It was, I'll admit, a close run thing, but in the end I decided to spend a couple of days rebuilding the script to generate heuristic-based tips. The thought of spending the season wondering about how Shadow or Silhouette would have been performing had I been bothered to update their algorithms for 2011, proved just a little too much to bear. So, now it's done.

The need for the revamp came about because of the introduction of byes into the draw which meant that I couldn't simply re-use last year's code. As you can read about in this PDF, while I was making the changes to accommodate the byes I took the opportunity to tweak a few of the heuristics at the same time.

This year there'll be no Funds based on the Heuristic Tipsters due partly to their untested nature but also to the fact that I'm contemplating something of a return to the austerity of the early years of MAFL when the Funds were few and the profits were attractive. More on this in future blogs ...