W-League Predictions – Week 6, 2018-19

We’ve been continuing our 50/50 record in recent weeks, getting two right for the third week in a row. Brisbane and Melbourne Victory won where we tipped them to, while we didn’t expect Canberra to win or Melbourne City to draw with Adelaide.

After five rounds, we’re sitting at 40%, slightly more than even (but probably not statistically significant). Our bits, perhaps a more reliable indicator, are a little less successful at -0.39.

We’re tipping a round of quite close games here – the first two lean towards the away side, the last two towards the home.

W-League Predictions – Week 5, 2018-19

For the second week straight, we went two from two, bringing our season tally to 6/16. Better than average!

The two Sunday games both have sides with a 53% chance of scoring a win – Melbourne Victory as they host the Wanderers, Sydney as they travel to Canberra.

A-League Predictions – Week 6, 2018-19

We’re experimenting with pushing out our weekly prediction posts earlier in the week, rather than on the day of the event. There will be a retweeted reminder on Friday afternoon, probably. -Ed.

Our most impressive predictive feat of the season came this weekend, by being the only one of the three A-League tipsters to correctly pick a Newcastle victory. Unfortunately, the rest of the week wasn’t as impressive, with our obvious Perth tip the only other correct one.

We improved our accuracy, something which all of the tipsters did. The Flag is still at the bottom of the tree on 32%, with GRAFT sitting at the peak on 40%. However, our Bits decreased, thanks to Melbourne Victory’s upset.

The two Sunday games are the games that we’ve tipped to be the most even for the round. They’re also the only ones in which the tipsters at The Flag go against the grain of the other two.

A-League Predictions – Week 5, 2018-19

In the last round, which seems like it happened ages ago, all of us tipsters got two correct – the two games that The Flag disagreed with GRAFT and 538 on were both draws, something none of us are ever going to predict correctly. Both of the other two are sitting on 7/20, better than random chance, while I’m one behind at six.

This round includes our boldest prediction yet, with Sydney FC the heavy favourites against Melbourne Victory. This is the system’s doing, not the author’s.

All three tipsters are in agreement on the Sunday games, but the others have some variation – us being the contrarians in two of them, GRAFT in the other.

W-League Predictions – Week 4, 2018-19

We doubled the number of games we tipped correctly last week, with both Saturday games going to the teams we predicted! We’re now at 1/3 for the year, exactly random chance. Our bits decreased though, because we had the odds for the upset wins too low and they counteracted our correct tips.

Whereas we predicted last week to be a good one for the home tips, this week it’s swapped around and the away sides are (for the most part) tipped to win.

W-League Predictions – Week 3, 2018-19

In both weeks of the W-League so far, we’ve gotten one game right, so we’re sitting 2/8 at this point. In the last round, the game that we did get was Brisbane’s 1-0 win over Western Sydney. And it looked like we were on track to get a second, until Perth’s insane comeback against Canberra.

We’re tipping a good week for all of the ‘home’ sides (if there’s such a thing in a Melbourne derby), with all of them having a >40% chance of winning by our system.

A-League Predictions – Week 4, 2018-19

Last week was pretty good for us (well, by our standards). We correctly tipped the two Sydney sides and Perth to win, however our tips of Newcastle and (bafflingly) Central Coast came to backfire on us. We’re at 4/5 at this point, one behind GRAFT and FiveThirtyEight. Our ‘bits’ have increased to -1.05.

Our predictions have four games with a clear winner, and one that looks like we’ve hedged our bets perfectly. Newcastle and Sydney both have a 37% predicted chance, but we looked at the data and it has Newcastle slightly edging out the Sky Blues.

That game, and the Wanderers-Brisbane one, are the two where we go against the grain, with GRAFT and FiveThirtyEight both tipping the Wanderers and Sydney. In fact, they’re in agreement on every game.

A-League Predictions – Week 3, 2018-19

We did finally get a tip right! We’d named Sydney FC as our likely winners for last Saturday’s Sydney derby, and the Sky Blues did triumph 2-0 in a VAR-affected game.

That mean’s we’ve brought our win percentage up from 0% to 10%.¹ However, our ‘bits’ (based around the Monash system) went down by 0.72 points.

Our predictions are less committal then they were last week, with only one team having a majority chance. We hedge our bets on a lot more of the games for Round 3.

In addition, we’ve built a fun new spreadsheet: we’re comparing our predictions to those at GRAFT and FiveThirtyEight. There’s a link to it here, and we’ll put a more permanent one somewhere else, but here’s how we match up for this week:

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¹That’s an infinite percent increase!

W-League Predictions – Week 2, 2018-19

For a bit more than 60 hours, we had a 100% record for our W-League tips. Last week, we’d tipped Sydney FC to win the season-opening derby, and they delivered, with a Caitlin Foord brace propelling them to a 3-0 lead.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t follow that up on the other games. So that one is the only game we’ve gotten so far, but we’re not that far behind what we ‘should’ be.

Our second set of predictions say that this’ll be a good week for the away teams, with Canberra the only side we’ve tipped to triumph in front of their home fans.

A-League Predictions – Week 2, 2018-19

We (unfortunately) didn’t get any of our tips right last week, meaning that we’re 0/5. In our defence, there were three draws, something that’s very unlikely to ever be tipped by our system…come to think of it, that’s a failing of the system.

We’re also trying to work out a way to have bits, like exist in the Monash Probabilistic Footy comp, so you have a better method of our inaccurate our percentage predictions are.

Anyway, we’re hoping that we’ll do better this week than the last one.¹ In all of our games we have a clear prediction, and in almost all of them that’s the home side. Here’s hoping.

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¹Although we are at 100% in our W-League predictions!