For a few years now I've been compiling and publishing the MARS Ratings of all AFL Teams, which I calculate using ELO-style algorithms specially calibrated for football.

As I noted in the previous blog, when I rebuilt the heuristics to cater for the bye, I made a few other what I thought were subtle changes to some of the building block rules on which they're built. My assumption was that these changes would have had minimal effect on the tipping accuracy of each heuristic and, to be honest, I didn't even consider whether it would effect their wagering performance.

It was, I'll admit, a close run thing, but in the end I decided to spend a couple of days rebuilding the script to generate heuristic-based tips. The thought of spending the season wondering about how Shadow or Silhouette would have been performing had I been bothered to update their algorithms for 2011, proved just a little too much to bear. So, it's done.