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The Elo rating system is a highly successful ranking algorithm for games of skill where, by construction, one team wins and the other loses. A primary limitation of the original Elo algorithm is its inability to predict information beyond a…
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…
In a $(1:b)$ Maker-Breaker game, a primary question is to find the maximal value of $b$ that allows Maker to win the game (that is, the critical bias $b^*$). Erd\H{o}s conjectured that the critical bias for many Maker-Breaker games played…
Experience is an important asset in almost any professional activity. In basketball, there is believed to be a positive association between coaching experience and effective use of team timeouts. Here, we analyze both the extent to which a…
We have developed a program called MUDoS (Maastricht University Domineering Solver) that solves Domineering positions in a very efficient way. This enables the solution of known positions so far (up to the 10 x 10 board) much quicker…
This article considers a problem arising from a two-player game based on the classical secretary problem. First, Player 1 selects one object from a sequence as in the secretary problem. All of the other objects are then presented to Player…
In this article we revise the football's performance score called PlayeRank, designed and evaluated by Pappalardo et al.\ in 2019. First, we analyze the weights extracted from the Linear Support Vector Machine (SVM) that solves the…
We introduce a general framework for positional games in which players score points by claiming a prescribed portion of each winning set, extending the notion of scoring Maker-Breaker games. In the scoring variant, Maker gains a point by…
We present constructions regarding the general behaviour of biased positional games, and amongst others show that the outcome of such a game can differ in an arbitrary way depending on which player starts the game, and that fair biased…
Volleyball is a team sport with unique and specific characteristics. We introduce a new two level-hierarchical Bayesian model which accounts for theses volleyball specific characteristics. In the first level, we model the set outcome with a…
Toral introduced so-called cooperative Parrondo games, in which there are N players (3 or more) arranged in a circle. At each turn one player is randomly chosen to play. He plays either game A or game B. Game A results in a win or loss of…
Consider a multi-class preemptive-resume $M/D/1$ queueing system that supports advance reservations (AR). In this system, strategic customers must decide whether to reserve a server in advance (thereby gaining higher priority) or avoid AR.…
We study variants of a stochastic game inspired by backgammon where players may propose to double the stake, with the game state dictated by a one-dimensional random walk. Our variants allow for different numbers of proposals and different…
We discuss a single-server multi-station alternating queue where the preparation times and the service times are auto- and cross-correlated. We examine two cases. In the first case, preparation and service times depend on a common discrete…
We introduce and study Maker/Breaker-type positional games on random graphs. Our main concern is to determine the threshold probability $p_{F}$ for the existence of Maker's strategy to claim a member of $F$ in the unbiased game played on…
This paper studies the game of guessing riffle-shuffled cards with complete feedback. A deck of $n$ cards labelled 1 to $n$ is riffle-shuffled once and placed on a table. A player tries to guess the cards from top and is given complete…
The main challenge of combinatorial game theory is to handle combinatorial chaos, if one player knows the strategy better than his opponent, he is able to determine the exact results of a game. If both players are qualified competitor, the…
We consider two-player games played over finite state spaces for an infinite number of rounds. At each state, the players simultaneously choose moves; the moves determine a successor state. It is often advantageous for players to choose…
In volleyball games, we define a rally as the succession of events observed since the ball is served until one of the two teams on the court scores the point. In this process, athletes evolve in response to physical and information…
Juggling patterns can be described by a closed walk in a (directed) state graph, where each vertex (or state) is a landing pattern for the balls and directed edges connect states that can occur consecutively. The number of such patterns of…