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The baseball game is often seen as many contests that are performed between individuals. The duel between the pitcher and the batter, for example, is considered the engine that drives the sport. The pitchers use a variety of strategies to…
Many recent proposals for reducing tanking in draft lotteries share a common structure: losses improve draft position early in the season while wins improve draft position later. While such systems improve late-season incentives, they…
Assessment of the performance of a player in any sport is very much needed to determine the ranking of players and make a solid team with the best players. Besides these, fans, journalists, sports persons, and sports councils often analyse…
Quarterback performance can be difficult to rank, and much effort has been spent in creating new rating systems. However, the input statistics for such ratings are subject to randomness and factors outside the quarterback's control. To…
I describe a new likelihood technique, based on counts-in-cells statistics, that I use to analyze repeating in the BATSE 1B and 2B catalogues. Using the 1B data, I find that repeating is preferred over non-repeating by 4.3:1 odds, with a…
We present evidence, based on play-by-play data from all 6087 games from the 2006/07--2009/10 seasons of the National Basketball Association (NBA), that basketball scoring is well described by a weakly-biased continuous-time random walk.…
Major League Baseball (MLB) recently limited pitchers to three pickoff attempts, creating a cat-and-mouse game between pitcher and runner. Each failed attempt adds pressure on the pitcher to avoid using another, and the runner can intensify…
A Bayesian Survival Analysis method is motivated and developed for analysing sequences of scores made by a batsman in test or first class cricket. In particular, we expect the presence of an effect whereby the distribution of scores has…
We formulate the head-to-head matchups between Major League Baseball pitchers and batters from 1954 to 2008 as a bipartite network of mutually-antagonistic interactions. We consider both the full network and single-season networks, which…
For combinatorial games, temperature is a measure of the volatility, that is, by how much the advantage can change. Typically, the temperature has been measured for individual positions within specific games. In this paper, we give the…
We use a simple machine learning model, logistically-weighted regularized linear least squares regression, in order to predict baseball, basketball, football, and hockey games. We do so using only the thirty-year record of which visiting…
We consider the problem of inferring an unknown ranking of $n$ items from a random tournament on $n$ vertices whose edge directions are correlated with the ranking. We establish, in terms of the strength of these correlations, the…
Two new Bayesian methods for estimating and predicting in-game home team win probabilities are proposed. The first method has a prior that adjusts as a function of lead differential and time elapsed. The second is an adjusted version of the…
Imagine that there are two bins to which balls are added sequentially, and each incoming ball joins a bin with probability proportional to the p-th power of the number of balls already there. A general result says that if p>1/2, there…
In sports betting it is easier to predict the winner of a game match than the team that covers the bet. Since, a winner team might not cover a bet. This study focuses on the relation of the variable win to the betting variable cover the…
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 pickleball doubles with conventional side-out scoring, points are scored only by the serving team. The serve alternates during a game, with each team serving until it has faulted twice, except at the beginning of the game, in which case…
In the Penney-Ante game, Player I chooses a head/tail string of a predetermined length $n\ge3$. Player II, upon seeing Player I's choice, chooses another head/tail string of the same length. A coin is then tossed repeatedly and the player…
We study the effects of randomness on competitions based on an elementary random process in which there is a finite probability that a weaker team upsets a stronger team. We apply this model to sports leagues and sports tournaments, and…
We study a version of the minority game in which one agent is allowed to join the game in a random fashion. It is shown that in the crowded regime, i.e., for small values of the memory size $m$ of the agents in the population, the agent…