Related papers: Understanding Betting Strategy
Competitive balance is the subject of much interest in the sports analytics literature and beyond. In this paper, we develop a statistical network model based on an extension of the stochastic block model to assess the balance between teams…
Forecast of football outcomes in terms of Home Win, Draw and Away Win relies largely on ex ante probability elicitation of these events and ex post verification of them via computation of probability scoring rules (Brier, Ranked…
The approaches routinely used to model the outcomes of football matches are characterised by strong assumptions about the dependence between the number of goals scored by the two competing teams and their marginal distribution. In this…
Online gambling sites offer many different gambling games. In this work we analyse the gambling logs of numerous solely probability-based gambling games and extract the wager and odds distributions. We find that the log-normal distribution…
Understanding soccer as a complex system we base on nature and the collective behavior of many organisms that "do calculations," seeking to generate solutions in a bioinspired way. When soccer mysteries appear, complex systems science…
In this paper, we propose a shot percentage distribution strategy among the players of a basketball team to maximize the score that can be achieved by them. The approach is based on the concepts of game theory related to network flow.
This paper employs a Bayesian methodology to predict the results of soccer matches in real-time. Using sequential data of various events throughout the match, we utilize a multinomial probit regression in a novel framework to estimate the…
Bridge is a trick-taking card game requiring the ability to evaluate probabilities since it is a game of incomplete information where each player only sees its cards. In order to choose a strategy, a player needs to gather information about…
This study explores strategic considerations in professional golf's Match Play format, challenging the conventional focus on individual performance. Leveraging PGA Tour data, we investigate the impact of factoring in an adversary's…
In-game win probability models, which provide a sports team's likelihood of winning at each point in a game based on historical observations, are becoming increasingly popular. In baseball, basketball and American football, they have become…
We study the relationship between social media output and National Football League (NFL) games, using a dataset containing messages from Twitter and NFL game statistics. Specifically, we consider tweets pertaining to specific teams and…
Predicting the results of soccer matches is of great interest. This is not only due to the popularity of the sport and the joy of private "betting rounds", but also due to the large sports betting market. Where previously expert knowledge…
Prediction is a complex notion, and different predictors (such as people, computer programs, and probabilistic theories) can pursue very different goals. In this paper I will review some popular kinds of prediction and argue that the theory…
There seems to be an upper limit to predicting the outcome of matches in (semi-)professional sports. Recent work has proposed that this is due to chance and attempts have been made to simulate the distribution of win percentages to identify…
In this paper we describe an approach to resolve strategic games in which players can assume different types along the game. Our goal is to infer which type the opponent is adopting at each moment so that we can increase the player's odds.…
Strategy iteration is a technique frequently used for two-player games in order to determine the winner or compute payoffs, but to the best of our knowledge no general framework for strategy iteration has been considered. Inspired by…
Tanking, the act of deliberately dropping points or losing a game in order to gain some other advantage, is usually seen as being against the spirit of sports. It can be even more serious if playing a draw is a (weakly) dominant strategy…
We developed an artificial intelligence approach to predict the transfer fee of a football player. This model can help clubs make better decisions about which players to buy and sell, which can lead to improved performance and increased…
The standard mathematical approach to fourth-down decision making in American football is to make the decision that maximizes estimated win probability. Win probability estimates arise from machine learning models fit from historical data.…
Technology offers new ways to measure the locations of the players and of the ball in sports. This translates to the trajectories the ball takes on the field as a result of the tactics the team applies. The challenge professionals in soccer…