MAFLOnline Has a New Name ...

... actually, it's a pseudonym (a word that, prior to 25 years exposure to poor spelling on the web, I'd have confidently set down and then moved on without the need, as I have just now, to look it up in an online dictionary - which, now I think about it, I've assumed was correct ...).

I know from the weblogs that few of you come to the MAFL site via the tortuous method of clacking maflonline.squarespace.com into the address bar of your browser. Frankly, I probably wouldn't either were I not using Google Chrome which completes the remaining 25 characters for me as soon as I type the leading 'm'.

From today you need no longer remember that alphabet's worth of URL when you want to visit MAFL or refer a friend, colleague or random passerby to the site. (Look, traffic's traffic, and every writer wants an audience). Thanks to the commercially generous folk over at Squarespace, who are offering all their subscribers a free domain name, you can now reach the MAFL site via www.matterofstats.com.

For those of you who come to MAFL by other methods, including those who click on the links in the automatic e-mails they receive, nothing changes. The matterofstats link is a new and additional door to the site, and none of the old doors have been boarded up.

I like the MatterOfStats name and, in time, almost certainly in the off-season, I'll probably use it in rebranding and rejigging the current site. For at least the next 4 months though you'll see no other changes related to it.

2012 Round 6 : Wagers - Updated

Investors have secured the last of their wagers for the round, the Blues to beat GWS by 20-29 points, and have been offered $21 in return for their faith in a statistical algorithm prophesying the result of a mismatch, the like of which it never saw during its training.

Here's the full set then of 6 Line bets, 1 Head-to-Head bet, and 5 SuperMargin wagers:

And here's the Ready Reckoner for that boatload of bets: 

 (Note that I've corrected a couple of minor errors from the version that came with the blog post on Thursday [and Saturday ...]). 

2012 Round 5 : Wagers for ANZAC Day

Just a very quick note to let Investors know that they do have wagers on tomorrow's Collingwood v Essendon game, specifically: 

• The Line Fund has 5% on the Pies -5.5 at $1.90
• The Margin Fund has 2.5% on the Pies to win by 10-19 points at $7.50

 Three scenarios are possible:

• The best of all possible worlds, where the Pies win by 10-19 points. Both wagers are therefore collects, the Line Fund rises by 4.5%, the Margin Fund rises by 16.25%, and Portfolios rise by 5.5%.
• The world that's not quite as good but that's still better than the other possible world, where the Pies win by 6 points or more, but not by 10-19 points. In that case the Margin Fund falls by 2.5%, the Line Fund rises by 4.5%, and Portfolios rise by 1.8%
• The most likely but least desirable world, where the Pies win by 5 points or less, draw or lose. Here, both bets are losers, the Margin Fund falls by 2.5%, the Line Fund falls by 5% and Portfolios fall by 3%. 

2012 MARS Ratings After Round 3

For the first few rounds of a new season, we know that team rankings based on MARS Ratings are heavily influenced by the Ratings that teams carried over from the previous season. Still, it's interesting to see what those Ratings and rankings currently are and the direction in which each team's Rating is headed.

Already, Carlton has emerged as the clear number 1 team, rated 1,029 ahead of four more teams that are Rated between 1,020 and 1,025. Another, arguably even bigger surprise in terms of Ratings change has been Collingwood, who've dropped almost 7 Ratings Points (RPs) across the season, 5 of them last week, and are now at risk of slipping back to 6th behind a Saints team with considerable momentum.

Overall, there's a high level of agreement between ranking based on MARS Ratings and positions on the Competition Ladder. For example, amongst the teams Rated in the top 8 based on MARS, 6 of them fill places in the top 8 on the Competition Ladder. At the level of the individual teams, the biggest discrepancies are for the Cats (MARS Rated 3rd but 10th on the Ladder) and the Pies (Rated 5th but 12th on the Ladder). No other team is Rated more than 5 places higher or lower than its Ladder position, and for 9 teams the discrepancy is no greater than 2 places.

Turning lastly to team momentum, measured here by a team's change in MARS Rating since the start of the season, Carlton's steep climb is apparent, but so too is that of the Eagles and, to a lesser extent, the Saints.

Six more teams have gained about 3 RPs or more across the 3 rounds of the season to date.

The Dees, the Dogs and the Suns have been the biggest shedders, each dropping over 10 RPs each, while Collingwood and GWS have proven to be solid secondary sources of RPs, each surrendering 6 to 7 points to the market.

Geelong and Brisbane have been the only other teams to offer up multiple RPs.

In coming weeks I'll start tracking teams' Massey and Colley Ratings too, and we'll return to the issue of competitive balance.