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During the 2017 NBA playoffs, Celtics coach Brad Stevens was faced with a difficult decision when defending against the Cavaliers: "Do you double and risk giving up easy shots, or stay at home and do the best you can?" It's a tough call,…
An accumulator is a bet that presents a rather unique payout structure, in that it combines multiple bets into a wager that can generate a total payout given by the multiplication of the individual odds of its parts. These potentially…
The Traveling Tournament Problem (TTP) is a hard but interesting sports scheduling problem inspired by Major League Baseball, which is to design a double round-robin schedule such that each pair of teams plays one game in each other's home…
Maddox, et al. (2022) establish a new win probability estimation for college basketball and compared the results with previous methods of Stern (1994), Desphande and Jensen (2016) and Benz (2019). This paper proposes modifications to the…
Sports betting markets are proven real-world laboratories to test theories of asset pricing anomalies and risky behaviour. Using a high-frequency dataset provided directly by a major bookmaker, containing the odds and amounts staked…
Timeout is a short interruption during games used to communicate a change in strategy, to give the players a rest or to stop a negative flow in the game. Whatever the reason, coaches expect an improvement in their team's performance after a…
In sports analytics, home field advantage is a robust phenomenon where the home team wins more games than the away team. However, discovering the causal factors behind home field advantage presents unique challenges due to the…
In a casino where arbitrarily small bets are admissible, any betting strategy M can be modified into a savings strategy that, not only is successful on each casino sequence where M is (thus accumulating unbounded wealth inside the casino)…
The National Football League (NFL) sets its regular season schedule to optimize viewership and minimize competitive inequities. One inequity assumed to impact team performance is rest differential, defined as the relative number of days…
We study independent searchers competing for a target under restarts and find that introduction of restarts tends to enhance the search efficiency of an already efficient searcher. As a result, the difference between the search…
Ranking sportsmen whose careers took place in different eras is often a contentious issue and the topic of much debate. In this paper we focus on cricket and examine what conclusions may be drawn about the ranking of Test batsmen using data…
In this paper, we employ machine learning techniques to analyze seventeen seasons (1999-2000 to 2015-2016) of NBA regular season data from every team to determine the common characteristics among NBA playoff teams. Each team was…
Conventional wisdom in baseball circles holds that a seven-game playoff series is fairer than a five-game series. In an earlier paper, E. Lee May, Jr. showed that, treating each game as an independent event, a seven-game series is not…
Penney's game is a two player zero-sum game in which each player chooses a three-flip pattern of heads and tails and the winner is the player whose pattern occurs first in repeated tosses of a fair coin. Because the players choose…
There is a widespread notion in cricketing world that with increasing pace the performance of a bowler improves. Additionally, many commentators believe lower order batters to be more vulnerable to pace. The present study puts these two…
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, depending on the strategy. Game 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…
Winning the coin toss at the end of a tied soccer game gives a team the right to choose whether to kick either first or second on all five rounds of penalty kicks, when each team is allowed one kick per round. There is considerable evidence…
We analyze how coaching strategies affect goal difference and home win probabilities using hand-coded Serie A match commentary (2011/12--2013/14). Our dataset captures in-game dynamics, referee actions, and team behavior. Applying…
In-game win probability models, which provide a sports team's likelihood of winning at each point in a game based on historical observations, are becoming increasingly popular. In baseball, basketball and American football, they have become…