2018 - Round 21 : The MoS Twins Are Disagreeable

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It seems very unlikely we'll enjoy close football this weekend of the likes we saw on Friday and Saturday of Round 20 - at least not in the quantity we saw there, with this week's fare including only one game with an expected margin of under two goals.

Overall, the average margin is about twice that, bumped up considerably by the expected 10-goal margin in the Richmond v Gold Coast game (more on which a little later).

That average of 24,5 points per game is the highest since Round 18 and the fifth-highest of the season, and has lifted the 2018 season average to 20.3 points per game.

Let's see what the MoS forecasters think.

TIPS AND PREDICTIONS

We're back to generally low levels of dissension amongst the Head-to-Head Tipsters this week, with only the Hawks v Cats game eliciting any more than a couple of tips for the underdogs. In that game, Home Sweet Home and Consult The Ladder have been joined by the MoS twins in predicting a Hawthorn victory.

ENS_Linear, Bookie Knows Best and the two RSMP Tipsters are in complete alignment across all nine games, however, so there'll be no movement at the top of the Leaderboard this week.

There is disagreement though amongst the Margin Predictors, most notably between the MoS twins and the rest, which has resulted in mean absolute deviations (MADs) of around 7 points per game for both twins. MoSHBODS_Marg has the extreme forecast in five contests, and MoSSBODS_Marg in four. 

Three other forecasters have MADs above 4 points per game, which has contributed to the round's relatively high all-Predictor MAD of 4.3 points per game per Predictor.

So, there is more variability in the margin forecasts this week, which we can also see when we view them on a game-by-game basis. Three contests have MADs of over 6 points per Predictor: Essendon v St Kilda, Port Adelaide v West Coast, and Melbourne v Sydney. The range of forecasts in the second and third of those games are 27 to 28 points.

In comparison to the current leader, Bookie_Hcap, a best set of results for MoSSBODS_Marg would see it move from about 77 points behind to about 1 point behind, while a best set of results for MoSHBODS_Marg would see it move from about 176 to about 90 points behind.

The mean expected margin across the nine games and all Margin Predictors is 23.0 points per game, which is again about a point and a half below the TAB Bookmaker's average.

Turning lastly to the Head-to-Head Probability Predictors, we find high MADs in the same three games in which the MADs are high amongst the Margin Predictors. Here the MADs range from 6.1% points to 7.5% points per Predictor.

MoSHBODS_Prob has the round's highest MAD - which is quite portentous for the week's head-to-head wagering - and MoSSBODS_Prob has the round's second-highest.

WAGERS

It's been quite the week for wagering. Just after the line markets were posted on the TAB, I went through my usual routine of plugging in the prices, determining bet sizes and then placing bets. While inputting the prices for the Tigers v Suns game I was a bit surprised by the difference in the lines for Gold Coast on the TAB compared to Centrebet (+72.5 at the TAB and +59.5 at Centrebet), but didn't really make too much of it. It's a busy time and I'm trying to place the bets as quickly as I can.

Having placed all the bets - and there were, as you'll see, quite a few of them this week - I was doing some post-auditing and realised that I'd accidentally placed a head-to-head wager on the Suns at $15 rather than a line wager on them +72.5. By the time I went back to make the bet, which couldn't have been longer than a couple of minutes, the market was flagged as "Unavailable". About a minute later it was reposted as Suns +62.5. It's a reasonable assumption, I think, that this margin was mis-entered initially with a 7 where the 6 should have been.

Anyway, I missed out on the +72.5 line and MoSSBODS was uninterested in +62.5, so we've no bet on the Suns at the line.

I do, however, have an erroneous, non-canon, bet on the Suns head-to-head, which will land me a healthy windfall should the incredibly unlikely happen on Saturday. Either way, that result will not be included in the Head-to-Head Fund's performance.

In the end then we've seven wagers from MoSHBODS in the head-to-head markets (though not on the Suns) with sizes ranging from about 1% to 5%, and three wagers from MoSSBODS in the line markets, comprising a rounding error, a moderately sized bet, and a immoderately sized one.

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

It's mostly Melbourne that's caused all the fuss, with both MoS twins expecting them to win fairly handily, enough for MoSSBODS to put 5% of the Head-to-Head Fund on them at $1.45, and MoSHBODS to put 6% on them giving 15.5 points start.

That game then represents a large proportion of the risk described in this week's Ready Reckoner, which appears below.

The Dees game has a potential swing of almost 7c, but more downside than upside because of the sub-$2 prices on both bets. The next-biggest potential swing is in the Dons v Saints game where it's 4.6c and, after that, in the Port Adelaide v West Coast game where it's 3.3c.

In total, 9.4% of the original Combined Portfolio is at risk and the maximum upside is 11.6%. 

To finish, here are MoSHBODS' and MoSSBODS' opinions about likely team scoring.

Commentary about these forecasts will come in the week's Overs/Unders blog.