annihilated the Hawks by 64 points, and then on Sunday St Kilda teased us long enough to let us feel that we earned our payoff having trailed by a point at quarter time, drawn level by half-time, led by a point at three-quarter time before running out 15-point winners. Two bets, two wins, the Heuristic Fund up another 4.3%, and the Recommended Portfolio now up 1.13% on the season. All of this with the prospect of the Hope Fund commencing trading in the coming round.

Here are the details of the weekend's wagering:

Favourites seemed to collectively recall their job descriptions this weekend, winning in all six games where one existed. In the two games with equal favourites the victors were the teams higher on the ladder, so BKB wound up tipping the card this week. Chi, Follow The Streak, and Consult The Ladder were the next-best tipsters, all bagging 7 for the round.

Those performances put Follow The Streak atop our tipster ladder on 25 from 32 (78%) and place Consult The Ladder in second on 24 from 32 (75%).

Though Investors have much to smile about courtesy of Shadow's tipping, they might have been happier still had the Heuristic Fund been originally entrusted to Follow The Streak, Consult The Ladder, Ride Your Luck or Easily Impressed I. Few investment strategies though are immune from post hoc regret.

On MARS ratings, St Kilda did enough in beating Freo to retain top spot, though the Cats' thumping of Port allowed them to narrow the gap between them and the Saints to just half a point. Collingwood's win and the Dogs' loss saw them swap places in third and fourth. The only other change in the top eight was Fremantle's elevation into it, due not to any improvement in Freo's rating but instead to the large rating declines suffered by Hawthorn and Adelaide, which simultaneously pushed them out of the top 8 and drove their rankings below the 1,000 mark.

Only seven teams remain with a rating above 1,000.

Margin prediction was a perilous occupation this week, as five games finished with victory margins of 40 points or more.

BKB emerged from the weekend with elevated mean and median APEs but still retaining the lowest mean APE and second-lowest median APE. ELO now has low median APE on its own and LAMP, finally being faithful to its name, now has the second-lowest mean APE.

Chi, despite being on the right team in seven of the eight games, had conservative margin predictions and, as a consequence, grievously insulted his mean and median APEs.

HELP's results were hard to distinguish from those of a notional naive tipster this week. It now has a 50% line tipping record for the season and overall sub-naive figures on all three probability scores.

This week I thought I'd finish with a look at what in previous seasons I've referred to as Alternative Premierships. In the table below I've shown the quarter-by-quarter performance of each team so far in season 2010.

St Kilda has performed well in quarters 1, 3 and 4, but has struggled a little in second quarters, winning two, losing two, and recording a sub-100 percentage, making it only the 10th-best team in this quarter.

Melbourne have struggled in the first quarter where they rank 11th, but have been positively diabolical in the second quarter, losing all four and scoring less than one point to their opponents' three. They've come to life in the second-half, however, producing performances that see them ranked 4th on their third-quarters and 1st on their final terms, where they're the only teams yet to lose a final term.

The Dogs have a different cadence to their performances: poor in the 1st and 3rd terms for which they're ranked 13th and 12th respectively, better in the 2nd and 4th terms where they're ranked 1st and 8th respectively. In 2nd terms they've outscored their opponents by almost two to one.

Fremantle's cadence matches the Dogs'. Freo ranks 10th and 13th for quarters 1 and 3, and 5th and 2nd for quarters 2 and 4.

Onto Round 5 then, where Hope begins ...