2014 - Round 26 Results : A Marginal Loss

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On Friday night the Swans won, by enough to cover the Line market spread but by too much to land the more optimistic of our SuperMargin wagers. And then on Saturday evening the Hawks won, but only just, and not even by enough to land the less optimistic of our SuperMargin wagers. So it goes.

In summary, the Line Fund collected on its sole wager and the Margin Fund collected on none of its four, which stripped 0.3c from the price of the Recommended Portfolio but still left the Portfolio up by more than 10c on the season.

TIPS AND PREDICTIONS

Blanket 2 from 2 performances was the summary for the Head-to-Head Tipsters, while the Margin Predictors managed a collective 31.9 points per game Mean Absolute Prediction Error (MAPE) headed by Combo_NN_1's 27.1 MAPE.

Bookie_LPSO recorded the round's next-best MAPE and, in so doing, cut the gap to Combo_7, the MoS competition leader, to under 11 points. It's hard to imagine the pair's GF margin predictions differing by this much, but it isn't impossible. The mean absolute difference in Bookie_LPSO's and Combo_7's margin predictions across the season has been just 3.3 points per game, and the median just 2.1 points per game, but there have been nine games where the difference has been 10.7 points or more.

Below these two Predictors it's hard to see any change in the rankings after the GF excepting perhaps that H2H_Adj_7 and H2H_Adj_3 might quibble over 9th and 10th.

Only four Margin Predictors have been unable to produce profitable Line betting performances this season: Bookie_9 and Bookie_3, who currently sit 3rd and 5th on the Leadboard, and Combo_NN_1 and Combo_NN_2, who sit second-last and last. In aggregate, the Margin Predictors have correctly identified the Line betting winner almost 55% of the time.

None of the Margin Predictors selected the correct SuperMargin bucket in either game this week, however, leaving seven with profitable season-long performances when tipping a Home team win or draw.

Amongst the Head-to-Head Probability Predictors, WinPred fared best this week, some distance ahead of H2H and then Bookie-LPSO. Bookie-OE nonetheless still head the MoS Leaderboard, with Bookie-LPSO in second and Bookie-RE in third.

The Line Fund algorithm recorded a positive Log Probability Score (LPS) for the week, its second in the last three weeks and its fourth in six weeks, with one of the intervening negative LPS weeks being effectively a zero Score.

FINALS HISTORY 2000-2014

With the Swans and Hawks winning this weekend, teams finishing in the first two places on the home-and-away season ladder will have had 22 GF appearances amongst them since 2000 once next weekend is completed.

Teams from fifth and sixth, which are the positions that this week's losing Preliminary Finalists filled, now have a collective 0 and 4 record in Prelims.

Further, of the 15 Grand Finals:

  • Seven will have pitted 1st v 2nd
  • Five will have involved the Minor Premiers but not the Runners-Up
  • Three will have involved the Runners-Up but not the Minor Premiers
  • None will have been without either

Lastly, looking at the aggregate Finals history of the teams finishing in each of the eight ladder positions shows that the only ladder positions from which teams have eked out a better than 50% win-loss record have been 1st and 2nd.

Teams from 7th have the worst record, 4 and 15, with none progressing beyond the Semi-Finals and only four even reaching that stage. Teams from 8th have the next-worst record at 7-15 but at least can boast the fact that they've reached the Semi-Finals on seven occasions.