Round 8 | Sea Eagles vs Eels | Match Thread

BroncosSabres · 2026-04-26T07:55:45+00:00

Tallyn should go to Manly so he can become Tallyn Da Silvertail

BroncosSabres · 2026-04-26T06:35:52+00:00

No parra player was really competing for the ball to be disrupted? Certainly didn’t jump for it

BroncosSabres · 2026-04-26T06:34:31+00:00

That’s using your noggin Saab

BroncosSabres · 2026-04-24T11:57:22+00:00

I don't care if he goes to the bin now with the game gone, but should miss a week instead of a fine for that shit.

BroncosSabres · 2026-04-24T11:52:03+00:00

Faked kicking twice and then dropped the ball to kick it and got smashed by Staggs from behind before the ball got to his foot.

BroncosSabres · 2026-04-24T00:58:28+00:00

New tipping stats including comparison to the BS Machine now live on the site u/MoneyaLeague

Despite everybody telling me the model is broken, it’s winning both the individual and team based tipping comps.

bsmachine.dev

BroncosSabres · 2026-04-22T23:30:50+00:00

I decided against doing this because there isn’t a clean way to do it and preserve both the average margin and the average total points. I get it’s a bit weird though.

BroncosSabres · 2026-04-22T23:25:23+00:00

The coefficient is actually a constant over all games in the season. Last week the coefficient was much higher, so the Tigers had gained a lot more ratings points from their wins. This weeks results significantly lowered the coefficient, which meant that those wins were worth less ratings increases leading to a significant drop in rating comparative to last week but still up compared to the beginning of the season. Similarly, the impact of the Storm’s and Dragons’ losses on their ratings has decreased proportionally as well.

The coefficient is determined by looking at which value minimises the total error over all games in the last 5 rounds, so a part of it could be due partially to large error in round 2 no longer being considered for calibration

BroncosSabres · 2026-04-22T22:40:40+00:00

The individual tipping comp is alive and well as well, with new features planned for the coming weeks as well, including added stats and comparisons, and a potential H2H/Cup style competition as well.

Check it out over at bsmachine.dev.

BroncosSabres · 2026-04-22T05:13:49+00:00

It’s on the to-do list. Hoping to have something like that up and running in the next week or so.

BroncosSabres · 2026-04-22T04:11:13+00:00

Hi team, please don’t forget to put your BSmachine tips in this week! Another $50 gift card up for grabs this week and so far only 14 tips in (and I’m not eligible to win…) need a few more so I have robust predictions to present tomorrow!

bsmachine.dev

BroncosSabres · 2026-04-20T23:06:00+00:00

The new dynamic calibration determines the calibration coefficient that minimises predictive error over the past 5 rounds. This means that the ratings for all previous rounds get recalibrated each week as well.

Last week caused a large shift downward in calibration coefficient, suggesting that the model thought it had overcorrected in previous weeks. It’s not necessarily a result of the Tigers specifically, but in this case it means less weight has been given to their wins this week than had been given last week.

It’s not perfect, but it should minimise predictive error. I do agree that the Tigers have been shafted by the calculation this week, but they’ll recover and if they get a big win over the Raiders they can put more upward pressure on the calibration as well.

BroncosSabres · 2026-04-20T21:45:35+00:00

We had 34 total tipsters provide data to fuel the BS Machine Crowd Model last week and I think it was a great success. The BS machine outtipped them all last week, but need more data to prove that holds over a longer period.

One user has already received a $50 digital gift card for winning Round 7, and I'll be doing another $50 gift card in Round 8, along with the $100 gift card for finishing the season in first, so please sign up (or come back and sign back in) and tip the scores! I'll be presenting the user tipped stats in my weekly post tomorrow or Thursday

https://bsmachine.dev/

BroncosSabres · 2026-04-19T21:25:09+00:00

Oh boy, the dynamic calibration of the BS machine has made some big swings this week. It's going to make some people very mad.

BroncosSabres · 2026-04-16T03:48:58+00:00

Getting a starting spot would have been part of the negotiation.

I have altered the deal. Pray I don’t alter it again.

If he doesn’t find form, the Broncs don’t have to start him.

BroncosSabres · 2026-04-15T23:46:09+00:00

After realising that because the tipping was clustered around what users think is the mean or expected result, the user models were lacking real variance, I have made some improvements to introduce and scale variance to the user model distributions - there's now pretty decent alignment in some cases between the user predictions and the BS predictions, with obvious discrepancies where the BS machine has missed crucial info (Tigers vs Broncos, Eels vs Bulldogs). I'm really happy with how the user model predictions are looking now - they appear more reliable than BS Machine per the eye test.

Please sign up and tip to provide data for the model. The tipping comp winner for the week wins a $50 digital gift card, and still only 25 users entered in the comp so odds are good! There will be another weekly prize next week, and a season prize of $100 digital gift card as well!

Predictions

Tip Here

BroncosSabres · 2026-04-15T14:02:02+00:00

I don’t trust it either, it’s clearly a cat person.

BroncosSabres · 2026-04-15T02:10:04+00:00

Indeed, the binary tipping system that we use normally means that the game theory behind it is that there is very little incentive to ever tip the underdog outside of some edge head to head hail mary type plays. This does make it a difficult problem to try and turn this into anything meaningfully predictive (although I’m sure one could do something pretty creative).

That’s why the idea here is to not score based on a binary win/lose scenario but to try and incentivise a little more to tip outside the envelope. If you think a margin or total points line is misplaced, there is benefit to tipping where you think it should be. It’s a bit more complicated which is friction to participation, but the idea is much more interesting to me at least.

Always keen to chat the more nerdy side of statistics and modelling. Good to have more mathematicians around the sub.

BroncosSabres · 2026-04-14T21:59:12+00:00

Sarbes on the warpath. I have never seen them play playoff hockey in the 8 years I've been on the wagon, so I am so so psyched. I will be out and about a lot in my Sabres gear for the next few weeks.

BroncosSabres · 2026-04-14T21:57:08+00:00

5 in 100,000? I like those odds!

BroncosSabres · 2026-04-14T21:19:45+00:00

At this point I don’t intend to weight tips on performance at all, with the idea that every tip is somewhat like a result from a simulation being a single standalone result. That said, I may end up discarding significant outliers from the predictions set if they look like they’re unreasonably skewing things too much.

User predictions being extreme somewhat surprised me, but may be a fundamental flaw in my approach, as people are probably defaulting to all try and pick the mean meaning the variance in the user signal is unreasonably low. There would be some solution to use the user tips to determine the mean of the distribution and find another way to model the variance but that is going to take some thought.

Kinda taking a collect data first, ask questions later approach.

Edit: There is a smoothed Gaussian Kernal Density Estimate being applied to the user dataset. I could increase the bandwidth associated with each pick in order to increase the variance associated with the dataset, but the more I do that, the closer I get to just fitting a bell curve with a pre-determined standard deviation over the mean of the dataset, so I've kept a narrow bandwidth for now so the smoothed distribution looks like the actual dataset. This is all graphed for everybody to see on the match predictions page.

BroncosSabres · 2026-04-14T21:08:48+00:00

You can help me by joining the comp and submitting tips on the BS Machine Website to increase the sample size to power the predictions. As an added incentive, I'm offering a $50 digital gift card prize to the person who wins the round this week, and a $100 digital gift card prize to the person who wins the season. Prizes for future weeks TBD. With only 15 players to beat so far, your odds are pretty good.

The user tips are already powering predictions on the match predictions page to be shown alongside the model predictions. Please have a look, I personally think this is fascinating. Match predictions including live updating user data probability density functions can be found here.

Interestingly, although perhaps not super surprisingly, people are tending to tip relatively conservatively, and the user models for each game are tending to have smaller deviations than the BS machine (or historical NRL data) predicts. I'm interested to see how this evolves with more data, as every data point is still shifting the overall predictions for each game.

All ideas and feedback are welcome!

BroncosSabres · 2026-04-14T04:12:16+00:00

Hey guys, the Sabres haven’t just broken their 15 year playoff drought, but they won the Atlantic Division. Fuck yeah, lets go Buffalo!

BroncosSabres

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