MAFL 2010 : Round 22 Results

*Sigh*

Entering into Sunday with wagers on both favourites and a cumulative 3.7% profit on the weekend so far for the Recommended Portfolio, I had what I thought were reasonable hopes that this Portfolio would end the weekend having erased some of the loss it had accumulated over the preceding 6 months.

The Tigers and the Dees thought otherwise, however, and, combined, inflicted losses of over 6% on the Recommended Portfolio, eventually leaving it, writhing and in pain, down almost 2.5% on the weekend. This loss means that the Recommended Portfolio is now trading at about 87c.

MIN#002's and MIN#017's Portfolios also suffered losses - of about 4% and 6% respectively - driving them also further into the red.

(Nonetheless, I'll continue to post here as if I know something about football as long as you'll maintain the pretence with me.)

Here's the Dashboard for Round 22:

The Shadow and Heuristic-Based Funds are now closed for the season. It's interesting to note that, while both were successful in 70% of their wagers, Shadow lost 28c on the year while the Heuristic-Based Fund, which relied on Shadow's expertise for the first 12 rounds of the season, made 21c. Which goes to show that, in gambling, it's not just how often you win, but how much you make when you do and how much you lose when you don't. Now there's a homily you can take to the bank.

Tipping proved moderately difficult this weekend, partly because only five favourites were successful. This produced a lowish average of 4.77 correct predictions from 8 for the MAFL Tipsters. Best amongst our bunch were Consult The Ladder, Ride Your Luck, and Follow The Streak, which all tipped 6 from 8, a performance that, in Follow The Streak's case, was enough to secure it victory in the MAFL Tipping competition with a season-long score of 116/176 (66%).

Follow The Streak's strategy can be explained very simply: in any game pick the team that has the longer winning streak and, if both team's streaks are equal in length, pick the team higher on the ladder. Simple and - this year, at least - effective.

Second position was secured, jointly, by Consult The Ladder and Silhouette on 114 from 176 (65%). BKB finished five tips behind Follow The Streak and in equal 3rd-last on the MAFL Tipping ladder. Its score of 111 is six tips worse than the 117 it scored in season 2009.

Further evidence of the relative difficulty of tipping this year is provided by a comparison of this year's winning score - 116 - with that for 2009, when Silhouette led all MAFL Tipsters with a score of 124. In fact, Follow The Streak's 116 would have only placed it 7th last season.

I hope this comparison provides you with some small comfort if you also found tipping this year to be more than usually difficult.

Level-stake wagering on the tips of the MAFL Tipsters whenever they predicted a home team win would have been profitable over the season had it been applied to any but the tips of ELO, BKB and Chi, and would have been most profitable had it been diligently followed in relation to the prognostications of Easily Impressed I (who, virtually every week, has merely tipped the team that won by the largest margin, or lost by the smallest margin, in the immediately preceding round). Thumbs up, I think, for rules of thumb.

Not much changed this week in terms of team rankings on MARS Ratings, the sole movement being the trading of 6th and 7th spots between Sydney, who claimed 6th, and Carlton, who surrendered it.

That leaves the MARS rankings for teams somewhat different from their final competition ladder positions, most notably for Adelaide (ranked 8th on MARS but 11th on the competition ladder), Fremantle (9th on MARS, 6th on the competition ladder), and Port Adelaide (13th on MARS, 10th on the competition ladder). Hawthorn is the other team with a difference of two or more places in their respective MARS and competition ladder rankings: they're 5th on MARS but 7th on the competition ladder.

In the end, BKB was the only Margin Tipper to break the magical 30 for its Mean Absolute Prediction Error. Its 29.9 points per game saw it finish about 0.4 points per game ahead of LAMP. HAMP's strong showing in Round 22 was enough for it to snatch 3rd spot from ELO.

LAMP, meantime, as well as grabbing 2nd on Mean APE, held on to win the Median APE competition with a score of 26.5 points, 0.5 points ahead of BKB, ELO and HAMP, all tied for 2nd.

HELP predicted 4 from 8 line results this week to finish the season on 83 from 176 - comfortably sub-naive - and recorded similarly unsatisfactory probability scores. That'll be the last you'll be seeing of the HELP algorithm.

The Super Smart Model (SSM) tipped the first four line results for the round, but followed up with none of the remaining four. It also bagged 5 from 8 on head-to-head tipping. That left it with an impressive season-long line betting record of 98 from 176 (55.7%) and head-to-head record of 111 from 176 (63.1%), the same as BKB's. It's fairly certain you will be seeing more of SSM next year.

Lastly, the Bookie Probability Model had two successful and one unsuccessful wager this week, which netted out to a virtual breakeven position for the round. Over the course of the season, it would have made a quite substantial profit, and so it too will almost certainly return in 2011.

In the coming weeks I'll probably provide some more analysis of the 2010 home-and-away season, but for now, that'll do.