2013 : Round 2 - Results

There was a lot to be happy about in this week's results, not least the breaking of the long drought in the collect history of the Margin Fund. Combo_NN2 was responsible for two successful SuperMargin wagers, and Bookie_9 was the source of another and was within a kick of landing two more. These successful wagers have left the Margin Fund up by 10c on the season to date. Shame I reduced the weighting of this Fund this season ...

The other Funds weren't as successful, the Line Fund landing 2 from 3 to make a small profit - though not enough to fully recoup last round's losses - and the Head-to-Head Fund losing its sole wager. That leaves the Recommended Portfolio up by a little under 2c on the round but down by the same amount on the season.

TIPS AND PREDICTIONS

Pleasing too were the results for a number of the Tipsters and Predictors.

Combo_NN2 had a particularly spectacular round, tipping all 9 victors including the narrow-underdog Hawks and margin-predicting with a 25.6 points per game MAPE, that despite the potentially MAPE-destroying 148-point victory by the Dons. This performance has left Combo_NN2 atop both the Head-to-Head Tipster and the Margin Predictor portions of the Leaderboard.

What I'm also encouraged by is the margin predicting performance of this season's new Margin Predictors in the shape of the two RSMP variants and the Bookie variant based on the LPSO approach to deriving implied probability. (For details on these predictors follows the links in this blog post.) The two RSMP Predictors are also showing promising early talent in predicting line betting results, each having correctly chosen in 78% of games so far.

 In probability prediction, the TAB Bookmaker is proving difficult to beat once again, but what's pleasing there is that the Risk-Equalising approach to deriving Bookmaker probabilities from market prices is proving very-slightly superior to our previous, Overround-Equalising approach. (Details on the distinction are also available in the blog post I linked to earlier.) 

2013 : Round 1A - Results

Forget the Draft, the talk of tanking and peptides, forget the pre-season contest with its quirky scoring, rule-changes, and surprise results; you can only feel assured that a new season has truly commenced once the www.afl.com.au website has buckled under the apparently startling load.

To be fair, the AFL site was accepting visitors come the second quarter of Friday night's game, but by then I'd found the reliability of other websites more compelling, so I can't vouch for its availability thereafter. You'd reckon the AFL might do a little more to ensure that its online porch-light was blazing - or, at the very least, turned on - for the first game of the season.

None of the sites I visited though was providing the view I was hoping for on Friday night, as the Crows squandered an early 4-goal lead to eventually go down to the Dons by 35 points, failing expansively to cover the 15.5 point handicap they - and by financial contagion we - were offering. Freo's 28-point win on Saturday night evened our line-betting win-loss ledger and reduced our Line Fund losses, but the Crows' loss on the Line and SuperMargin markets still left us down by three-tenths of a cent on the weekend.

With both favourites finishing winless, all but one of the Head-to-Head Tipsters is currently on 0 from 2, HSH being the exception and benefitting from the Dockers' designation as the Home team in its derby with the Eagles.

Amongst the Margin Predictors, only CNN1's tip that Fremantle would win by 3 goals stands out as particularly prescient, while scanning the Head-to-Head Probability Predictors we find that it's the Bookmaker-based Predictors whose caution has proven wisest.

There's still seven games to go though before we draw a cliched line under the 1st round ...

2013 : Understanding the Tipsters, Margin Predictors and Fund Algorithms

Compared to most previous seasons, the number of changes to MAFL Funds and algorithms this year has been very small. Consequently, this post from last year remains a good source of general information about how MAFL works. 

The only information I'd add by way of update would be that:

• Many algorithms now use a slightly different version of Implicit Bookmaker Probabilities. The differences between the Implicit Probabilities we'll use now and those we'd use previously given the same market prices are always small, but using the new version of the probabilities does seem to generally improve the predictive powers of the algorithms.
• There are some changes to the MAFL Funds and their underlying algorithms and wagering strategies, which you can read about in this blog. Probably the greatest change is that all Funds will now wager all season long.

For those of you who would like to know even more about the algorithms used in MAFL, I've also created a downloadable PDF with details of each algorithm's inputs, outputs, type/method of creation and purpose, as well as, in some cases, the actual equations themselves. MAFL is nothing if not transparent.