I'm back this week and feeling much like Tennyson (ie a little rusty) but looking forward to resuming the routine.

(Look, the puns will not be improving here, so you might as well give up hoping for that.)

If you're new here, firstly, welcome. May I suggest you visit this post from last season, which will provide you with some explanations for the information that appears later in this blog.

In short, the week's first blog typically looks at the forecasts of the MoS Tipsters and Predictors, and at the wagers that have been made on the basis of the opinions of the MoSSBODS and MoSHBODS family of forecasters.

We start with the week's tips and predictions.

TIPS AND PREDICTIONS

Fans of disagreement amongst the MoS Tipsters and Predictors can usually look forward to some raging virtual arguments in the early rounds, but this year sees remarkably high levels of agreement in the Round 1 forecasts.

We see four unanimous favourites amongst the Head-to-Head Tipsters in Richmond, St Kilda, Port Adelaide, and GWS, and find Adelaide, Geelong and Sydney denied unanimous favouritism only by the single-minded Home Sweet Home algorithm. (Note that BKB has sided with Hawthorn and Geelong in the two games where the TAB has equal-favourites, its tie-break being the teams' ladder finishes at the end of the 2017 home-and-away season).

In the remaining two games we have only two dissenters in C_Marg and MoSSBODS_Marg narrowly opting for the Pies over the Hawks, while in the Suns v Roos game we have 6-3 majority support for the underdog Roos.

Overall disagreement levels are thus very low, elevated only by Home Sweet Home (a theme I imagine we'll revisit regularly across the remainder of the season).

The Margin Predictors show generally low levels of disagreement too, highest in the Port Adelaide v Fremantle game mostly on account of MoSHBODS_Marg's very confident forecast of a 51 point home team victory. Disagreement is also somewhat high in the St Kilda v Brisbane Lions, and the Melbourne v Geelong games.

Looking across the Predictors we find that MoSHBODS_Marg and MoSSBODS_Marg have the highest mean absolute deviations (MADs) from the all-Predictor average this week, MoSHBODS' arising from that Port Adelaide forecast as well as from its confident Roos prediction, and MoSSBODS' from relatively large forecast wins for St Kilda and Geelong, and relatively small forecast wins for GWS and Sydney.

The highest level of divergence amongst the Head-to-Head Probability Predictors comes in the Melbourne v Geelong game where the probability estimates for Melbourne range from 33% (MoSSBODS_Prob) to 52% (Bookie_LPSO) and the MAD is 6.7% points per Predictor.

There's a similar range - though smaller MAD - in the Gold Coast v Kangaroos game where the low estimate for the Suns is MoSHBODS_Prob's 36%, and the high is Bookie_LPSO's 55%.

MoSHBODS_Prob and MoSSBODS_Prob have the round's highest MADs, though Bookie_LPSO is, unusually for it, not far behind.

WAGERS

The Head-to-Head and Line Funds have this year, as they did in 2017, wagered aggressively in Round 1,

Investors face six head-to-head wagers, four on favourites, and none on a team priced higher than $3. The largest of these is on Port Adelaide (9.6%), who MoSHBODS - drawing entirely on its knowledge from the latter parts of 2017 - assesses as 93% favourites.

(Please click on the image below to access a larger version.)

Those half-dozen head-to-head wagers are joined by five line wagers, two on four-goal favourites, one on a near equal-favourite, and two more on roughly three-goal underdogs. The largest is about 3% on Geelong with half-a-point start.

The ready reckoner for all of these wagers is shown below.

Four games carry potential swings of about 3c or more, the largest of these the Port Adelaide v Fremantle game where despair to joy spans a 4.5c range.

Across the nine games the aggregate swing is just under 18% points, from about a 7c gain to a 10.5c loss.

Over the next day or so I'll post about the Over/Under markets once they've been provided but, in the meantime, here are MoSHBODS' and MoSSBODS' opinions about likely team scoring.