2012 Round 17 - Wagers & Tips : A Measured Re-Engagement

After MAFL weeks like last week - which, fortunately, have been infrequent during MAFL history - I'm torn between a desire to see the Funds regroup, reflect and recalibrate, and an unvoiced hope that they'll find genuine value in every market they see, wager heavily and tantalise with the promise of recouping all the losses they made in the previous week, and then more. As usual, what I get is somewhere in between.

So, while we're not on the first two games of the round (which, as it turns out, are the games with the highest "information content"), we're on all seven of the remaining contests with five Line, two Head-to-Head, and three SuperMargin wagers. In total these wagers represent a tick under 15% of total Funds, which is about the average level of wagering we've seen each week since all three Funds became active in Round 6.

Only one of the week's Line wagers is on a team offering start, and that's on the Dockers spotting GWS 12-and-a-half goals to be going on with. The two Head-to-Head wagers are on teams priced at $1.50 and $2.30, so there's not too much risk there, and the apparently riskiest of the SuperMargin wagers is on Freo to win by only 40 to 49 points, a wager that is priced at just $9.

Those Fremantle wagers make for a slightly odd-looking Ready Reckoner entry for that contest.

An Adelaide win by between 1 and 9 points is the best single result for which an Investor might hope. It would be worth 3.7c to Overall Portfolios. Next best would be a Sydney win by 20 to 29 points, worth 3c, and then a Richmond win of any size, worth another 2.7c. A Fremantle win by 75 points or fewer, and not by between 40 and 49 points, or a Fremantle draw or loss would be the worst possible result for Investors, knocking 3c off the Portfolio price.

Amongst the Head-to-Head Tipsters there's unanimous endorsement of only three teams this week - Adelaide, Sydney and Fremantle - with Home Sweet Home the sole dissenter in two other matchups, preferring the Cats over the Dons, and the Dogs over Carlton. On review, Home Sweet Home's support of the Cats is a little perverse, since they've played at Docklands, their "home" ground this week, 6 times fewer than have their opponents.

In the other contests, there's strong majority support for the Hawks to beat the Pies, and for the Roos to topple Richmond, while there's considerably more contention about the Suns v Lions and Dees v Power games, in both of which there's only an 8-5 vote in favour of the away team favourites.

As ever, the Margin Predictors are more resolute, unanimous in all but the round's opening two games. In the first of these, the Cats v Dons game, their predictions range from a Cats win by 3 points to a Dons win by 4 points, while in the second, the Pies v Hawks game, victory margins span a broader though still bipartisan range, from a Pies win by 10 points to a Hawks win by 12 points.

The high level of ultimate unanimity should be balanced by a recognition of the relative uncertainty in a couple of the games. In the Tigers v Roos clash, though the Predictors all eventually sided with the national emblem, a number of them came very near to supporting the Tigers. As well, in the Melbourne v Port Adelaide game, a majority of tipsters offered only single-digit endorsement of Port Adelaide.

Head-to-Head Margin Predictors are also unanimous in their selection of the favourite for every game this week, though the level of enthusiasm in each game differs considerably too.

Compared with TAB Sportsbet's opinions, the largest differences in probability assessments are that:

• WinPred, ProPred and H2H all rate the Pies' chances lower against the Hawks
• ProPred and H2H both rate the Crows' chances higher against the Eagles
• WinPred rates Sydney's chances lower against the Saints

The Line Fund algorithm rates the Dees' chances as highest of all in line betting, followed by Hawthorn's and the Eagles', then Sydney's, Freo's, the Suns' and the Dogs'. Richmond and Essendon are the two other teams that this algorithm assesses as more likely than not to win on line betting, though it assigns them probabilities of just 53% and 52% respectively.