Rugby league is back, baby. It’s good again. Awoouu (wolf Howl) Yes, the rugby league tipping equivalent of a dril tweet has returned for another season of being really bad at tipping but not so bad that you could take it to the bank as a contrarian indicator. Before we get down to business, there are… Read More NRL Tips (and ISC) – Round 1, 2018
Last year, I did a report on each NRL club featuring a bit of history, a few statistics and some graphs. The series didn’t do super well in terms of clicks but also didn’t take a lot of effort to produce. One thing I did enjoy putting together were the class graphs. These use a… Read More A Complete History of the NRL (nerd edition)
This headline (the actual article is fine) from Tim Gore typified the attitude when the draw was released in November last year: Not only were the NRL never going to redo the draw, it speaks to the tendency that the they can do no right in the fans’ eyes (“Release the draw earlier! No, not that… Read More Season preview: who has the softest draw?
Can we predict a premiership winner from their Elo ratings? Obviously, yes. That’s what the Stocky is for and this site would pointless if this was not true. But what if we wanted to look into the future before a single game has been played? I think that the Elo ratings of premiership winning teams… Read More Predicting this year’s NRL premiership winner with class
If you’re wired for numbers, like I am, it can be hard to deal with people’s feelings and understanding why they think the things that they do. That’s why I’ve decided to quantify the feelings a team generates into five distinct indices: Power, Hope, Panic, Fortune and Disappointment. Each index has two components. There’s a… Read More Primer – How do the Indices work?
The Greeks is the collective name given to a series of Elo rating models for tracking performance of rugby league teams and forecasting the outcomes of games. I usually refer to them as if the philosopher himself was making the prediction, even though the Greeks have mostly been dead for a couple thousand years and… Read More Primer – Who are the Greeks? 2018 Edition
While the recent RLWC was on, I couldn’t help but notice that the RLIF had Scotland pegged as the world’s fourth best team. Scotland hadn’t won a game since 2014 and even that was against Ireland. Since then, they’d lost to Australia, England, Ireland, Wales and France. I also got frustrated because a fifteen second… Read More Primer – Introducing Pythago World Rankings
I can finally put a woefully inadequate season of tipping behind me. For a guy that had an Elo rating system that could practically see the future last year (up around 67%), Euclid did let us all down really badly this year. But how good has the football been? This weekend sees the fairy tale-esque… Read More NRL Tips – Grand Final, 2017
We’re down to the final four. There’s the impossibly good expansion team from Melbourne, the pretty good expansion team from Brisbane, the grit-sucking, giant-slaying fairy tale machine from regional Queensland and there’s the 109 year old club of gronks that no one in their city wants to support. The NRL could not have set it… Read More NRL Tips – Preliminary Finals, 2017
I was right at least that my bracket was destroyed within fifteen minutes of the first game as the Roosters went to an early lead against the Broncos that they only briefly gave up. I finished the round one tip from four, meaning that the only thing I got right was that I got my… Read More NRL Tips – Semi Finals, 2017
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