Related papers: A double-elimination format for a 48-team FIFA Wor…
The selection of an appropriate competition format is critical for both the success and credibility of any competition, both real and simulated. In this paper, the automated parallelism offered by the RoboCupSoccer 2D simulation league is…
The traveling tournament problem (TTP) is to minimize the total traveling distance of all teams in a double round-robin tournament. In this paper, we focus on TTP-2, in which each team plays at most two consecutive home games and at most…
Team assembly is a problem that demands trade-offs between multiple fairness criteria and computational optimization. We focus on four criteria: (i) fair distribution of workloads within the team, (ii) fair distribution of skills and…
In this work, we compare three different modeling approaches for the scores of soccer matches with regard to their predictive performances based on all matches from the four previous FIFA World Cups 2002 - 2014: Poisson regression models,…
The draw of some knockout tournaments requires finding a perfect matching in a balanced bipartite graph. The problem becomes challenging with draw constraints: the two draw procedures used in sports are known to be non-uniformly distributed…
Problem definition: Professional sports leagues may be suspended due to various reasons such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic. A critical question the league must address when re-opening is how to appropriately select a subset of the…
In this work, we combine two different ranking methods together with several other predictors in a joint random forest approach for the scores of soccer matches. The first ranking method is based on the bookmaker consensus, the second…
We present a new problem called the incomplete Traveling Tournament problem, which introduces the well known Traveling Tournament Problem into the realm of incomplete round-robin tournaments. We focus on the case where teams can face each…
Many sports tournaments are organised in a hybrid design consisting of a round-robin group stage followed by a knock-out phase. The traditional seeding regime aims to create balanced groups roughly at the same competition level but may…
Knockout tournaments constitute a popular format for organizing sports competitions. While prior results have shown that it is often possible to manipulate a knockout tournament by fixing the bracket, these results ignore the prevalent…
The group draw of a sports tournament requires assigning teams to groups of (almost) the same size. The most important criteria for a draw procedure are balance, randomness, and transparency, which could not be satisfied simultaneously if…
A tournament organizer must select one of $n$ possible teams as the winner of a competition after observing all $\binom{n}{2}$ matches between them. The organizer would like to find a tournament rule that simultaneously satisfies the…
The integrity of a sport can be seriously undermined if its rules punish winning as this creates incentives for strategic manipulation. Therefore, a sports tournament can be called unfair if the overall win probabilities are not ordered…
The paper analyses how draw constraints influence the outcome of a knockout tournament. The research question is inspired by European club football competitions, where the organiser generally imposes an association constraint in the first…
We investigate multi-round team competitions between two teams, where each team selects one of its players simultaneously in each round and each player can play at most once. The competition defines an extensive-form game with perfect…
Scheduling a sports tournament is a complex optimization problem, which requires a large number of hard constraints to satisfy. Despite the availability of several such constraints in the literature, there remains a gap since most of the…
Given a mapping from a set of players to the leaves of a complete binary tree (called a seeding), a knockout tournament is conducted as follows: every round, every two players with a common parent compete against each other, and the winner…
National teams from different continents can play against each other only in afew sports competitions. Therefore, a reasonable aim is maximising the number of intercontinental games in world cups, as done in basketball and football, in…
Knockout tournaments, also known as single-elimination or cup tournaments, are a popular form of sports competitions. In the standard probabilistic setting, for each pairing of players, one of the players wins the game with a certain (a…
This paper aims to explore the impact of tournament design on the incentives of the contestants. We develop a simulation framework to quantify the potential gain and loss from attacking based on changes in the probability of reaching the…