plusSixOne

So Thursday night again. Bye week again. Breif preview again! Check out my full tips at this link or on Squiggle. Ratings The main thing that jumps out from our ratings is how two tiered it looks - from Hawthorn up, the ratings are pretty tight between teams and not much separates each team. Also - Geelong jumped up into our tp rank last week, joining Sydney, Richmond and West Coast as the teams to beat. [Read More]

Those who have been following the blog for a while know that Thursday games always catch me out and this week is no exception! No update for me but you can see my tips, as always, at this link or on Squiggle. I’ve also got my plots below, presented without comment. As a separate note - I’ve decided to enter the World Cup Datathon. You can see my posts below More updates coming. [Read More]

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, I introduced the Betfair World Cup datathon and acquired some data. Now, let’s spend a bit of time exploring that data and creating some features! Feature Engineering is where the art comes into our modelling process. Given I don’t have a lot of domain knowledge here, I’ve done a bit of quick reading. Again - I’m not going to go into some advanced Soccer analytics like Expected Goal (XG) or any kind of network analysis - so I’ll simply use the match results, FIFA rankings and betfair data. [Read More]

I introduced the Betfair World Cup Datathon in Part 1 of this series of posts. In this second post, I’m going to focus on getting data. Given I don’t have a lot of domain knowledge, I can’t go into developing anything too advanced myself. As such, getting as much data as possible is going to be my best bet. This post shows all the data sources I’ve been able to easily access. [Read More]

Introduction I’ve never been able to get into that round ball game we cheekily refer to as soccer in this country. I’ve got mates who are big watchers of the Premier League and it’s always something I wish I could learn to love but it has never clicked for me. The closest I get to being a football fan however is World Cup time, where I take on an out-of-character amount of patriotism in following the Socceroos. [Read More]

Super quick update this week sorry guys. You can see my tips, as always, at this link or on Squiggle. Ratings Richmond take top spot back off Melbourne this week. The Dees do keep a handy gap to 3rd spot though, where we find it tough to split West Coast, Sydney and Geelong. Simulations Richmond have firmed back ahead of West Coast as our favourite for the minor premiership. [Read More]

Round 11 is on us - read on for an overview of the weekend ahead. You can see my tips, as always, at this link or on Squiggle. Ratings Don’t look now but we have a new ELO leader! The Demons, on the back of three huge weeks have jumped the competition to be in top spot. Given this, I wondered when was the last time they reached these heights? [Read More]

A pretty brief preview this week - I’m at the airport on my way to Melbourne for the weekend. You can see my tips, as always, at this link or on Squiggle. Ratings Again, Richmond are the big talking points of the week. However, with their big loss to WCE, it’s not for the same reasons as the last few. That loss brings them back to the chasing pack and parachutes the Eagles up to 2nd spot! [Read More]

On-wards and upwards to round 9! Read on to see my round preview. You can see my tips, as always, at this link or on Squiggle. Ratings Not a whole lot of movement at the pointy end of the ratings - Richmond remain clear favorites, followed by a close group of Geelong, Sydney and Adelaide. Those three are now joined by West Coast, who’s big win last week propelled them up into that chasing pack. [Read More]

As is the norm, here is a last minute update late on Friday afternoon! You can see my tips, as always, at this link or on Squiggle. Ratings Richmond extends their dominance at the top of the ratings. They now sit 40 rating points clear of 2nd place Geelong, which equates to about 8 points. While that may not seem huge, it is about the same as the long term average margin of home teams in the AFL. [Read More]