The 2009 Tipsters Have Arrived

I'd like you to think for a moment about the most recent non-trivial decision you made.

Do you recall how you went about making it? Did you, as the textbooks suggest, gather every piece of information that you could about each available option, carefully weight these pieces of information based on your fully-enunciated preferences, and then make the obvious choice, glowing with the self-satisfaction that comes with making a choice that's rational, completely explicable and just plain right? Oh, you didn't? Well join the very long queue labelled "most of us".

What you almost certainly did instead was to employ what the academics call an "heuristic" and what the rest of us call a "rule of thumb", a way of intelligently using what you know - some of it highly relevant, some of it barely so - to arrive at a decision that is satisfactory and, in its own way, sensible.

This year I've retired from tipping all of the MM and SMM Models, the Uber Model and the Simplified Uber Model, and replaced them with heuristics. Some of these heuristics you'll recognise - BKB, CTL and Shadow - but the remainder are new. If you want to know more, right-click the "Tipsters" link above and download the PDF, which describes the heuristics we'll be following this year (along with a revamped Chi and another new tipster, ELO, which is based on the Team Rating System that I developed last year).