Footy 29 Mar 2005 11:28 am
Footy tipping - round 1
It’s a Melbourne thing; if you live somewhere else, you’re not really supposed to understand this. But, when March arrives, together with the new football season, comes the new football tipping season.
Everyone seems to hold tipping competitions: TV stations, phone companies, groups of friends and co-workers… everyone tries to be a football expert and to predict the results better than everyone else.
Well, I don’t really now much about Australian Rules Football, having been introduced to the game less than a year ago (and despite having read parts of “Aussie Rules for Dummies” - yes, there is such a book, and I admit to reading some sections). So, I decided to approach this tipping thing as a numeric exercise; a “technical” approach, if you will, with no more regard to the teams than what can be glanced from a few external information sources (to take the investment metaphor a little further, I am disregarding the “fundamentals” of the teams).
I devised three simple strategies; they are a starting point and can be improved for next year, if necessary. I’ll use them and follow the results during this whole year, to find out how they fare against the real “experts” out there. They are:
- the ladder: in each game, the team that is higher on the ladder (that is, has more victories and/or a better goal average) is expected to win; for the first round, the final ladder of the previous year is used; this can be rephrased as “using past results to predict future performance” (don’t try this with your investments)
- the money: as in, following it; for each game, the team most people are betting on (and, as a consequence, the one paying less to winners) is expected to win; this way, I try to use the wisdom of the masses to predict the results
- home: the simplest of all, it considers that the home team will always win; it takes home-turf advantage as the only deciding factor
In each case, I’m ignoring completely the possibility of a tie; some tipping competitions don’t even let you bet on a tie. I’m recording the results as the number of correct guesses but, also, as the amount of money I would have made if I had bet on my tips, at 5 dollars per game. I’m not actually betting, so these results are all hypothetical; maybe next year, depending on how these strategies fare this year…
After the first round, all strategies fared better than I expected; all of them did better than chance (50%) and all of them did better than the average tipper (55%, according to Channel Ten). These are the results (out of eight games):
| Round 1 | Ladder | Money | Home |
|---|---|---|---|
| Correct tips | 6 | 5 | 5 |
| Accuracy | 75% | 62.5% | 62.5% |
| $ result | $9.05 | $-2.20 | $3.30 |
The dollar result is the net result, subtracting the supposed expenditure ($40) from the winnings. The “money” strategy didn’t do too well, despite a reasonable number of correct tips; I believe this is a side-effect of the strategy, as it tends to bet on teams that will not pay well; as such, it needs a higher number of correct guesses to actually yield a positive net result.
I’ll post the next update in a week, after round 2.
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