2013 : Round 17 - Results

Weekends like the one we just had are the reason I keep doing this.

Amongst the mixed dozen of the wagers faced by Investors, two were priced at $17 and while the more lucrative of the pair wasn't the one that paid out, any win on a wager at those odds is one to savour. I'm fairly sure that it's the highest price ever for a successful MAFL wager.

That $17 payout came in just the second game of the round when a late behind from the Dogs was enough to cut their losing margin to just 19 points, deftly steering it into the 10 to 19 point bucket that Investors were hoping for. Our earlier wager in the round had also been a close-run thing, though in that case ending badly, with the Roos' defeat by a single point leaving us just two points shy of collecting on our two SuperMargin wagers on the Roos to win by 1 to 9 points.

Success in the Hawks v Dogs game heralded a sharp change in our fortunes. It was followed by a string of collects, broken only by the loss of a small head-to-head wager on the Dees. Amongst the winning wagers were two other head-to-head wagers: the Suns at $6, and the Crows at $4.90. Both played far better than their pre-game prices would have suggested they would, and both hung on to win by narrow margins.

Sprinkled in with those encouraging head-to-head wagering outcomes was a four from four performance by the Line Fund. All told that meant a 15c increase in the Recommended Portfolio for the week, leaving it in the black for only the second time this season, and this time by a very healthy 13c. 

This week's result extends the streak of profitable wagering to five rounds, during which the Line Fund has gone 13 and 5, gaining 33.5c in so doing and ensuring that it now, like the two other Funds, is showing a profit for the season. The Line Fund has one more week to capitalise on its strong predictive performance before its bet size is curtailed commencing in Round 19.

TIPSTERS AND PREDICTORS

The week proved much tougher for the Head-to-Head Tipsters, due mainly to the fact that only five favourites were successful. The H2H-related Tipsters were best at foreseeing many of the upset results, each finishing with seven correct tips from nine, enough to propel four of them into a share of the lead with Combo_NN2, which managed just five correct predictions, and the three ProPred predictors, which all managed six.

That group of eight predictors are all on 107.5 from 144 (75%) and lead the three WinPred-related Tipsters by a single tip.

In none of the games this week was the margin of victory greater than 39 points, so the prevalence of upsets didn't stop the Margin Predictors from continuing their extraordinary season. Best amongst them was Combo_NN2, which, despite not selecting the correct winning team in many contests, still managed to predict margins that were, on average, less than 13.5 points different from the actual outcomes.

That performance allowed Combo_NN2 to grab back 7th spot amongst the Margin Predictors. Elsewhere on the ladder, nothing changed in the first three positions, while Bookie_9 leapt two places to 4th, knocking Combo_7 and Bookie_3 into 5th and 6th spots respectively.

Bookie_LPSO, now 3rd amongst the Margin Predictors despite selecting margins within 1 goal of the eventual result less often than any other Margin Predictor in our competition except Bookie_3, still sits atop the Probability Predictor section of the MAFL Leaderboard. It does so after a round in which its probability score was negative, a characteristic shared by all the other most directly Bookmaker-derived Probability Predictors as well, but not by WinPred, which turned in the round's best probability score, nor by H2H Predictors, which were next best. ProPred's probability score was positive too, though only marginally.

The Line Fund algorithm had its best round of the season this week as measured by probability scoring, surpassing its previous high from last round.

SUPERMARGIN PERFORMANCES

Win3 and Win7 did best this week amongst the Margin Predictors on SuperMargin wagering, selecting the correct bucket in 3 games each. Next best was Combo_NN2, which was the only other Predictor to choose the right bucket more than once. Unfortunately for Investors, one of Combo_NN2's correct selections was in a game where it was predicting an away team victory.

The week's tallies of successes and failures leave ProPred_3 as the Predictor with the most correct selections on SuperMargin wagering so far this season. It's been right on 23 occasions, twice more than ProPred_7, and three times more often than WinPred_7, H2H_Unadj_10 and H2H_Adj_3. Our own Combo_NN2 is just one correct prediction further back, in equal sixth.

Where it really counts in terms of wagering, though, which is in those games where victory by the home team has been predicted, Combo_NN2 is one of three equally most-successful predictors.