What MAFL Is All About

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I do go on a bit. But, what do I go on about most? That's something that a word cloud could answer, and these can now be readily created for any corpus of text using the fine wordle website. So, I exported the entire contents of the MAFLOnline website as an XML file, fed it to wordle, deleted the "words" in the resulting word cloud that were actually HTML tags, and wound up with the following.
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2011 Round 28 Results: Cats, and the Bookmaker, Just Too Good This Year

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Most of the cats I've known have treated water as something profoundly repugnant while many of the birds of my acquaintance have been quite fond of it, but on a dampened and at times sodden MCG on Saturday it was the Geelong Cats who revelled in the conditions and eventually accounted for a dispirited Collingwood Magpies by over 6 goals.
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2011 MARS Ratings After Finals Week 3

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Some will, I'm sure, disagree but on MARS Ratings the Eagles will now finish the season in 6th, with Carlton in 4th and St Kilda in 5th. That's the upshot of this week's Preliminary Final results, which saw the Cats snatch 2.7 Ratings Points from the Eagles and Collingwood, despite winning, surrender 0.8 Ratings Points to the Hawks, such was the unexpected narrowness of their victory.
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Likely Grand Final Prices

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By combining the Flag prices we're seeing on the TAB for the four teams with the prices for each of the four possible Grand Final pairings that we're also seeing there, and by assuming that the overround embedded in each price within a market is the same, we can mathematically derive the probabilities that the TAB bookmaker must logically hold for every possible GF result.
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2011 Round 27: Pies for 2c

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Investors have a little more at stake in this Round. To collect, we'll need the Pies to beat the Hawks by 4 goals or more, which would be enough to land our lone line wager and boost the Portfolio price by just under 2c. Should the Pies fail to provide this outcome Portfolios will instead fall by just over 2c. The Cats and the Eagles can do as they please - at least as far as the Funds are concerned.
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2011 MARS Ratings After Finals Week 2

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The Hawks' grabbed just over 2 Ratings Points from Sydney on the back of their 6-goal victory, while the Eagles snared just half a Ratings Point from the Blues, leaving team order unchanged on the MARS Ladder.

Carlton look set to finish the season as the fourth-highest ranked team, comfortably ahead of the Eagles. It's a moot point, but I do wonder whether the Blues might have progressed further had the draw been kinder to them and they'd consequently finished fourth rather than fifth, thereby avoiding the trip to Western Australia.

Anyway, they'll start next year with a MARS rating well above 1,000. 

2011 Round 25 Results: A Morsel of Profit

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I think Sunday's game provided ample support for my claims that the Dons were lucky to make the 8 this year and that the Blues are a better side than their 5th-place finish might suggest. The Blues' 62-point victory over the Dons was worth 5c to Investors and more than erased the losses incurred earlier in the weekend by the Pies' inability to cover their 30.5 point spread and the Saints inability to defeat the Swans, let alone go anywhere near covering their 18.5 point spread.
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2011 Finals: How Lucky Are Essendon To Be There?

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Essendon lurches into its Finals campaign with a MARS Rating of just 988.2, rating it behind both the 9th-placed Roos on 1,002.4 and the 10th-placed Dogs on 1,000.9. That makes the Dons the lowest MARS rated team to participate in a Finals series since the West Coast team of 2002, which entered September rated 987.7 and exited in week 1, ironically at the hands of the Dons.
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2011 MARS Ratings After Round 24

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A season-high 25.9 Ratings Points changed hands in Round 24, more than 7.5 of them as a result of the lopsided result between the competition front-runners. Still, none of the horse-trading of Points mattered at all for the rankings of teams 1 through 10, the first effects being felt by Adelaide, previously 10th, dropping two places and allowing Fremantle and Melbourne, both losers, to rise by a spot.
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Smart Money Follows the Suns

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Somebody knew something. Within 2 hours of the line market being posted on the TAB on Wednesday, the Suns, granted 75.5 points start by those who determine these things, had moved from $1.90 to $1.70. Meantime, the head-to-head market, frequented it seems by different money, ill- or un-informed and therefore unaware of the team announcements to come, steadfastly supported the Gold Coast's Monday assessment as $13 prospects.
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