2016 Round 15 : Overs/Unders Update

It looks as though Investors can safely rely on the Overs/Unders Fund to provide wagering action even when the two other Funds have decided to save their money for another day.

This week, we've Overs bets in four of the six contests and an Unders bet in a fifth, leaving the Port Adelaide v Richmond game as the only accurately-handicapped game according to the Overs/Unders Fund. That, of course, is the one game in which the Head-to-Head and Line Funds have already funded an interest so, combined, the three Funds have managed to place some wager on all six contests.

View fullsize

The five Overs/Unders wagers, when added to the single Head-to-Head and single Line wager, put just on 3.4% of the original Overall Portfolio at risk, the lowest total for any round so far this season and making it three weeks in a row that the aggregate amount wagered has declined.

In a season where a net profit has already been made, I'm quite happy with that.

MoSSBODS COMPARISON WITH THE TAB

This week, MoSSBODS' Totals are particularly low in comparison to the TAB's, with MoSSBODS disagreeing in some games by as much as 6 goals.

View fullsize

Ten of the twelve teams are also expected to score less, according to MoSSBODS, than they will according to the TAB, by margins ranging from 2 to 25 points. It is, of course, a familiar story so far this season that MoSSBODS will forecast lower team scores than will the TAB, though this remains more of an issue for its performance in predicting home team scores than in predicting away team scores, as the following mean absolute error (MAE) and signed error (actual less predicted) performance data reveals:

• Home Team Scores - MoSSBODS: MAE 20.4 / Ave Error +8; TAB MAE 18.3 / Ave Error +4
• Away Team Scores - MoSSBODS: MAE 19.5 / Ave Error +1; TAB MAE 19.9 / Ave Error -5
• Total Scores - MoSSBODS: MAE 27.1 / Ave Error +10; TAB MAE 24.7 / Ave Error -1
• Game Margins - MoSSBODS: MAE 29.8 / Ave Error +7; TAB MAE 29.5 / Ave Error +8

The simplest explanation at this stage would be that MoSSBODS has systematically underestimated home teams' Venue Performance values this season, but we should probably wait until we have a full season of data before we settle on that conclusion.

What's more, given my current methodology, any on-average increase in forecasts of home team scoring would, of necessity, result in an on-average decrease of the same magnitude in away team score forecasts and so far this season, as we just saw, MoSSBODS' away team score forecasts have been better than the TAB's.

Anyway, the final features of the MoSSBODS / TAB comparison that I'll note for this week are a couple of similarities. Firstly, both predict that only three teams will score more than 100 points: West Coast, Port Adelaide, and Adelaide. Secondly, both also predict that Essendon will be the round's lowest-scoring team, and the Western Bulldogs the second lowest-scoring.