2014 - Round 4: Full Coverage
/For the first time this season the three MatterOfStats Funds have conspired to prevent Investors from enjoying any of the weekend's nine contests free from financial worry.
Read MoreFor the first time this season the three MatterOfStats Funds have conspired to prevent Investors from enjoying any of the weekend's nine contests free from financial worry.
Read MoreIt's rare for the ChiPS Rating System to add 6 Ratings Points to a team's Rating on the basis of a single result. It's rarer still for MARS to do the same thing.
Read MoreNot a great weekend for Investors, mostly because of eight unsuccessful SuperMargin wagers, though the story could have been a little different had the Giants kicked a behind rather than a goal in the dying stages of their clash with the Dees.
Read MoreBased on the TAB Bookmaker's pre-game Round 3 prices, this week's results should be high in "information content". Or, put another way, they're likely to tell us more about the abilities of the 18 teams in the competition than we thought previous rounds would.
Read MoreBefore performing the analysis tonight I thought that team ChiPS Ratings would have been much more affected by the results of Round 2 than team MARS Ratings but, as it turns out, Ratings were similarly affected for both Ratings systems.
For only four teams are ChiPS Rankings more than a single place different from MARS Rankings:
Six more teams have ChiPS and MARS Rankings differing by a single spot - Richmond, the Kangaroos, Essendon, West Coast, the Brisbane Lions and the Gold Coast - while the remaining eight teams have identical ChiPS and MARS Rankings. Some of the gaps between teams are more or less assailable in a single round, but the rankings are remarkably consistent.
Lastly, the correlation between ChiPS and MARS Ratings increased a little this week, rising from +0.977 to +0.983. Team Rating Systems, it seems, have much in common.
This week only the Head-to-Head Fund took a backward step, unsuccessful in its lone wager and thereby surrendering just under 1c to the TAB bookmaker on a Dees outfit that scored 2 goals and 11 points fewer in the entire game than its opponents registered in the 1st quarter alone.
More than offsetting this loss from the Head-to-Head Fund was the Line Fund's two successful wagers from three, which added just under 1c to its value, and the Margin Fund's two additional successful wagers from eight, which added almost 9c to its value. Combined, these two Funds' results added almost 3c to the value of the Recommended Portfolio, leaving it up by 2c for the round and now 6.4c for the season.
Read MoreAll three MatterOfStats Funds are active once again this round, and the general wagering tone remains subdued. The Head-to-Head Fund's lone wager is a small one on the Dees, who are priced at $7.50 for their clash with the Eagles. Whilst not as speculative a wager as last round's Giants plunge, this small bet on the Dees doesn't exactly have "collect" written all over it either.
Read MoreAs I've written about before, MatterOfStats has an additional team rating system this season, called ChiPS, and designed so that the difference in the ratings of any pair of teams is a direct assessment of the margin of victory you'd expect to see were they to meet on a neutral ground.
Read MoreOn the face of it, Round 1 results were tough to pick, with only four of the nine pre-game TAB favourites running out victors. Seven of the winners, however, were teams that finished higher on the competition ladder than did their opponents at the end of the 2013 home-and-away season, which was great news for the MatterOfStats Heuristic Tipsters almost all of which adopt the Consult The Ladder approach in the first round of the season.
Read MoreIn last week's post I revealed MatterOfStats' wagers and tips for the entirety of the 1st round, none of which I'll be altering this week in light of the results from the first half of that round. Investors are reminded that they have only SuperMargin wagers to look forward to this weekend, which have as perhaps their only virtue the fact that they generally render all but the last few minutes of a contest largely moot.
Read MoreBased on the traffic to the MatterOfStats website today, I'm guessing that many regular visitors already know that the first four-ninths of Round 1 of the 2014 season has proven to be profitable for anyone holding the Recommended Portfolio.
The Head-to-Head Fund recorded two successful wagers from two attempts, most notably recognising the now-obvious value that subsisted in the Giants' $13 pre-game price-tag. This Fund is now up by over 9c on the season and is comfortably buttressed against a relatively extended period of ineptitude. The Line Fund also benefited from the Giants' strong showing, its wager with over 8 goals start never seeming to be seriously in danger.
Only the Margin Fund finished the weekend unfulfilled, with both of its Blues'-related wagers coming up short despite promising signs at the end of the first three quarters. It shed 2.5c as a consequence of its poor judgement.
So, all told, the Recommended Portfolio is up by almost 3c after just four games and never have I felt more compelled to remind myself that extrapolation almost always ends in tears.
On the tipping front, Home Sweet Home is enjoying a very rare period of relative accuracy, its 2 from 4 as good as any of the MatterOfStats (MOS) Head-to-Head Tipsters. It too, I suspect, should take heed of the pitfalls in extrapolation.
In other MOS contests, H2H_Unadj_3 leads all-comers amongst the Margin Predictors, although its 42.23 mean absolute prediction error is a long way from elevating it into MOS folklore, and H2H_Adj and H2H_Unadj have, jointly, the best Head-to-Head Probability Predictor performances.
As well, the Line Fund algorithm is enjoying a very rare period of net positive log probability scoring.
Of course, I'd do well to remember that five-ninths of a round is a long time in football ...
Welcome to the Wagers & Tipping blog for Season 2014.
Read MoreLast year at around this same time I said
Compared to most previous seasons, the number of changes to MAFL Funds and algorithms this year has been very small.
For 2014 I've treated last year as a worthy precedent and made only a handful of changes, none of them significant.
I'd love to be able to present an empirical case for these weightings but, alas, none exists. If pressed I'd simply relay my sense that, last year, a Fund carrying only 10% of the total portfolio seemed to be something of an irrelevance, regardless of how active it was.
That's it. Everything else will be this year as it was last year including, I hope, our wagering success.
Hawthorn did just enough in the Grand Final to snatch a little less than half a Rating Point (RP) from Fremantle to end the season Ranked 1st with a Rating of 1,052.3 having accumulated 27 RPs across the season, the most of any team.
Fremantle exited the GF Ranked 3rd having netted just under 24 RPs across the season, behind the Cats who finished Ranked 2nd after bolstering their Rating by 25 RPs. The Roos, who accumulated 17 RPs, the 4th-highest of any team, finished 5th on the MARS Ladder, while the Swans, who eventually squirreled only 10.6 RPs, finished Ranked 4th.
At the other end of the Ladder, Melbourne shed most RPs across the season, 50.3, to finish Ranked 17th, and GWS shed 2nd-most, 41 RPs, to finish Ranked 18th.
The final team MARS Rating worms for the season show the Lions, Pies, Dockers, Cats, Hawks, Roos and Tigers preparing to enter season 2014 with Ratings momentum behind them, and the Dons, Giants, Dees, Swans and Eagles with work to do to reverse their Ratings slides.
Hawthorn's victory in the 2013 Grand Final lifted the record of minor premiers in GFs for the period since 2000 above 50%.
That record now stands at 6 and 5, and includes a 3 and 1 record against teams, like Fremantle, finishing 3rd in the home and away season.
It's now the case that the only ladder positions with a better than 50% record in Grand Finals are 1st and 2nd - which is, I think, as it should be.
Reviewing the collective records for the same period of teams from the eight ladder positions contesting the Finals we find that minor premiers now enjoy a 71% record including a 21 and 8 tally for the last three weeks of the series, and that runners' up in the home and away season have a 68% record, with an 18 and 9 tally for those same three weeks.
Teams finishing 3rd now have a barely better than 50-50 record in Finals, while the fourth-best record belongs to teams finishing 6th, which have won 12 and lost 14 (46%). Their 0 and 2 record in Preliminary Finals has meant that none have progressed to the Grand Final however.
The teams with the worst collective record are those who ended the home and away season in 7th. They have a 4 and 14 record and none has progressed beyond the Semi Finals.
For those of you who might be curious about how the progress of the Finals this year has compared with Finals in years past, here's a summary of each series since 2000.
A punter's opinion about a contest doesn't much matter unless he or she acts on it with a wager.
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