Brownlow 2021: Why most punters will focus on the wrong thing

• Why projected Brownlow 2021 vote counts are misleading
• Punters need to be focused on probabilities and price, like any betting market

Welcome to Part 3 of Brett’s Brownlow Breakdown. In the lead-up to the Brownlow 2021, Brett – the man behind our new Total Brownlow package – will share his key thoughts on betting on the Brownlow medal.

One thing I’ve noticed with all Brownlow Medal previews and predictions is that they all focus on ‘projected votes’. That seems to be what everybody wants to see.

I think they’re actually somewhat misleading.

Yes, they’re a guide, but ultimately what’s important is a price. You need to create that price with your model.

Eyeballing vote projections won’t help you figure out a correct price. They can help you to establish a very simple trading policy, but that’s about it.

Brownlow 2021: The importance of price

For example, in a head-to-head market… your projected vote count might have Player A two votes ahead of Player B.

But what does that mean price-wise? What price should each player be?

Who knows?

So a vote projection is not very useful for establishing whether a bet represents value or not.

Our approach is based on probabilities, just like any other pricing model.

We generate a probability of a player receiving either one, two three or zero votes in every game – they’re the four possibilities.

We do that for all 44 players, in all games.

From there, simulations add all these player performance probabilities together. A player who played 22 games has 22 multinomial distributions for projected vote outcomes. They’re connected together and then it’s all iterated 5,000 times.

That’s the process we go through to come up with what we need: a price.

So our advice here is: put aside the vote projections and predictors for a moment. Knowing exactly how many votes a player will get isn’t the big question.

We’re betting here, so what’s important is the price, and whether that price offers value.

<< Part 1: Why the Brownlow is different to other sports betting

<< Part 2: The #1 rule for betting Brownlow group markets

>> Part 4: The ‘X Factor’ that our Brownlow Medal model possesses