2012 Round 19 - Wagers & Tips : There's Always Hope On A Sunday

August 1, 2012 Tony Corke

One Head-to-Head, four SuperMargin and five Line bets comprise this week's wagering activity, collectively representing for Investors a best-case upside of about 22c and a worst-case downside of about 15c. Almost certainly the eventual outcome will be somewhere within those bounds - lightning not striking twice in the same place and all that - but that's still quite a range ...

Activity, of course, is what drives risk and reward, so it's not surprising then that only one game, Saturday's Lions v Tigers game, is wager-free. Six other contests see only a single Fund in action, though three of these involve Line Fund wagers, which matter most to Investors because of their relative size and because of the 50% weighting of the Line Fund in Overall Portfolios.

It's not until Sunday that we find games with two Funds active. Unfortunately, in the first of these, the Line Fund needs a win by 21 points or more and the Margin Fund needs a win by only 1 to 9 points. To use the appropriate jargon, these are "mutually exclusive" outcomes. The last game of the round sees these same two Funds active again, though in this game it is possible for them both to be successful should the Crows defeat the Dons by between 40 and 49 points thereby landing the SuperMargin and the Line wagers.

Not surprisingly, it's this Crows v Dons game that sports the most striking profile in the week's Ready Reckoner.

A Crows win by the requisite margin would be worth over 5c to Investors, comfortably the best return on offer for the round. Other welcome results would be a Hawks win over the Cats by 40 to 49 points, worth a little over 3c, or a Pies win over the Saints by 20 to 29 points, also worth about 3c.

Disaster looms in the form of a Melbourne loss, draw or victory by 10 to 20 points, any of which results would knock 3c off Overall Portfolios. A failure on the part of the Crows to cover their 37.5 point spread would also bring about a similar decline in Portfolio value, while losses by any of the Dogs, Giants or Fremantle on line betting would be only marginally less painful, each stripping about 2.5c from Portfolios.

On MAFL, as the Divynls pointed out, it's a fine line between pleasure and pain.

Across the Head-to-Head Tipsters this week the majority pick is the favourite in all nine games. For three teams - Hawthorn, Collingwood and Adelaide - the majority opinion is unanimous, and in three more, Home Sweet Home is the lone, boy-who-cried-wolf dissenter. In the Gold Coast v Melbourne game there's also a single dissenter, though there it's Short Term Memory I tipping the home-team Suns. The remaining two matchups include the Lions v Tigers game where the striped is favoured over the maned 9-4, and the Eagles v Dockers game where the avian is favoured over the maritime 7-6.

Again we find, however, that the best-credentialled tipsters - BKB, ProPred and WinPred - are in perfect synchrony, so it looks as though the log-jam on the MAFL Leaderboard is set to continue.

Speaking of synchrony, the Margin Predictors are this week unanimous for all nine contests.

The good news though, at least for those who crave competitive over lopsided matchups, is that their are single digit margin predictions amongst the Predictors in six of the games: Hawthorn v Geelong, Fremantle v West Coast, Collingwood v St Kilda, Brisbane v Richmond, Melbourne v Gold Coast, and Carlton v Sydney. Only in the Dogs v Roos, GWS v Port, and the Crows v Dons games do the favourites enjoy consistently strong support amongst all Predictors, manifesting as average predicted margins in excess of five goals.

Amongst the Probability Predictors, the non-TAB subset rate the Hawks', Dogs', Port Adelaide's, Giants', Fremantle's, Pies', and Lions' chances as being lower than does the TAB Bookmaker, and rate the Dees' and the Crows' chances as being higher.

The Line Fund algorithm is most convinced about the line market chances of the Saints this weekend, but also rates highly the prospects for the Cats, Crows and Lions. GWS, Freo, Melbourne, the Dogs and the Blues are alll rated fairly similar chances at around 55%.