2011 Round 6 Results: A Couple of Goals Down at Quarter Time

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This was an unusual week in that Investors were rooting solely for Away teams from Thursday to Saturday, albeit with points start in every case. That proved to be a largely unedifying experience, save for the one bright spot of the Blues defeating the Swans on a sodden SCG on Friday night, as Melbourne, Port Adelaide, Brisbane and St Kilda all conspired to lose by more than the handicap they were being provided.
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2011 Round 6: Back So Soon?

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It feels like, well, only yesterday that I was writing up the results for Round 5 and here we are, talking about the wagers for Round 6. This week, the AFL's only managed to drag the round's seven games out over four days, but we start again on Thursday night so, come Sunday, that means there'll have been an AFL game on somewhere in the country on nine of the preceding eleven days. On current form, I'm not sure Investors can afford that rate of activity.
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2011 MARS Ratings After Round 5

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There were no major moves on MARS Ratings this weekends.

The teams at the opposite ends of the MARS Ratings ladder enjoyed the largest gains, with Richmond (17th) rising by 1.6 Ratings Points, Collingwood (1st) rising by 1.4 Ratings Points, and Geelong (2nd) rising by 1.3 Ratings Points.

In terms of positions, Carlton and Hawthorn swapped 4th and 5th, Adelaide and Essendon swapped 9th and 10th, and the Gold Coast and the Lions swapped 14th and 15th, with the Gold Coast rising instead of falling precipitously for the first time the season (barring the bye).

2011 Round 5 Results: Can Tip, Can't Punt

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It's just not happening for the Funds at the moment. When the Dons almost drew level with the Pies in the 3rd term on Anzac Day it looked, however briefly, that the Head-to-Head Fund might be about to drag itself back into profitability, but the Pies soon made that unlikely, then improbable, and ultimately impossible as they kicked clear to eventually win by 30 points. Thankfully that meant the Pies covered the spread - by just a point and a half - so all was not entirely lost for Investors as this ensured that the other, smaller Line Fund wager was successful. In total, though, the Dons v Pies game represented a net loss. Three other games yielded profits. Freo did the right thing by Investors in limiting their victory margin to just 7 points, allowing the Dogs to get up by half a point on Line betting; Gold Coast did a lot more than just protect their 63.5 points start, winning outright; and Carlton were victorious, though not by as large a margin as we'd hoped.
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2011 Round 4 Results: Just One Kick Away From Profit

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Across the weekend's shortened Round, the Head-to-Head Fund landed 3 from 5 to drag itself almost back to break-even for the season, but the Line Fund bagged just 2 from 4, courtesy of a late surge by the Roos, which proved enough to see our Freo -34.5 line bet go down by a single goal. Reversing that result would have been sufficient for Investors to see black ink for the weekend taken as a whole.
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2011 Round 2 Results: A Round of Learning

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Well that's settled a few things. The Gold Coast weren't a 1,000 MARS-Rated team at the start of the weekend (and they certainly aren't now), games where the line is under 6.5 points do seem as though they'll be tricky propositions this seasons, Investors aren't going to enjoy a season of unremitting joy, and if it's truly the mean we've just regressed to, I don't want any part of it.
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2011 Round 2 : Regress and Regret or Consolidate and Confirm?

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Often we make implicit decisions even when we kid ourselves that we're not making a decision at all - we're just letting "nature take its course". For example, I heard the other day about the Principle of Indifference, which states that, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, all possible outcomes of an event should be treated as equally likely. This sounds to me like an invitation to be fleeced by somebody who has greater knowledge about an event than you do and who is willing to frame a market to take advantage of this - a situation that is sometimes referred to an information asymmetry. The decision not to change from an otherwise predestined course of action is a decision not to change from that predetermined course. And the decision not to change the default initial rating for a footy team is a decision to apply the default initial rating to that team.
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A Few Tweaks to the Head-To-Head Fund

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Over the past week or so I've been analysing in detail the performance of ProPred, WinPred and the Head-to-Head Fund across seasons 2007 to 2010. I'll be writing more about what I've found for ProPred and WinPred on the Statistical Analyses blog, but here I want to explain what I've found for the Head-to-Head Fund, which previously I'd evaluated mainly on its 2009 and 2010 performances, and how I've tweaked the Fund's wagering rules as a result.
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