Related papers: Understanding Betting Strategy
We examine two types of binary betting markets, whose primary goal is for profit (such as sports gambling) or to gain information (such as prediction markets). We articulate the interplay between belief and price-setting to analyse both…
The paper presents a plus-minus rating for use in association football (soccer). We first describe the standard plus-minus methodology as used in basketball and ice-hockey and then adapt it for use in soccer. The usual goal-differential…
In this work, a machine learning approach is developed for predicting the outcomes of football matches. The novelty of this research lies in the utilisation of the Kelly Index to first classify matches into categories where each one denotes…
In this paper, we present a new application-focused benchmark dataset and results from a set of baseline Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning models for prediction of match outcomes for games of football (soccer). By doing so we…
The subject of this paper is a variation of a blackjack game, mainly popular in some parts of Europe where it is known as einz (in German slang: one). We describe the rules of this game, indicate its main characteristics, give some…
We undertake extensive analysis of English Premier League data over the period 2009/10 to 2017/18 to identify and rank key factors affecting the economic and footballing performances of the teams. Alternative end-of-season league tables are…
In online betting, the bookmaker can update the payoffs it offers on a particular event many times before the event takes place, and the updated payoffs may depend on the bets accumulated thus far. We study the problem of bookmaking with…
The forecasting of sports events is of broad interest from the applied but also from the theoretical perspective. In this work the question is addressed for the example of the German soccer Bundesliga how a theoretically optimum forecast of…
Statistical applications in sports have long centered on how to best separate signal (e.g. team talent) from random noise. However, most of this work has concentrated on a single sport, and the development of meaningful cross-sport…
We consider the task of determining a football player's ability for a given event type, for example, scoring a goal. We propose an interpretable Bayesian model which is fit using variational inference methods. We implement a Poisson model…
Modelling football outcomes has gained increasing attention, in large part due to the potential for making substantial profits. Despite the strong connection existing between football models and the bookmakers' betting odds, no authors have…
We study the effects of randomness on competitions based on an elementary random process in which there is a finite probability that a weaker team upsets a stronger team. We apply this model to sports leagues and sports tournaments, and…
We analyse a mathematical model of seeding for sports contests with round-robin qualifying tournaments. The standard seeding system based on coefficients measuring the historical performance of the teams is shown to be unfair as it might…
This paper considers the challenge of designing football group draw mechanisms which have the uniform distribution over all valid draw assignments, but are also entertaining, practical, and transparent. We explain how to simulate the FIFA…
Much of the theoretical work on strategic voting makes strong assumptions about what voters know about the voting situation. A strategizing voter is typically assumed to know how other voters will vote and to know the rules of the voting…
Results in contact sports like Rugby are mainly interpreted in terms of the ability and/or luck of teams. But this neglects the important role of the {\em motivation} of players, reflected in the effort exerted in the game. Here we present…
We consider a matching problem, which is meaningful in team competitions, as well as in information theory, recommender systems, and assignment problems. In the competitions which we study, each competitor in a team order plays a match with…
Probabilistic properties of tennis scoring systems are examined and compared with best-of-K systems. A model, where each player has his/her own probability of winning his/her service point and which remains invariant for the duration of the…
We study a variation of the minority game. There are N agents. Each has to choose between one of two alternatives everyday, and there is reward to each member of the smaller group. The agents cannot communicate with each other, but try to…
In classical game theory, optimal strategies are determined for games with complete information; this requires knowledge of the opponent's goals. We analyze games when a player is mistaken about their opponents goals. For definitiveness, we…