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Probabilistic Footy Tipping Competition 2017
The 2017 AFL football season starts tonight and so too does Monash’s famous Probabilistic Footy Tipping Competition.
Rather than picking nine clear winners each week, the long-running competition allows footy tippers to hedge their bets, by nominating the probability (between 0 and 1) that a particular team will win.
It means that if you think a certain team will win, but also believe the opposing team has at least a slight chance of winning, you can tip that way.
The popular competition, now in its 23rd year, was launched by Associate Professor David Dowe from the Faculty of Information Technology at Clayton in 1995 and is believed to be the world’s oldest such competition.
Also known as the ‘information theoretic or info competition’ it was launched on the back of research Associate Professor Dowe was undertaking with the late computer science pioneer Professor Christopher Wallace and other Monash colleagues.
But Associate Professor Dowe says it is more than just a tipping competition.
“Not only does this competition appear to help primary school children learn about numbers between 0 and 1, and not only at another extreme does it help researchers like me with our endeavours to establish interesting results, but the proof that log-loss is an appropriate scoring system for our competition is a good exercise in differential calculus,” Associate Professor Dowe said.
On the competition’s website you will find a table which shows how the scoring system works. Basically, the more confidence you place in a particular team to win, the more you have to gain, if they do win. But, with more extreme tips, the returns for a correct tip diminish and the penalties for an incorrect tip become more severe.
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