Related papers: Does the first-serving team have a structural adva…
We analyse a sequential contest with two players in darts where one of the contestants enjoys a technical advantage. Using methods from the causal machine learning literature, we analyse the built-in advantage, which is the first-mover…
In the original Parrondo game, a single player combines two losing strategies to a winning strategy. In this paper we investigate the question what happens, if two or more players play Parrondo games in a coordinated way. We introduce a…
Consider a two-player game repeated N times. Player 1 can choose between two styles (for interpretability, offensive and defensive), whereas Player 2 uses a single fixed style. Let X N\,:= \#wins -\#losses for Player 1 after N games, and…
The old adage says that it is better to be lucky than to be good, but when it comes to winning NCAA tournament pools, do you need to be both? This paper attempts to answer this question using data from the 2014 men's basketball tournament…
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…
We construct a statistical ensemble of games, where in each independent subensemble we have two players playing the same game. We derive the mean payoffs per move of the representative players of the game, and we evaluate all the…
Context-free games on strings are two-player rewriting games based on a set of production rules and a regular target language. In each round, the first player selects a position of the current string; then the second player replaces the…
We consider a system consisting of a server alternating between two service points. At both service points there is an infinite queue of customers that have to undergo a preparation phase before being served. We are interested in the…
If the final position of a team is already secured independently of the outcomes of the remaining games in a round-robin tournament, it might play with little enthusiasm. This is detrimental to attendance and can inspire collusion and…
The game of memory is played with a deck of n pairs of cards. The cards in each pair are identical. The deck is shuffled and the cards laid face down. A move consists of flipping over first one card then another. The cards are removed from…
Do NFL teams make rational decisions? What factors potentially affect the probability of wining a game in NFL? How can a team come back from a demoralizing interception? In this study we begin by examining the hypothesis of rational…
In a round-robin tournament, a team may lack the incentive to win if its final rank does not depend on the outcome of the matches still to be played. This paper introduces a classification scheme to determine these weakly (where one team is…
In two-player finite-state stochastic games of partial observation on graphs, in every state of the graph, the players simultaneously choose an action, and their joint actions determine a probability distribution over the successor states.…
Team captains Alice and Bob divide up $2m$ footballers, each reduced to a real-valued score, into two teams of $m$ footballers each. On each turn, one captain plays picker, and the other chooser: the picker names a footballer yet to be…
Models in which the number of goals scored by a team in a soccer match follow a Poisson distribution, or a closely related one, have been widely discussed. We here consider a soccer match as an experiment to assess which of two teams is…
Despite growing interest in quantifying and modeling the scoring dynamics within professional sports games, relative little is known about what patterns or principles, if any, cut across different sports. Using a comprehensive data set of…
We study two-player reachability games on finite graphs. At each state the interaction between the players is concurrent and there is a stochastic Nature. Players also play stochastically. The literature tells us that 1) Player B, who wants…
Football forecasting models traditionally rate teams on past match results, that is based on the number of goals scored. Goals, however, involve a high element of chance and thus past results often do not reflect the performances of the…
In the sports of soccer, hockey and basketball the most commonly used statistics for player performance assessment are divided into two categories: offensive statistics and defensive statistics. However, qualitative assessments of…
In a zero-sum stochastic game with signals, at each stage, two adversary players take decisions and receive a stage payoff determined by these decisions and a variable called state. The state follows a Markov chain, that is controlled by…