Both the Line Fund and the Head-to-Head Fund have taken the opportunity afforded by the first 9-game round for three weeks to ramp up their wagering activity, finding value in the first two and the last two games of the round.

Two of the head-to-head wagers are on moderately firm favourites in the shape of the Cats ($1.50) and the Eagles ($1.40), another is on the underdog Port Adelaide team priced at $2.65 playing at home against the Hawks, and the fourth and last is on the rank outsider Dons at $6.00, taking on the mercurial Saints. The Head-to-Head Fund is, it seems, determined to land a second longshot win on Essendon sometime this season.

The four line bets are on the same four teams but in sizes ranging from just 0.3% (West Coast) to 3.1% (Port Adelaide), which makes for a ready reckoner as shown below.

Essendon can deliver easily the weekend's largest potential collect, a win by them adding almost 6c to the value of the Overall Portfolio. A Port Adelaide victory would add about half as much, but a loss by 15 points or more would knock over 2c off the value of the Overall Portfolio, the largest loss than can be inflicted by any single team.

Four perfect results would add over 10c to the Portfolio, while four regrettable ones would strip just over 7c from its value.

And, of course, we've still the Overs/Unders Fund activity to look forward to.

TIPS AND PREDICTIONS

There's little debate amongst the Head-to-Head Tipsters this weekend, with only the first game of the round eliciting any significant minority support. There we find five of the 11 Tipsters lining up behind the underdog Port Adelaide team: the three MoSSBODS-based Tipsters, C_Marg ... and Home Sweet Home. Let's hope the latter benefits from a wise association with the former. 

Overall the Disagreement Index for the Head-to-Head Tipsters this week is a fairly mild 16%.

The Margin Predictors are a little more reflective of the prevailing political mood both here in Australia and elsewhere, with a few of the more prominent members disagreeing significantly with mainstream opinion.

MoSSBODS_Marg, in particular, has taken a contrarian stand in a number of games, emerging as Predictor Most Extreme in three of them and with a mean absolute deviation (MAD) a defiant 9.7 points per game. Bookie_3, another prominent dissident, is Predictor Most Extreme in six of the week's contests, though it has a slightly lower MAD of 7.2 points per game.

Overall, the all-Predictor MAD is 5.4 points per game per Predictor.

Looking from a game-by-game perspective we find that it's the Gold Coast v Brisbane contest that has the largest and only double-digit MAD (10.2 points per Predictor), with four other games sporting MADs of around 6 points per Predictor. Only in the Eagles v Roos game do we find extremely high levels of agreement, the MAD there just 1.1 points per Predictor and the range of predictions spanning a tiny 4 points.

MoSSBODS_Marg's extreme behaviour in the Margin Predictor arena is mirrored by MoSSBODS_Prob's amongst the Head-to-Head Probability Predictors. There it finds itself Predictor Most Extreme in all but one of the games, most especially in the Gold Coast v Brisbane Lions contest where its 48% estimate of the Suns' chances is at odds with the roughly 80% estimates of all four other Predictors.

Not surprisingly, MoSSBODS_Prob has the week's largest MAD of 9.4% points per game, well ahead of the second-highest, which is C_Prob's 5.0% points per game.

The Overall MAD is a relatively low 5.2% points per game per Predictor, this figure most-inflated by C_Prob's and MoSSBODS_Prob's opinions in the Power v Hawks and Dees v Dockers games, and MoSSBODS_Prob's just-discussed opinion in the Suns v Lions game.

This would be a good week for MoSSBODS to reassert its historically undeniable above-average predictive powers.

To finish, let's take look at the bases for its opinions this week.

In all but two of the games it has the home team benefiting from the game venue, the exceptions being the Dons, who'd be comfortable underdogs anyway, and the Suns, who would otherwise have been fractionally favourites in their Lions clash.

That Suns v Lions game is tipped to be the high-scoring game of the round, MoSSBODS predicting a total of just on 200 points for it, while the Cats v Swans and Dees v Dockers games are tipped to be the low-scoring contests, producing just 145 points or so each.

Four teams are tipped to score 100 points or more this weekend: Adelaide (107), GWS (103), Brisbane Lions (101), and St Kilda (100). As well, the Suns are expected to score 99 points and lose, and the Eagles 97 points and win.

Still, the average expected total for the week has come in at just 168 points per game.