All You Need to Know About AFL Tipping
Footy tipping is the well-known Australian past-time of picking which Australian Rules Football (AFL) teams will win their matches each week. Every tipper gets a point for effectively picking the winner and a point in the case of a draw.
Towards the end of the season, the champion is the one with the most points, foreseeing the margin of the first match of each round serving as a tie-breaker. You can enjoy AFL Tipping using a platform like Sportsbet AFL to share your excitement with your mates.
There are many heuristics that one could utilise to choose the winners and losers for the week. Below, we will present a couple of basic heuristics for anticipating AFL match results.
Basic Heuristics
This surely isn’t a comprehensive list for a tipper who isn’t isn’t generally paying attention to how teams are playing nowadays; each heuristic represents a means of accomplishing accuracy more than 50% while utilising a single, easy-to-find data point.
Heuristic 1: Always Tip the Home Team
Although few would choose the home team to win every match, it is a reality that playing at home is better than playing away, to such an extent that playoff series is organised around the acknowledgment of this premise. Online tipping rivalries punish non-tippers by defaulting to the visiting team.
Precision when continually tipping the home team: 57.29%
Heuristic 2: Always Tip the Odds-on Favourite
From an end-user’s viewpoint, this is nearly as basic as tipping the higher-ranked team. However, it acts practically like a complex black-box ensemble model: apparently, outsiders have access to the same data as oddsmakers.
Though they optimise for revenue, you won’t know what processes — what mystery sauces — produce the line odds and point spreads that individuals bet on.
Possibly a group of cragged, elderly men in fedoras and cheap suits smoke cigars and contend over exactly how many points Sydney will beat St.Kilda by or perhaps a running on GPUs day and night, distributed deep-learning model, calculates odds to 100 huge digits every 5 minutes. Sometimes, a foreshadow watches the skies for how the beautiful birds are flying on some given day.
Regardless, the betting odds unquestionably represent an aggregation of undeniably more data than any past heuristics described.
Accuracy when continually tipping the odds-on best: 72.32%
Heuristic 3: Always Tip the Higher-Ranked Team
However simple, this is likely closer to how a casual fan might tip: the parameters are a quick 2-word Google search away. One is always choosing the historically more fruitful team from the beginning of the season to the current round. Obviously, upsets do occur, and the difference between #1 and #15 is a lot more noteworthy than it is somewhere in the range of #7 and #8.
Accuracy when always tipping the higher-ranked team: 68.00%
A Quick Roundup:
As described in the average accuracies above, a heuristic’s dependability increases with the number of data inputs that its source considers.
- Calculating the home team needs one datum: which group is at home.
- Calculating the higher-ranked team needs somewhat more: both teams’ cumulative wins, scores, draws, and opponents’ scores for the season.
- Finally, creating the odds for each match conceivably considers all of the above alongside each team’s recent win rate, in-game analytics, and players’ individual information, head-to-head history for every matchup, etc.
If you’re looking for an online tipping competition and not a sports gambler, ignore the hype and glamour of the betting companies and consider a platform like Sportsbet AFL.
