2014 - Round 7 : A Small, Significant Giants Bet

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We've already collected this season, in Round 1, from a wager on GWS when they were priced in the "not this week" range, and this week the Head-to-Head Fund is hoping to reprise that symphony with a 2.1% wager on the Giants at $9.50 facing the horribly in-form Port Adelaide. Its bet is twice as large this week as it would have been were it made last week when the Fund's Kelly bet divisor was still at 20 and not 10. According to the Head-to-Head Fund, no other home team represents value in the head-to-head market this week - at least none of the three other home teams that it was entitled to consider for that privilege, they being the only ones priced at $1.50 or higher.

Even were we to lower that minimum price for the Head-to-Head Fund to $1.30, only one more wager would have been possible, such is the strength of favouritism for the home teams in the other games this week.

Handicaps, of course, are designed to bring near-parity into even the most lopsided of contests, though the Line Fund thinks that this hasn't been achieved for three of the home teams. It assesses that two home teams have been given too much start (GWS and Brisbane) and that a third hasn't been required to give enough (Adelaide).

Five pairs of SuperMargin wagers complete the round all of them, as is usual, on home team favourites.

Combined, these 14 wagers represent just under 7% of the Recommended Portfolio, a 0.5% point increase on last week's total and the 2nd-highest percentage for a single round for the season as a whole. Just under 40% of the entire Portfolio has now been wagered during the course of the season.

A best case set of results in the seven games on which we've wagers would see the Recommended Portfolio grow by 17.5% of its original size; a worst case set would make it shrink by 6.9%.

Over one-third of that total upside is associated with a single game and a single result: a GWS victory over Port Adelaide. The remaining upside is more dispersed, with about another one-third of it attributable to, combined, a favourable outcome for the Dons (a win by between 20 and 29 points) and a favourable outcome for the Crows (a win by 50 to 59 points). Four other games carry the rest of the upside.

In excess of one-half of the downside rests with the Giants and the Crows, a loss by more than 46 points by the Giants triggering a 1.9c decline, and a victory by the Crows by only 39 points or fewer triggering a 1.8c decline.

Included in the week's total downside are two Chasms of Despair, one in the Hawks v Saints contest associated with a 30 to 39 point Hawks win, and the other in the Roos v Suns matchup for the same points range.

TIPS AND PREDICTIONS

Just three games this week have produced head-to-head tip summaries where five or more Tipsters disagree with the majority. Saturday's Essendon v Western Bulldogs contest has exactly five contrarians, the three WinPred Tipsters, Short Term Memory I and Easily Impressed I all favouring the underdog Dogs. On Sunday, the Roos v Suns clash has six Tipsters siding with the underdog Suns, all of them Heuristic Tipsters and none of them having tipped at a rate better than 56% across the season so far, and the Eagles v Dockers matchup has nine dissenters, all of them here too Heuristic Tipsters and only one of them (Silhouette) with a record even close to 60% for the season.

In three other games the lone dissenting voice belongs to Home Sweet Home - which, as a consequence, has the week's largest Disagreement Index - while in another game it belongs to Easily Impressed II. In the Adelaide v Melbourne game the dissenting voices are silent.

The Margin Predictors are even less divided that the Head-to-Head Tipsters and are unanimous in their selection of the victor in every game bar one. In that lone game where there is some disagreement about which team wins, the Dons v Dogs contest, there are only two Predictors on the other side of zero and even then by only 1 or 2 points.

There's a little more spread in the range of predicted victory margins for a number of the games, however, all but one game having a range in excess of 20 points, and four games having a range of more than 30 points. 

Bookie_3 finds itself in the unaccustomed position of being the Predictor Most Different this week, its margin predictions, on average and in absolute terms, more than two goals different from the all-Predictor average. The next-most different predictions belong to Combo_NN2, after which it's a long way further to Bookie_LPSO and ProPred_7 in equal third. C_Marg lies in 5th place this week, well below its usually prominent ranking, and has only managed to be Predictor Most Extreme in two contests. Combo_NN_2 has assumed this position in four games, and Bookie_3 in three.

PROBABILITY PREDICTORS

As the Margin Predictors, so too the Head-to-Head Probability Predictors this week, the Dons v Dogs game the only one to produce Probability Predictors on either side of the 50% mark. That same game is also the one that's produced the largest probability range, WinPred's 48% assessment differing by 28% from Bookie-LPSO's 76% assessment.

Almost as large are the ranges for the Eagles v Dockers game where, here, C_Prob's 48% represents the Eagles' best assessment and WinPred's 20% represents their worst assessment, and the Giants v Port game, where the two H2H Predictors' 29% contrasts with C-Prob's 4%.

C_Prob is, again, the round's Probability Predictor Most Different, it representing the extreme prediction in five of the contests. WinPred is next-most different and holds the most extreme views in four games.

The Line Fund algorithm appears to have ingested something this week and has assessed five teams as having better than two-thirds chances of prevailing in line markets, and three more as having at least 57% chances. That's likely to lead to either a highly positive or a highly negative probability score for the week. It's probably a good thing that we now only level-stake rather than Kelly-stake the Line Fund algorithm's opinions.

ChiPS PREDICTIONS

Team Rating differences dominate ChiPS' opinions this week for all but the West Coast v Fremantle game where the Eagles' Home Ground Advantage is almost enough to offset its roughly three-goal Ratings deficit it suffers. In all other games, the difference between ChiPS' final Predicted Margin and the Team Rating Difference is generally no more than about a goal.

On converting those margin predictions into probabilities and comparing these with the TAB prices on offer, ChiPS recommends just two wagers this week, both modest, one on the Lions at $4.90, and the other on the Eagles at $2.75.

For anyone who's following along with ChiPS' wagering, so far this season it's made about a 5% return on Initial Funds, all of the profit accruing in the first two rounds of the season though with approximate breakeven being achieved in Rounds 3 and 6.