NRL Round 4 Wrap-Up

Round 4, and the last round of the Sportsbet money back special if your team loses by 8 or less. This has saved us 5 bets over the 4 weeks, including 2 this week, and means that whilst we've been close, we will miss you old money back special.....

But ignoring this, we had another solid week, with St George doing us proud again, although annoyingly the -2.5 line proved 0.5 points too much! But whilst St George have proven to be solid contributors, what about the Titans. Bet of The Week this week, and yet again they came home. Our model likes them, especially when compared to the bookies, and they are proving solid gold performers. The models used by others will start to factor the Titans form in, so the odds may become less juicy.

So what about the model and certain teams - we can see the Titans are winning us money, but which teams are we struggling to predict the result on? Well it's the Rabbitohs who lead the way, and we are a massive 24 points a game out on average! It's only 4 games in, but last week we thought they'd lose by 5 and got smashed by 30, and in week 1 we thought they'd lose (this was before we saw the Roosters play!) by 6 and actually won by 32! So they're all over the place compared to our model - also because they have a fairly inexperienced squad (and our model favours experience). The following chart shows how far we've been out this far by team . It seems a lot but looking at the footytips website the leading two tippers have a margin error of 71 and 86 each over 4 games (first one of each round), so approximately 20 out per game - our margin is 43, which is around 11 per game which ties in with our overall margin errors.

And as the season progresses and we have more data the model, should in theory, get better

at predicting the results.

Well round 4 saw our best average margin error of 9 points per game, and that factors in the

Rabbitohs debacle. But its very early days and we'll keep monitoring and tweaking.

It wont have made you as much money in betting terms but tipping the home teams doesn't

seem like too bad a method so far this year, and is certainly the go in the AFL (9 from 9)!

As always glad to hear your feedback and especially on the Rabbitohs - which team will turn up next week? And will the Panthers be able to score against the measly Eels?