The round started this week on the vast open fields of the MCG with a tepid display by the pre-game favourite Pies, who ultimately went down to the Cats by about 7 goals, and ended in the very insular confines of MatterOfStats spreadsheets where the ChiPS Tipsters registered significant falls on all of its Leaderboards.

But, before getting on to matters minute, I should relay to Investors that the Overall Portfolio suffered another small setback this week - smaller than the setbacks in any of the past four rounds, but a setback nonetheless. The Head-to-Head Fund's 1 from 2 performance saw it shed 0.7c on the round, while the Line Fund's 2 from 4 saw it shed 0.5c of its own, the combination stripping 0.6c from the Overall Portfolio price, leaving it down now by 10.2c on the season. If wagering's the Stawell Gift, I think we've given the TAB bookmaker more than enough start now.

Having relayed my displeasure with being forced to carry an unexpected and, at the time, unwelcome wager on the Giants over the weekend on account of a poorly-designed TAB app, I feel compelled to acknowledge the ultimately fortuitous nature of that wager. As it happened, I was at a family dinner at a local Chinese restaurant on Saturday night as the latter stages of the game unfolded and, for reasons that are not at all clear to me, the restaurant had the Giants v Hawks game up on a big screen on a wall 90 degrees to my left and about 20 metres away. I'd venture that Chinese restaurants in Sydney offering AFL footage on Saturday night might have been counted on the same pair of chopsticks.

Anyway, it's difficult - actually, on reflection, I think it's impossible - to surreptitiously scan a television, even of that size, at that range and in that position. Worse, the scores are displayed in white writing on a multi-coloured background, which renders them mostly illegible, at least with my eyes, that far away. I spent a fair amount of time, angst-ridden, mentally flipping between reading 0s as 8s, and 8s as 0s desperately trying to decipher the current status of my errant wager. It was only the post-siren hugs of the Giants players that convinced me that the unlikely had become the actual and I'd made more than enough to cover the evening's Mongolian Lamb and Salt & Pepper Squid. Such is the life of a small-time punter away from his laptop on a Saturday evening.

TIPS AND PREDICTIONS

The MatterOfStats Head-to-Head Tipsters averaged just over 4 correct tips from 9 this week, the second-lowest all-Tipster average of the season, higher only than the result from Round 2. Just four favourites grabbed the competition points, which meant that the generally low levels of disagreement went unrewarded. Best were Shadow's and Easily Impressed II's 6 from 9, and worst were C_Marg's, Follow The Streak's, and Short Term Memory I's 2 from 9. The top 3 Tipsters are still BKB, Bookie_3 and Combo_7, now on 36 from 54 (67%), and they sit one tio ahead of Bookie_9 and Combo_NN2. MoS' Official Tipster, Win_3 (now appropriately highlighted on the Leaderboard), still sits 5 tips behind the leaders.

MoS' Margin Predictors, as a group, did relatively much better than the Head-to-Head Tipsters, their 26.2 points per game average MAE the second-lowest of the season. H2H_Adjusted_3 did best, its 20.3 points per game MAE enough to elevate it into 2nd place on the MoS Leaderboard, behind Combo_NN1, who now leads all-comers by 2 goals or more.

C_Marg, the competition leader for a number of weeks, paid heavily for its contrarian nature this week, recording easily the round's worst MAE of 37.2 points per game to fall from 1st to 5th-last. It is though a congested table above it, so the possibility of climbing back into a more prominent position is not entirely remote. C_Marg remains though one of now eight Predictors with a season-long profitable line betting record. The all-Predictor line betting record stands at 50.7%, just a little above the expected performance of a coin-toss.

Combo_7, MoS' Official Margin Predictor, now lies 3rd, a little under 20 points from the lead.

On Head-to-Head Probability prediction, C_Prob, the sister Predictor of C_Marg, also suffered this week, recording by far the worst log probability score of all the Predictors. That saw it slip from 1st to 4th, its leadership position now taken by MoS' Official Head-to-Head Probability Predictor, Bookie-OE. Bookie-OE now sits in 1st place despite recording only the round's fourth-best probability score, bettered by WinPred and the two H2H-based Predictors.

Meantime the Line Fund algorithm, for the first time this season, registered a positive log probability score. Let's hope that's a harbinger of things to come.