Random Developments

Another fairly poor week for all strategies: 5 correct guesses for “home”, 4 for each of the others. The cumulative results still show a performance better than 50%, but just barely.

With no further ado, here are the numbers:

Links:

• Round 4 (previous)
• Round 6 (next)

A draw was the main interesting point of this week’s round. Draws are alwyas unexpected because the chance of one happening on any given game is very small; still, you can expect to see one or two on each season.

None of the strategies allows for a draw, which means that all of them missed on that game. And, overall, this was a less than stellar week, except for the “home” strategy, which got six games right and managed to get an excelent financial result. “Ladder” did 5, still a respectable result, and “money” repeated the poor performance of last week with just three correct results.

Tipping competitions deal with draws in different ways; some of them allow you to tip a draw, while other don’t; of these, some of them consider that any tip is correct for a draw, while others consider that all tips are incorrect. Since I’m using these numbers to calculate possible financial results, I’ll consider all tips to be incorrect on the event of a draw. With this in mind, here are the numbers for this week:

Links:

• Round 3 (previous)
• Round 5 (next)

I never thought of myself as a very creative person. However, the light of inspiration does occasionally shine on me. Or at least these guys think so.

The User Friendly guys are coming down under…

In a week in which the average tipper scored 3.3 hits (according to Channel Ten), the “ladder” strategy performed amazingly well, with 6 correct guesses. In case you’re wondering, and I’m sure you aren’t, the two errors were in the Carlton-Collingwood and Bulldogs-Richmond matches.

On the other hand, the two other strategies had appalling performances, with just three correct hits each. Now, I know that the “home” strategy is pretty much random anyway (with so many teams based in Melbourne, there’s not really much of a home-turf advantage in most matches), but I was really expecting more of the “money” strategy; maybe this was a week composed mostly of upsets, after all.

On the financial front, “ladder” also did extremely well, especially because it was tipping “against the money” in most matches. The other two, though, did terribly, going well into negative numbers both for this round and in the cumulative performance (wiping the gains from the first two rounds, and then some).

Here are the numbers:

So far, I don’t think any of the strategies has proved to be good enough to bet on; the results are simply not consistent enough and, with such a small sample, any of them can be attributed to luck. Let’s see how things go as we approach September…

Links:

• Round 2 (previous)
• Round 4 (next)

… in a country far, far away, I was busy setting up my first home page and putting it online. It went “live” ten years ago yesterday (or, technically, today, as I was then in GMT-8), so I can probably say that this is my “online birthday”. On the other hand, I was active online before that, of course (e-mail, newsgroups, even some web browsing); so make that my “web birthday”.

I still have the original HTML files, but most of the external links on them do not work anymore; in fact, it was then hosted on http://www.best.com/~wilson/, which is also long gone. You can see on the right a thumbnail of what it looked like then. No, that picture on the upper left corner is not me; it is Macgyver’s (and now Stargate’s) Richard Dean Anderson. If my memory serves me right, I switched to a photo of David Duchovny after a few months, and later I changed the whole layout so that there wasn’t a photo on the front page anymore.

So, well, happy birthday to me!

Continuing the study I started on the first round, let’s see how our three strategies did this week.

The “ladder” strategy was the worst performer, with just four correct guesses (contrasting with six on the first week); no more than could be expected by blind luck. In retrospect, I believe this makes sense, and I think this poor performance may continue for a few weeks. The reason is that, after just one round (or even a few), the ladder doesn’t really say much about the relative strengths of the teams; teams will jump up and down several positions at a time until they “settle” somewhat. For the first round, the ladder represented the achievements of a whole season, which made it more representative. A better strategy would probably be a “sliding ladder”, taking into account the last X rounds (across seasons if necessary) to create an hypothetical ladder.

On the other hand, the “money” strategy did very well, with six correct guesses; the “home” strategy had five, same as last week. On the cumulative results, this puts “money” ahead on the number of correct guesses, but not on the financial results, where the “home” strategy takes the top due to its consistently good results so far (remember, no money is actually changing hands).

In short, these are the results:

More results next week.

Links:

• Round 1 (previous)
• Round 3 (next)