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Conventional wisdom in baseball circles holds that a seven-game playoff series is fairer than a five-game series. In an earlier paper, E. Lee May, Jr. showed that, treating each game as an independent event, a seven-game series is not…
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.…
Inefficient markets allow investors to consistently outperform the market. To demonstrate that inefficiencies exist in sports betting markets, we created a betting algorithm that generates above market returns for the NFL, NBA, NCAAF,…
In this paper it is demonstrated that the scoring at each PGA Tour stroke play event can be reasonably modeled as a Gaussian random variable. All 46 stroke play events in the 2007 season are analyzed. The distributions of scores are…
One of the most energetic bolide events in recent decades was detected by the US Government sensors (USGS) over remote areas of the Bering Sea on December 18, 2018, 23:48 UT. No ground-based optical observations exist. Using the satellite…
Originally devised for baseball, the Pythagorean Won-Loss formula estimates the percentage of games a team should have won at a particular point in a season. For decades, this formula had no mathematical justification. In 2006, Steven…
We investigate lens orbital motion in astrometric microlensing and its detectability. In microlensing events, the light centroid shift in the source trajectory (the astrometric trajectory) falls off much more slowly than the light…
Match-fixing undermines the integrity of sport by eroding public trust and threatening the financial sustainability of clubs and leagues. The global expansion of sports betting markets has created new incentives and opportunities for…
Resilience is the ability to positively respond to adversity. It has been studied in psychology for several decades, with focus on how individuals overcome traumata or cope with setbacks and obstacles in their professional career. Research…
In baseball, a scouting report profiles a player's characteristics and traits, usually intended for use in player valuation. This work presents a first-of-its-kind dataset of almost 10,000 scouting reports for minor league, international,…
We discuss individual components of the college football Bowl Championship Series, compare with a simple algorithm defined by random walks on a biased graph, attempt to predict whether the proposed changes will truly lead to increased BCS…
The sequence of moves in a dynamic team tournament may distort the ex-ante winning probabilities and harm efficiency. This paper compares seven soccer penalty shootout rules that determine the kicking order, from a theoretical perspective.…
In soccer, game context can result in skewing offensive statistics in ways that might misrepresent how well a team has played. For instance, in England's 1-2 loss to France in the 2022 FIFA World Cup quarterfinal, England attempted…
This paper presents an empirical investigation of the relation between decision speed and decision quality for a real-world setting of cognitively-demanding decisions in which the timing of decisions is endogenous: professional chess.…
The open stadium billiard has a survival probability, $P(t)$, that depends on the rate of escape of particles through the leak. It is known that the decay of $P(t)$ is exponential early in time while for long times the decay follows a power…
Estimating win probability is one of the classic modeling tasks of sports analytics. Many widely used win probability estimators use machine learning to fit the relationship between a binary win/loss outcome variable and certain game-state…
Large-scale mobilization of individuals across social networks is becoming increasingly prevalent in society. However, little is known about what affects the speed of social mobilization. Here we use a framed field experiment to identify…
The way pulsars spin down is not understood in detail, but a number of possible physical mechanisms produce a spin-down rate that scales as a power of the rotation rate ($\dot\nu\propto-\nu^n$), with the power-law index $n$ called the…
Sports betting markets are proven real-world laboratories to test theories of asset pricing anomalies and risky behaviour. Using a high-frequency dataset provided directly by a major bookmaker, containing the odds and amounts staked…
Moves in chess games are usually analyzed on a case-by-case basis by professional players, but thanks to the availability of large game databases, we can envision another approach of the game. Here, we indeed adopt a very different point of…