2026 - Preliminary Finals

Picks whoever's higher on the ladder. Home team wins ties. It's the dumbest predictor here on purpose — if the fancy ones can't beat this, something's wrong.

Looks at each team's last 10 games and counts the wins, weighting recent ones a bit more. A win's a win, whether you scraped through by 1 or smashed them by 40. Tiny home bias to break the close ones.

Same idea as Recent Form but cares about how you won. A 40-point flogging counts way more than a 2-point thriller, and beating the Storm matters more than beating the Tigers.

Looks at how many points a team's scored vs conceded across the season and runs it through the Pythagorean formula (yes, the one from baseball). Teams that score plenty but keep losing close games get a bit of love here.

Same Pythagorean idea but only the last 8 games. So a team that started 0-4 and has now won 5 straight finally looks good. The exponent was tuned on 5 years of NRL data instead of borrowed from the NFL.

Standard Elo, like the chess one. Every team has a rating, you win and you go up, lose and you go down. Bigger wins move you more, and beating a stronger team moves you more too. Home teams get a +70 bonus, and ratings drift back toward the middle each new season to handle roster turnover.

The only one that actually knows who's running out on the field. Pulls team lists off nrl.com every Tuesday and Saturday, looks up each player's rating on zerotackle.com, then averages the starting 13. When Cleary or Munster sits out, this one notices and the others don't.

A simple ML model. Feed it three numbers — form difference, scoring difference, ladder gap — and it figures out which combinations have historically meant which team wins. Gets retrained for every round so it can't cheat by peeking at future games.

What the market reckons, converted from decimal odds (with the vig stripped out). Current week's odds come from nrl.com, historical ones from aussportsbetting.com. Bookies do this for a living and it shows — over a full season this is usually the single best predictor on its own.

The big one. Takes every predictor above, works out which ones have actually been useful lately (Bookies and Team News are pulling most of the weight right now), and blends them into a single pick. The percentage is calibrated against history, so 70% really means it wins about 7 times in 10 — picks at 70%+ get the ★ Banker badge, 60–70% is a Lean, and anything under 60% is honestly labelled a Coin flip. If you've got no strong gut feeling on a match, just tip whatever this says.