2017 - Round 7 : Not Much Debate

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The usual suspects aside, there's not much disagreement amongst the forecaster families this week, with overall disagreement levels registering new or equal lows for both the Head-to-Head Tipsters and the Margin Predictors.

Home Sweet Home (HSH) and Consult The Ladder (CTL) have made their customary disagreement-bolstering contributions for the Head-to-Head Tipsters, HSH tipping three underdogs (St Kilda, the Kangaroos, and Gold Coast), and CTL doing the same (Richmond, Brisbane Lions, and Essendon). CTL has a better tipping record than BKB this year and HSH sits last on the Leaderboard so, of the pair, I'd be more inclined to consider CTL's contrarian musings.

The only other Tipsters forecasting any upset wins are RSMP_Simple, RSMP_Weighted and MoSSBODS_Marg, who have all opted for the Saints in Friday night's game.

That pattern of agreement is mirrored in the Margin Predictors' forecasts where we find that only C_Marg and MoSSBODS_Marg have recorded mean absolute deviations (MADs) of greater than 4 points per game. C_Marg is particularly outlying in its forecasts for the Pies v Blues, Power v Eagles, and Dees v Hawks games, in each case foreseeing a much larger victory for the home team than do the other Predictors.

At the game level, only the Power v Eagles game has generated a relatively large range of forecasts, the MAD for that game coming in at 6.2 points per Predictor, and the predicted margins spanning 26 points.

Amongst the Head-to-Head Probability Predictors, it's C_Prob and MoSSBODS_Prob that have the highest MADs this week, though even their numbers are mild in comparison to many from the earlier weeks.

Given those mostly small MADs, it's hard to see much movement on the Head-to-Head Probability Predictor Leaderboard this weekend.

Looking again from a game-by-game perspective, the most divergent probability estimates have come in the Saints v Giants (6.2 percentage points per Predictor) and Power v Eagles (6.0 percentage points) matchups. Even there though, the estimates cover less than 20% point ranges.

WAGERS

As you'd expect with relatively high levels of agreement this week, wagering activity is fairly subdued.

We do though have five head-to-head bets totaling almost 9% of the original Head-to-Head Fund, and five line bets totaling just over 9% of the original Line Fund.

Amongst the head-to-head bets is our now-customary wager on the Roos, though this week it's of a size that can't do much damage. There are also some more ambitiously-sized wagers on Collingwood and Fremantle, but their prices make for more downside than upside.

The games with the largest gap between best and worst outcomes are the Saints v Giants clash (3.4% swing) and the Swans v Lions clash (2.3% swing). If the Saints lose by a lot on Friday night, it's difficult to see a profit coming from the 10 wagers shown here without a margin-covering Swans victory and either a Suns win or a margin-covering Port Adelaide victory as well.

TEAM SCORING

Here are MoSSBODS' and MoSHBODS' views on team scoring this week.

Again, I'll save any commentary on these for the Overs/Unders Update later in the week.