MAFL 2010 : Round 23 (Week 1 of the Finals)

The importance of the weekend's fixtures should have all of us curious about their outcomes. If you're a Recommended Portfolio holder, though, and you're a bit concerned that one or two contests might drift into dullness, be comforted by the fact that you've wagers in all four.

With the Shadow and Heuristic-Based Funds no longer active, only four Funds had decisions to make this week and each of them has found at least one game worthy of a flutter.

New Heritage likes the look of all four contests - which only further convinces me that, should I run this Fund again next season, I'll need to find a way to prevent it from wagering on the bye. Anyway, it has made four wagers totalling a little under 40% of the Fund, the largest for 11.9% on Collingwood at $1.25 and the longest-priced for 5.2% on Freo at $2.15. The weighted average price of all its wagers is $1.45.

ELO-Line has also made four wagers, its assortment totalling 20% of the Fund and including three wagers on favourites and one on the underdog Freo. Prudence has added four more with a weighted average price of $1.52, largest amongst them a 4.6% dollop on the Pies at $1.25 and the longest-priced on Freo at $2.15 for 2.8% of the Fund.

Hope rounds out the bakers' dozen of wagers for the Recommended Portfolio with a single bet of 4.4% on Freo at $2.15.

In total, the 13 bets made on behalf of the Recommended Portfolio total about 13% of the Fund.

MIN#017 is again forced to endure the recklessness of New Heritage's wagering style and so carries the burden of its four wagers this weekend.

Here's the detail, this week in a slightly modified form that includes the tips from those tipsters that are still active and Ready Reckoner-style information for the Recommended Portfolio.

In three of the contests the tipsters have all gone with the home team favourites, while in the fourth there's some conjecture, as Chi, ELO and HAMP have lined up behind Fremantle, the home team underdog, leaving LAMP and BKB on their own endorsing Hawthorn.

Here's the week's full Ready Reckoner:

The system used for the finals series in 2010 is the same one that the AFL has used since 2000 and is described in the following graphic (courtesy of Wikipedia):

For the first time, this year I've sat down and worked through what the finals system means for teams finishing in different ladder positions. In hindsight I suppose it was obvious - as most things are - but I was surprised by the relative difficulty faced by teams finishing 5th through 8th in securing a Flag.

In all likelihood such a team will need to win their week 1 final and then win a Semi-Final, Preliminary Final and Grand Final against three of the teams that finished in the top 4, as you can see in the following graphic, which shows the teams that each finalist could face in any particular week of the finals.

Testament to the difficulty faced by the teams finishing in the bottom half of the eight is the fact that none of them has made a Grand Final in any of the 10 seasons since we started using the current finals system.

In fact, in only two seasons - 2001 and 2007 - has a team from positions 5 through 8 even made it as far as the Preliminary Finals.

Focussing our attention now just on Week 1 of the finals, history suggests that the Cats and Fremantle should be heavily favoured to win, since teams in 2nd have defeated the 3rd-placed team in 9 of the 10 previous encounters, and teams in 6th have defeated 7th-placed teams with a similarly biased frequency.

Minor premiers have, on average, had more trouble with teams finishing 4th, winning only 60% of the time and, curiously, teams finishing 8th have won more often than they've lost in their Week 1 finals against 5th-placed teams.