Certified Legendary Thread Squiggle 2017

Urge to kill, fading.......

 

Good to see someone with that avatar got that reference.

 

Last year I started paying more attention to this kind of thing. I found three things mainly affect tip accuracy:

• Margin: The greater the predicted margin, the more likely the tip is to be correct.
  
  
• Round Number: Games that occur later in the season are more likely to be tipped correctly.
  
  
• Weeks Until Game: Games that are far in the future are less likely to be tipped correctly.

Margin is by far the biggest factor, of course.

Round Number is fairly significant, with average tip accuracy rising from about 66% at the start of the year to about 70% by mid-year.

And Weeks Until Game is significant, but less so than you'd think: squiggle only loses around 3 percentage points of accuracy tipping 20 weeks in the future vs tipping the current week. I posted about this last year, because it's funny how it's not much easier to tip Round 23 the week before than it is months and months before.

As for the ladder predictor, you're right that most seasons have at least one big bolter or slider -- just like most rounds of football have at least one big upset. But it's one thing to know there will be a surprise somewhere; it's another to say what the surprise will be. You will usually be more accurate by tipping the most likely outcomes all the time and just accepting that some will be wrong than by trying to guess the upset, unless you have some kind of special insight or inside info. So that's what squiggle does.

 

I believe it was in a poker game back in '92.

 

Cheers for that. I guess my suspicions were sort of correct but not a huge difference really.

Just a follow up question if you're happy to share these stats - if round number is a difference of 4%, what is the difference in margin tipping (say under 20 v over 20, or whatever the Squiggle deems to be a small v large margin).

 

Fantastic work!!

Brilliant thread. Looking forward to seeing how it all pans out.

 

The best thing about footy is here

Am I the nonly person who when watches a game is therE thinking 'how will this affect the squiggle"

 

No beer and no TV make homer go something something..

 

Complete rip off of David King segment...

 

Do you sell this in poster size?

Asking for a friend.

 

And
Sub
Scrib
Ing

 

Squiggle Dials! Now I pull together tips from the best online models for you:

https://squiggle.com.au <-- I made a site

Currently looks like this:

​

My plan is also to post links there to online analysis from sites like The Arc, Figuring Footy, Matter of Stats, and FootyMaths Institute. Because they produce some really great stuff, which I think most people don't even notice. I'm not sure if I'll be able to keep up with this throughout the year, but I'll give it a shot.

 

Looks nice.

If one were to use this to assist in betting would I be right in saying that North @ $3 is probably a good bet, given the aggregate is about 50/50 for that one?

While Adelaide @ $2.35 would also be a good bet given they're slightly favoured.

Finally Hawks @ $1.61 seem good odds for the team rated most likely to win.

 

Squiggle corrected for ump bias??

 

That's a valid assumption if the models are better predictors than the bookies.

The real question is why there's a marked difference between the bookies and the models! There are quite a few R1 games like this. On the site, you can see that Punters (which are really bookies) are a lot more optimistic about Essendon's chances against the Hawks, for example, and more pessimistic about North's vs West Coast.

What's going on is information asymmetry: Punters know something the models don't. None of the models (I think) are sensitive to off-season personnel changes, so they don't know that Essendon is regaining a bunch of players as well as, perhaps, some self-belief and passion, nor do they know that North cut a bunch of veterans while West Coast acquired a player who's so good he won a Brownlow in the off-season.

So the Punters have an advantage over the models here, and I reckon they're probably more right. It's hard to beat the bookies at the best of times, and this isn't the best of times: it's been six months since the models last tasted fresh data, while human beings have had that time to think about just nine games. That's an advantage-humans situation. In a few rounds time, it should balance out, as we start to struggle to make intuitive sense of the mix of results, while the computers can go about processing it and forming objective conclusions.

 

FTFY

 

But how much is allowed for Bookies Bait? ie setting a price to attract more flies?

 

Can you make them max out at 11?

 

Dear god we smacked you move on

 

Off topic.

Please talk about the glorious squiggle.

 

Lol I like the squiggle sorry