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In forecasting competitions, the traditional mechanism scores the predictions of each contestant against the outcome of each event, and the contestant with the highest total score wins. While it is well-known that this traditional mechanism…
For every sports tournament, it is an important requirement to provide contestants with the appropriate incentives to perform. However, incentive compatibility is usually considered an all or nothing (binary) concept in the academic…
In sports competitions, teams can manipulate the result by, for instance, throwing games. We show that we can decide how to manipulate round robin and cup competitions, two of the most popular types of sporting competitions in polynomial…
Bookmakers' odds consistently provide one of the most accurate methods for predicting the results of professional tennis matches. However, these odds usually only become available shortly before a match takes place, limiting their…
We study statistics of the knockout tournament, where only the winner of a fixture progresses to the next. We assign a real number called competitiveness to each contestant and find that the resulting distribution of prize money follows a…
Multi-round competitions often double or triple the points awarded in the final round, calling it a bonus, to maximize spectators' excitement. In a two-player competition with $n$ rounds, we aim to derive the optimal bonus size to maximize…
We propose a statistical framework for quantifying the importance of single events that do not provide intermediate rewards but offer implicit incentives through the reward structure at the end of a multi-event contest. Applying the…
In this paper, we present a novel approach for optimising long-term tactical and strategic decision-making in football (soccer) by encapsulating events in a league environment across a given time frame. We model the teams' objectives for a…
Predicting the outcome of sports events is a hard task. We quantify this difficulty with a coefficient that measures the distance between the observed final results of sports leagues and idealized perfectly balanced competitions in terms of…
This paper considers the use of observed and predicted match statistics as inputs to forecasts of the outcomes of football matches. It is shown that, were it possible to know the match statistics in advance, highly informative forecasts of…
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.…
In recent years excessive monetization of football and professionalism among the players has been argued to have affected the quality of the match in different ways. On the one hand, playing football has become a high-income profession and…
In Major League Baseball, strategy and planning are major factors in determining the outcome of a game. Previous studies have aided this by building machine learning models for predicting the winning team of any given game. We extend this…
Contemporary statistical publications rely on simulation to evaluate performance of new methods and compare them with established methods. In the context of meta-analysis of log-odds-ratios, we investigate how the ways in which simulations…
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,…
This article is devoted to the forecast of the FIFA World Cup 2022 via nested zero-inflated generalized Poisson regression. Our regression model incorporates the Elo points of the participating teams, the location of the matches and the of…
Cricket is unarguably one of the most popular sports in the world. Predicting the outcome of a cricket match has become a fundamental problem as we are advancing in the field of machine learning. Multiple researchers have tried to predict…
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 each round of a Swiss-system tournament, players of similar score are paired against each other. An intentional early loss therefore might lead to weaker opponents in later rounds and thus to a better final tournament result - a…
The online sports gambling industry employs teams of data analysts to build forecast models that turn the odds at sports games in their favour. While several betting strategies have been proposed to beat bookmakers, from expert prediction…