Just a quick un, Bradford are a -10. And my ratings suggest HKR are a better team than there final league placing suggested last year. Out of interest if Hull KR were lining up against Wakefield on a neutral ground on the first day of the season who would you fancy?

Secondly the placings above are prior to the tweakings outlined below it, the tweakings have not yet been applied, i´m waiting to see what others with more knowledge of their own teams might suggest.

So how do you reckon HKR will go relative to last year, and I´m not talking number of wins or points specifically, more general competitiveness.

You need to get out more.

You are quite right but i´ve fallen in love with Excel spreadsheets. With a new bit of excel knowhow it only took a few minutes to create, and it does have real life applications, gambling for example.

If you are looking to gamble (any more seriously than just for fun) I really wouldn't do so based on your season long predictions. There are so many uncertainties involved over the course of a season (the main one being injuries) that if you want to successfully gamble you need to make a spreadsheet that predicts the outcome of individual matches (that way you can make a lot of small bets and the uncertainties should average out).

I'm currently making a program (I'm using Matlab) that analyses previous results of matches and will hopefully predict the winner of future matches with a decent accuracy. I'm designing my program for women's Australian basketball as this is pretty much the most obscure team sport, in which draws are unlikely (makes my program much simpler), which you can place bets on - based on the idea that the odds for these matches are far more erratic (pretty much chosen at random) so there is more chance of consistently beating the bookies odds.

Just out of interest, given the relative ratings of each team how are you predicting the winner of match? Are you using form from last season to make predictions or are are you updating and using form from the current season? i.e. if Wigan were to lose the first 10 games of the season would your spreadsheet be able to take this into account, lower the odds of them winning future games and thus make an updated simulation of the remaining season?

Thanks for the reply.

I regard my ratings highly, and have made money out of them three seasons running, this new programme is a bit of fun, for now and utilises the ratings that I use on a week by week basis, whilst it may or may not be able to pinpoint a bit of value in the season long markets, it´s not something I would be staking much money on if any at all.

With regards the season, yes the programme forecasts the result of every game and tots them up, to make a league table, as I´m sure you are aware the hoped for accuracy comes from the multiple runs of a season, after every game the ratings are recalculated and a new forecast for the remainder of the season can be projected.