A full set of Totals markets have gone up very early this week and, consistent with MoS philosophy, we’ve wagered in these markets as soon as possible.

MoSSBODS this week disagrees with MoSHBODS on the Total for every game by amounts ranging from 1 point to 8 points. On average, however, across all nine games, MoSSBODS is one point higher than MoSHBODS.

The two bookmakers are, on average, about 4 points higher than MoSSBODS.

With every team now having played at least three games, it feels an appropriate time to look at how the various MoS Team Rating Systems view the teams.

One thing to bear in mind this season is that MoSSBODS has been optimised to produce better game total forecasts, which will, in my experience, necessarily lessen its ability to forecast game margins well. It will also lead, as we’ll see, to quite different assessments of the 18 teams. In short, don’t expect the extremely high levels of correlation between MoSSBODS and MoSHBODS that we’ve grown used to in recent years.

That difference can be seen immediately when we look at the two System’s team ratings at the end of Round 4.

We have only our second nine-game round this week, and it feels as though it signals the end of the first portion of the season, after which we’ll have some reasonable ideas about the most likely and most unlikely Finalists.

Two-thirds of the nine games are expected to be won by less than three goals, one by four goals, another by about five goals, and the remaining game by about five-and-a-half goals. All of which you might expect to make head-to-head tipping quite challenging.

Let’s see what the models make of the new nine.

Round 4 was another entirely acceptable round, with seven of the early-week favourites getting up, leading to MoSHPlay, Bookie Knows Best, the RSMP twins, and ENS_Linear all registering that score on the Head-to-Head Tipsters Leaderboard.

That left MoSHPlay a tip clear of the field on 29 from 35 (83%).

The all-Tipster score came in at 6.4 from 8, which took the season-long all-Tipster performance to 25.3 from 35 (72%).