Related papers: A Treatise on Sucker's Bets
Predicting the outcome of sports events is a hard task. We quantify this difficulty with a coefficient that measures the distance between the observed final results of sports leagues and idealized perfectly balanced competitions in terms of…
In card games, in casino games with multiple decks of cards and in cryptography, one is sometimes faced with the following problem: how can a human (as opposed to a computer) shuffle a large deck of cards? The procedure we study is to break…
Guessing games for directed graphs were introduced by Riis for studying multiple unicast network coding problems. In a guessing game, the players toss generalised dice and can see some of the other outcomes depending on the structure of an…
Paired comparison models, such as the Bradley-Terry (1952) model and its variants, are commonly used to measure competitor strength in games and sports. Extensions have been proposed to account for order effects (e.g., home-field advantage)…
Nontransitive dice are dice beating one another in a cyclic way: die A wins die B, B wins C, and C wins A (like in a rock-paper-scissors game). In this article, it has been shown that a structure of mutual wins of 3 nontransitive dice (with…
In economy, markets are denoted as efficient when it is impossible to systematically generate profits which outperform the average. In the past years, the concept has been tested in other domains such as the growing sports betting market.…
Can one understand the statistics of wins and losses of baseball teams? Are their consecutive-game winning and losing streaks self-reinforcing or can they be described statistically? We apply the Bradley-Terry model, which incorporates the…
The Kruskal Count is a card trick invented by Martin J. Kruskal in which a magician "guesses" a card selected by a subject according to a certain counting procedure. With high probability the magician can correctly "guess" the card. The…
We consider the following one-player game called Dundee. We are given a deck consisting of s_i cards of Value i, where i=1,...,v, and an integer m\le s_1+...+s_v. There are m rounds. In each round, the player names a number between 1 and v…
We study games of chance (e.g., pokers, dices, horse races) in the form of agents' first-order posterior beliefs about game outcomes. We ask for any profile of agents' posterior beliefs, is there a game that can generate these beliefs? We…
We introduce a graph Ramsey game called Ramsey, Paper, Scissors. This game has two players, Proposer and Decider. Starting from an empty graph on $n$ vertices, on each turn Proposer proposes a potential edge and Decider simultaneously…
The sudoku puzzles have a long history, with variations going back more than a hundred years, but its current and perhaps surprising world-wide prominence goes back to certain initiatives and then puzzle-generating computer programmes from…
It is well known that in games with imperfect information, such as poker, bluffing with some probability can be a component of the optimal strategy. However, as far as we know, nobody has ever exhibited a Scrabble position in which the…
Many poker systems, whether created with heuristics or machine learning, rely on the probability of winning as a key input. However calculating the precise probability using combinatorics is an intractable problem, so instead we approximate…
The notion of shuffle-compatible permutation statistics was implicit in Stanley's work on P-partitions and was first explicitly studied by Gessel and Zhuang. The aim of this paper is to prove that the triple ${\rm (udr, pk, des)}$ is…
What is the number of rolls of fair 6-sided dice until the first time the total sum of all rolls is a prime? We compute the expectation and the variance of this random variable up to an additive error of less than 10^{-4}. This is a…
Stefan Mandel is said to have won the lottery 14 times. He never disclosed the recipe he called combinatorial condensation, which enabled him to hit the Romanian lottery jackpot in the early phase of his betting career. Combinatorial…
A long-standing conjecture states that every positive integer other than 15, 22, 23, 50, 114, 167, 175, 186, 212, 231, 238, 239, 303, 364, 420, 428, 454 is a sum of at most seven positive cubes. This was first observed by Jacobi in 1851 on…
In a well-shuffled deck of cards, what is the probability that somewhere in the deck there are adjacent cards of the same rank? What is the average number of adjacent matches? What is the probability distribution for the number of matches?…
A common problem faced in statistical inference is drawing conclusions from paired comparisons, in which two objects compete and one is declared the victor. A probabilistic approach to such a problem is the Bradley-Terry model, first…