By now it's one of a fairly small number of scripts that weekends seem to act out for Investors. This week it was the "win a bit then lose a bit more" story as the Hawks never looked troubled in covering their 22.5 point spread on Friday night to land our line bet before the Swans faded on Saturday evening to torpedo the head-to-head wager.

All up it was another 1.1c loss to leave the Portfolio down by just over 35%.

FINALS HISTORY - SEMI FINALS

The Hawks' win over the Crows preserved the perfect record of teams from 3rd against those from 7th in Semi-Finals over the past 16 seasons, while the Swans loss to the Roos ended the perfect record of teams from 4th over teams from 8th. 

Overall, teams from the top half of the 8 still have a formidable record over teams from the bottom half, the tally now standing at 27 and 5 (84%).

The Roos then become the first team from 8th to progress to a Preliminary Final in that time period and the Swans only the second team from 4th to bow out in the Semi-Final.

Overall, teams from 4th now have a worse winning percentage in all Finals than teams from 8th and a better winning percentage only than teams from 5th (barely) and teams from 7th. The only teams with better than 50% records in Finals since 2000 are teams from 1st and from 2nd.

TIPS AND PREDICTIONS

All of the Head-to-Head Tipsters landed just one of the two contests, which left the ordering on the Leaderboard completely unchanged though lowered the season-long accuracy levels for all remaining Tipsters. C_Marg's 1 from 2 took it to 146 from 203 for the year, which represents a still very creditable 72% accuracy rate. Even the worst of the Tipsters still boast rates above 65%.

For all of the Margin Predictors, to varying degrees, the Hawks won by too much and the Swans failed to win at all, which lifted the all-Predictor Mean Absolute Error (MAE) for the round to 44.1 points per game per Predictor. Combo_NN2 and C_Marg were the only Predictors to salvage something from the week, they alone in recording sub-40 MAEs. That was still enough though to drive C_Marg's season-long MAE just above 30.

Despite the gap between best and worst Predictor spanning an almost 13 point per game range, none did well enough or poorly enough relative to nearby rivals to disturb the overall ordering, which remains as shown below.

C_Marg has, however, extended its points lead over ENS_Greedy to 130.5, and RSMP_Weighted has narrowed the gap to ENS_Greedy to just 2.3 points.

Of the four Predictors that have most often being Predictor Nearest the Pin, three of them - C_Marg, Combo_NN2 and Bookie_3 - remain as the only Predictors with season-long profitable line-betting records. Combo_NN1, which has been Nearest the Pin third-most often of all Predictors has managed no better than about a 50% line-betting record, which is no better than chance.

The round's best head-to-head log probability score was recorded by C_Prob, shoring up its leadership position on the MoS Tipster Dashboard. Scores for WinPred, ProPred and the two H2H Predictors were heavily impacted by the Swans' loss, with the result that all four Predictors recorded negative log probability scores for the round. They were the only ones to do this, the Bookie trio recording mildly positive scores.

The Line Fund algorithm, however, recorded a strongly positive log probability score having assessed both ultimate line winners as better than 50% prospects.