The Betting 360 podcast is back in action and our special guest this week is Stephen from our AFL betting model.

We're 14 rounds into the season so it's a good time to discuss what has happened so far and of course what we have to look forward to over the next 3 months.

Punting Insights:

Why they believe the market is wrong on West Coast, Fremantle and Sydney

How West Coast's efficiency has helped them become this season's surprise packet

Why player ratings have been incorporated into the AFL model

How closing line value is used to measure the likelihood of long-term success

Some key things to consider when betting on the total points scored market

Today’s Guest:

Stephen from our AFL tips package.

Dave: How have you found the AFL season so far?

Stephen: It's been a season of ups and downs I guess in terms of looking at performance for the year in terms of betting results. It's definitely been an exciting one in which we've really seen a few teams coming to the fore that I guess we didn't expect at the start of the year, namely West Coast in particular, and obviously Hawthorn, the juggernauts of the competition who have performed strongly in recent weeks. They've dropped a few games, that not many people thought they would have earlier in the year, but the promising thing, I guess, is that we're confident going forward over this last third of the season of finals that we should be able to manage to find a bit of value is things have a lot of changes; injuries coming in and out and the stats kind of starting to get a bit more settled in our database. So looking forward to a good finish to the rest of the year at the very least.

Dave: So you mentioned West Coast as being one of the surprising teams. It's probably three or four weeks ago now, you sent out an alert to members to get on them for the flag at around $11. Since then there's quite a few more people that have jumped on the bandwagon, but what stood out at that stage is the West Coast being a genuine premiership threat.

Stephen: Yeah because we kind of try to get in the habit of running our future simulations every week but I think we let it go for a few weeks and we re-ran it and we had West Coast as sitting ranked second behind Hawthorn and couldn't believe our eyes when we saw the price they were offering on some of the bookmakers. So just looking at their stats and what they've done this year completely blew away our expectations at the start of the year but it just ... One thing we've around some of the measures that we create in terms to determine the strength and the form of the team is we use a couple of efficiency measures and by far and away West Coast are ranked the most efficient team on offence this year even higher than Hawthorn, which is a surprise, I guess, to most people.

So the measures that we use are inside 50s per goal and disposals per goal, so these measure how the team uses the ball around the field and the quality of their inside 50 entries. West Coast look dangerous enough up forward with Josh Kennedy leading the Coleman race and then they've got back Jack Darling and it makes them look even more unstoppable.

It's exciting stuff, and as you said, we tipped them I think in round 13, so a couple of weeks ago now, at $11.00 and now they've come in to $6.50, so obviously the market's responded a bit to their good form and also it moves a little bit after some followers got on, some money came for them, but they're still rated as only number 4 in the market behind Sydney and Fremantle, so the public still isn’t 100% sold on them being a real top contender this year.

Dave: So going by game and also for totals you have your assessed price, your rated price and then you look into your overlays. In the futures, the premiership markets, so the do you actually have a probability, an assessed price for them at the moment, like how much of an overlay that is at 6.50?

Stephen: Yeah,