AFL Gauntlet Tipping: More Than Just Picking The Winners

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84,621 tippers enter, a whole lot less leave.

The AFL’s home and away season has wrapped up for another year, along with countless tipping competitions.

One particular competition I’ve been keeping my eye on this year – the Gauntlet – has been run through the League’s official tipping site.

The rules of the Gauntlet (not to be confused with the bird gauntlet, which I’ve written about in the past) are simple: starting in round 7, players have to pick just one team they think will win their respective match each week.

If your team wins, you stay alive. But if your team loses, you’re eliminated.

The catch is that once you pick a team, you can’t pick them again for the remainder of the season.

I find the Gauntlet interesting because there are so many different factors to consider when making your selection – matchups, injuries, fluctuations in form over the course of a season, and trying not to back yourself into a corner in the final weeks by leaving Richmond, North Melbourne, and West Coast as the only teams you can pick from.

This year the Gauntlet started with 84,621 players. Prior to round 24, only 121 remained.

This corresponds to an average of 4971 tippers eliminated each week. But as we can see from the table below, some weeks were more brutal than others.

tipping-table

The first, and most brutal (in terms of raw numbers) round was round 8, when 37,829 people (44.7% of those who included at the start of the Gauntlet) were eliminated.

While it’s not possible to tell who was eliminated as a consequence of individual teams losing and who simply forgot to submit a tip (as these data are not publicly available), I have identified two key games from that round that might have significantly contributed to the carnage.

The first is Adelaide’s 30-point victory over Port Adelaide in Showdown 55. The Crows were 2-5 heading into this game, while the Power were 5-2 (although there were questions over the state of skipper Connor Rozee’s hamstring heading into the game).

The second is Hawthorn’s 7-point win over the Western Bulldogs at Marvel. The Bulldogs had a slightly better record going into the game compared to the Hawks (3-4 versus 1-6), who had lost their first five games of the season.

The other weekend where a substantial chunk of players were eliminated was in round 13, which saw 18,321 people (21.7% of the starting cohort, including yours truly) taken out of the competition.

There is a more comprehensive line up of potential culprits this time around.

Richmond (1-11 heading into round 13) knocked off the Crows (4-7-1) by 8-points at Adelaide Oval to kick off the round on Thursday night, before the Saturday games saw:

  • The Hawks (5-7) defeat Greater Western Sydney (7-4) in Launceston,
  • North Melbourne (0-11) register their first win of the season against West Coast (3-9), and
  • St Kilda (4-8) fall over the line against the Gold Coast (7-5) by 3-points.

I was one of the many people who were eliminated as a result of the Kangaroos beating the Eagles at Marvel Stadium.

The results of round 13 meant there were just 2019 players left for the remaining final 11 rounds of the season.

We didn’t see another mass elimination after round 13 – from this point onwards an average of 190 players were knocked out of the Gauntlet each week, and no more than 315 players were eliminated in a single week.

Unfortunately, the data for the latest round of matches is not available on the website, so it’s unclear how many people fell at the final hurdle – and how many managed to successfully run the AFL Tipping Gauntlet in 2024.

The timeframe of this stat is limited based on what data are freely/easily available and/or accessible. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you spot any errors in what I have presented.