2013 : Round 13 - Wagers & Tips

This week marks the last of the short rounds for the home and away season and the first of the rounds where, historically, the Head-to-Head Fund has been at its best.

It'd be nice if the Head-to-Head Fund could perpetuate that history this week since a successful wager by it on Port Adelaide, accompanied as it must logically be by a successful Line Fund wager also on Port but with start, would add 9.5c to the Recommended Portfolio.

Wagers on three other of the week's five remaining contests are of significantly less import, though a Saints win by 41 to 49 points would still be most welcomed, adding as it would over 3c to the Recommended Portfolio. In the other two games in which we've wagers, combined the best we can do is gain 1c and the worst is to lose less than half that.

Investors then should be hoping that the Port Adelaide that turns up this week is the Port Adelaide from the early part of the season, which was a team that went 5 and 0 at the start of the year.

TIPS AND PREDICTIONS

There little contention about the outcomes in five of the games this week. The Head-to-Head Tipsters - as usual, Home Sweet Home aside - and the Margin Predictors are unanimous in their opinion that the Hawks, Saints, Tigers, Freo and the Cats will walk away as winners.

In the remaining game, the Head-to-Head Tipsters are siding with the favourites, the Swans, though six of them are tipping an upset win by Port Adelaide. None of the Margin Predictors go as far as predicting a Port victory, but seven of them have the Swans winning by less than 4 goals.

Amongst those Margin Predictors it's Bookie_3 who's most different from the all-Predictor average this week, mostly because of its extreme confidence in the Swans and the Cats, both of which it expects to win by 50 points.

Unusually, Combo_NN1 is the Predictor nearest the all-Predictor average this week. Averaged across all games this season, Combo_NN1 ranks 5th highest in terms of average deviation from the all-Predictor average, behind only Bookie_3, Combo_NN2, the two WinPred-based Predictors, and Bookie_LPSO. Its margin predictions this week are within a few points of the all-Predictor average in every game except the St Kilda v Melbourne game where it's gone out on a limb and strayed a whole 8 points away from that average.

The Head-to-Head Probability Predictors are also broadly in unison this week, with the percentage point difference between the most extreme of the predictions for any single game 12% or less in four of the six matches. It's the Port Adelaide v Sydney game that, amongst these Predictors too, causes the highest level of disagreement. The Head-to-Head Predictors rate Port as 28% chances, while the Risk-Equalising variant of the TAB Bookmaker prices rates than as only 10% chances.

Lastly, according to the Line Fund algorithm, most of the week's line contests are roughly 55:45 to 60:40 propositions. It rates St Kilda as the team most likely to prevail on line betting, and assesses the Port Adelaide v Sydney game as the one most difficult to confidently predict (but not so difficult that it wasn't willing to fire off a wager on our behalf).