Related papers: Optimal Strategies and Rules for the Game of Horse
We introduce a betting game, where the gambler aims to guess the last success epoch from past observed data. The player may bet on the event that no further successes occur, or choose a `trap' which is any span of future times. In the…
We introduce a compact probabilistic model for two-player and two-team (four-player) squash matches, along with a practical skill-comparison rule derived from point-scoring probabilities. Using recorded shot types and court locations, we…
Balanced knockout tournaments are ubiquitous in sports competitions and are also used in decision-making and elections. The traditional computational question, that asks to compute a draw (optimal draw) that maximizes the winning…
We give very simple algorithms for best play in the simplest kind of Dots & Boxes endgames: those that consist entirely of loops and long chains. In every such endgame we compute the margin of victory, assuming both players maximize the…
Streaks of success have always fascinated people and a lot of research has been conducted to identify whether the "hot hand" effect is real. While sports have provided an appropriate platform for studying this phenomenon, the majority of…
In the game of Matching Pennies, Alice and Bob each hold a penny, and at every tick of the clock they simultaneously display the head or the tail sides of their coins. If they both display the same side, then Alice wins Bob's penny; if they…
In professional basketball, the accurate prediction of scoring opportunities based on strategic decision-making is crucial for spatial and player evaluations. However, traditional models often face challenges in accounting for the…
Ball and hoop system is a well-known model for the education of linear control systems. In this paper, we have a look at this system from another perspective and show that it is also suitable for demonstration of more advanced control…
Simple stochastic games are turn-based 2.5-player games with a reachability objective. The basic question asks whether one player can ensure reaching a given target with at least a given probability. A natural extension is games with a…
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…
The problem of stock hedging is reconsidered in this paper, where a put option is chosen from a set of available put options to hedge the market risk of a stock. A formula is proposed to determine the probability that the potential loss…
Sports betting's recent federal legalisation in the USA coincides with the golden age of machine learning. If bettors can leverage data to reliably predict the probability of an outcome, they can recognise when the bookmaker's odds are in…
Each of two players, by turns, rolls a dice several times accumulating the successive scores until he decides to stop, or he rolls an ace. When stopping, the accumulated turn score is added to the player account and the dice is given to his…
With the vast amount of data collected on football and the growth of computing abilities, many games involving decision choices can be optimized. The underlying rule is the maximization of an expected utility of outcomes and the law of…
Passing during power plays in hockey is a crucial component to move one's team closer to scoring a goal. With the use of women's ice hockey event and tracking data from the elimination round games during the 2022 Winter Olympics, we…
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…
This paper explores multi-entry strategies for betting pools related to single-elimination tournaments. In such betting pools, participants select winners of games, and their respective score is a weighted sum of the number of correct…
We introduce the class of pay or play games, which captures scenarios in which each decision maker is faced with a choice between two actions: one with a fixed payoff and an- other with a payoff dependent on others' selected actions. This…
We determine the optimal investment strategy in a Black-Scholes financial market to minimize the so-called {\it probability of drawdown}, namely, the probability that the value of an investment portfolio reaches some fixed proportion of its…
The winning condition of a parity game with costs requires an arbitrary, but fixed bound on the cost incurred between occurrences of odd colors and the next occurrence of a larger even one. Such games quantitatively extend parity games…