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For those of you who’ve been following me on Twitter, you’ll know that I’ve been working on an R package for AFL called fitzRoy with Rob from Analysis of AFL. Today we released a new version which has a much requested feature, so I’d figured a blog post was in order. You’ll have to reinstall fitzRoy to get the latest functions. We still aren’t on CRAN but you can use devtools to get it. [Read More]

Whoops. Missed Thursday again. Here is a quick preview for 8/9ths of Round 17! Check out my full tips at this link or on Squiggle. Ratings It’s certainly bunching at the top. With my new algorithm that is going to happen naturally due the late season games adjusting less than early season games. Nonetheless, you can clearly see the big divide after Hawthorn. Also it’s hard to seperate the top 3. [Read More]

Here we are for another damn Thursday night game. I actually quite like them except that I never have time to write my preview! Check out my full tips at this link or on Squiggle. Ratings After my recent update to the ratings system where my k-value (how much ELO ratings change after a game) is reducing as the season goes by, our ratings are somewhat stable. We still have a big gap between our top 11 and bottom 6, with Essendon sitting somewhere in between. [Read More]

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]