Sufficiently sizeable wins by the Hawks, Dons and Pies, and an upset victory by the Eagles, lifted the Recommended Portfolio by over 11c this week, leaving it now just under 10c short of breakeven.

Only the Gold Coast's inability to topple the Swans - an admittedly unlikely prospect, especially with the unfailingly-illuminating benefit of hindsight - prevented Investors from enjoying a blemish-free round of wagers. The financial cost of the Suns' ineptitude was just 0.3%, which can I think be legitimately considered as the price of a small speculative wager gone wrong.

Apart from the directionally encouraging signs in this table, what's also pleasing is that the Head-to-Head Fund has recorded a profit in 4 of the last 5 rounds (prevented only by the Eagles' upset victory over the Blues in Round 14 from making it 5 from 5) and that the Line Fund has black-inked in 4 of the last 6 rounds, during which it has produced a 14-9 record. 

Only two of the round's seven underdogs won this week - the Eagles and the Dogs - which helped the Head-to-Head Tipsters in recording an average performance of 5.2 from 7, the 5th-highest level of accuracy recorded so far this season. Many tipsters bagged 6 from 7, while the worst performance was a solo achievement of 3 from 7 from Shadow. Bookie_9 and CNN_1 now share leadership of the Head-to-Head Tipster table on 91.5 from 124 (74%), while BKB lies 3rd on 90.5 (73%). Those remain astonishingly high percentages so far into a season.

Margin prediction proved a little more challenging this week, with blowout victories by the Pies, Swans and Saints spoiling the numbers for most Predictors. The average MAPE for the round was 33.53 points per game, the 10th-highest average this season. Win_7 performed best, registering a 28.26 MAPE per game, while Combo_NN_2 performed worst with an MAPE of 40.07 points per game. That dropped Combo_NN_2 to 5th on the MAPE ladder for the season, on 30.24 points per game and now behind Combo_NN_1 on 30.06 points per game. Bookie_3 remains in 1st, now on 28.16 points per game and with a season-long bias near zero, Combo_7 retains 2nd, on 29.05 points per game, and Bookie_9 holds 3rd, on 29.56 points per game and is the last of three Margin Predictors to have a sub-30 MAPE.

Line betting was a little easier this week - as the Line Fund's wagering performance demonstrated - with the average score of 4.6 from 7 representing the 2nd-highest of the season. Bookie_3 remains as the Margin Predictor with the best season-long implicit line betting performance, now at 57%. Even pursuing a contrarian strategy with the line betting predictions of other Margin Predictors would not have produced a result superior to this.

The Probability Predictors all produced positive probability scores for the round, the sixth round in succession for which this has occurred. WinPred had the best round, but is still 4th behind, in order, the TAB Sportsbet bookmaker, H2H Adjusted, H2H Unadjusted and ProPred.

As well, the Line Fund algorithm turned in its best performance of the season to leave it now with a per-game probability score of just -0.027, tantalisingly close to zero.