2012 Finals Week 3 Results: Let's Call It A Draw

Well we've secured the all-avian Grand Final we expected but not as a result of victories sized in a manner that would most please Investors.

The Swans won by 26 points, just 7 more than was required to land a long-awaited SuperMargin wager, while the Hawks won by a waferish 5 points and only briefly gave Investors hope that they might win by the 50 to 59 points necessary to render the alternate SuperMargin wager collectible. So, both SuperMargin wagers were, as it's sometimes said of second marriages, triumphs of hope over experience. Fortunately, the moderately sized head-to-head wager on the Swans reaped a large enough return to secure a slightly better than break-even result for the round. In total, Investors made 0.1c this week.

This return came entirely as a result of a 3.6c profit by the Head-to-Head Fund, which leaves it now down by only 6.3c on the season. The Margin Fund's two further losses leaves it down 85c on the season and leaves Overall Portfolios down by just under 19c.

So, as is the custom at this point in the season, both favourites were successful this week, which meant that all Head-to-Head Tipsters selected 2 from 2, enhancing their respective season-long tipping percentages but doing nothing to separate or re-order them.

The Margin Predictors also emerged from the round with relatively strong performances, the all-Predictor average coming in at a low 21.2 points per game. Best amongst them was H2H_Unadj_3 with an MAPE of 14.36 points per game, whilst the worst performed was Combo_NN_2 with an MAPE of 31.27 points per game. Unlike the week's head-to-head tipping performances, the week's margin predicting performances have reshuffled the Leaderboard, relegating Bookie_9 to fifth behind H2H_Adj_3 and H2H_Adj_7, albeit by a very small margin.

These same Margin Predictors averaged a collective 1.3 from 2 on line betting and, while none of them selected the correct SuperMargin bucket in either game, 10 of them (both ProPreds, both WinPreds, all four H2Hs, and CNN1 and CNN2) were within one bucket of doing so in one or other of the contests, though not both.

Still it is that the H2H Predictors are the only ones to boast profitability on SuperMargin wagering should all of their predictions have been followed across the entire season.

Amongst the Head-to-Head Probability Predictors, ProPred returned the week's best result, though this wasn't sufficiently outstanding to budge it from the bottom of the Leaderboard mostly because all the Head-to-Head Probability Predictors recorded yet another week of positive probability scores too. The Line Fund algorithm also returned a positive probability score despite leaning the wrong way on the Swans v Pies clash - it's high level of confidence that the Hawks wouldn't cover their 36.5 point spread was more than offsetting.