2012 Round 3 Results : At Last

Apologies that this blog is 24 hours late. It surely wasn't for lack of motivation - after all, Investors did have their first wagering return for the season - but instead was down to a lack of a fully functional laptop. 

My previous laptop, about 3 years old, was suffering from Advanced Relevance Deprivation Syndrome, brought on by the recognition that running any of the most recent software was beyond it and that loading but a fraction of any seriously "big" data set was a task unlikely to finish in finite time. Laptops, I've decided, age like dogs - at about 7 years per year. 

So it was that I spent some of Friday, all of Saturday, all of Sunday and even a little of Monday, transferring files from the old machine to the new, unable to create a blog for fear of confusing the program performing the file transfer and thus prolonging the process.

The good news for Investors is that the SuperMargin Fund now stands at 91.25c, and hence Investor Portfolios at 98.25c, bounced skyward by the Hawks' settling on a 56-point victory margin after 14 horrible minutes of time-on in the final term, only about 10 minutes of which was spent with the margin in the requisite 50-59 point range.

What's now horrifically apparent to me is that there's no such thing as a safe SuperMargin bet since, regardless of the current margin, a six-pointer in the wrong direction will always move it outside the required range. Far better, I realise, to check only the final result, reducing the outcome to a binary happy/sad proposition, rather than endure the slings and arrows of outrageous majors.

The week's profit is, of course, thanks to CN2's margin-predicting prowess. Its results are currently bettered amongst the Margin Predictors only by those of the H2H-based predictors, assuming that we impose the same constraint on the Predictors of being allowed only to wager when they tip a Home win or a drawn game (see the second block of data in the table below).

In fact, as you can see, the same statement is also true if we allow the Predictors to wager on their preferred bucket for all of their predictions, not just when they imply a Home team win or draw.

If, instead, we followed the strategy of also wagering on the buckets either side of a Predictor's preferred bucket, then we could also have made a profit by wagering on the Home team predictions of Bookie_9, WinPred_3 or WinPred_7.

Could haves and might haves aside, what's pleasing about the Margin Predictor that Investors are depending on, CN2, is that it's been within a bucket of the right result in 8 of 27 games overall, and on 4 of the 12 occasions in which it's predicted a Home win.

Head-to-Head Tipping again proved to be a simple affair this week, with all but Home Sweet Home landing 8 from 9 tips, thereby producing another round with a 7.9 average and leaving the leaderboard positions unchanged.

Unhindered by unexpected results and improbable margins, the Margin Predictors also fared well. The best of them, CN1, recorded a 28.47 points per game mean APE, followed by HA7 with 29.16 points, then CN2 with 29.46 points. The all-Predictor average was just 30.34 points per game. On the back of these strong performances, the two bookmaker-based Margin Predictors now fill places 1 and 2 on the ladder, with CN2 in third.

Head-to-Head Probability scoring was also high for a third consecutive week and again saw ProPred and the H2H Probability Predictors outperforming the TAB Bookmaker. ProPred currently leads the pack with an improbable 0.411 per game average.

The Line Fund recorded a narrowly positive probability score for the round in correctly predicting 5 of the 9 results to move it to a 14 and 13 season-long performance. Amongst the Margin Predictors, the round's best line prediction performance was due to CN1, which bagged 8 from 9, though most Margin Predictors found themselves on the right side of the line in most contests, as the all-Predictor average came in at 6.3 from 9.