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The main objective of this paper is to investigate the extent to which the margin of victory can be predicted solely by the rankings of the opposing teams in NCAA Division I men's basketball games. Several past studies have modeled this…
The Pythagorean formula is one of the most popular ways to measure the true ability of a team. It is very easy to use, estimating a team's winning percentage from the runs they score and allow. This data is readily available on standings…
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…
We consider two-player contests with the possibility of ties and study the effect of different tie-breaking rules on effort. For ratio-form and difference-form contests that admit pure-strategy Nash equilibrium, we find that the effort of…
The traditional approach to choosing moves in game-playing programs is the minimax procedure. The general belief underlying its use is that increasing search depth improves play. Recent research has shown that given certain simplifying…
It is customary for researchers and practitioners to fit linear models in order to predict NBA player's salary based on the players' performance on court. On the contrary, we focus on the players salary share (with regards to the team…
We consider the problem of selecting a portfolio of entries of fixed cardinality for contests with top-heavy payoff structures, i.e. most of the winnings go to the top-ranked entries. This framework is general and can be used to model a…
We analyze what happens to the average duration of a game of Chutes and Ladders as the probability of rolling $\delta \in \{ 1,2,3,4,5,6\}$ approaches 100%. We utilize Markov models, and Monte Carlo simulations in Python. We also introduce…
In international football (soccer), two-legged knockout ties, with each team playing at home in one leg and the final outcome decided on aggregate, are common. Many players, managers and followers seem to believe in the `second-leg home…
In this work the properties of multi choice minority games are studied by means of extensive computational simulations. We have considered several ways of rewarding the strategies of the players and compared the resulting behaviours of the…
In soccer, game context can result in skewing offensive statistics in ways that might misrepresent how well a team has played. For instance, in England's 1-2 loss to France in the 2022 FIFA World Cup quarterfinal, England attempted…
We study a mixed population of adaptive agents with small and large memories, competing in a minority game. If the agents are sufficiently adaptive, we find that the average winnings per agent can exceed that obtainable in the corresponding…
In this paper, we present Mambanet: a hybrid neural network for predicting the outcomes of Basketball games. Contrary to other studies, which focus primarily on season games, this study investigates playoff games. MambaNet is a hybrid…
Multiple teams participate in a random competition. In each round the winner receives one point. We study the times until ties occur among teams. We construct martingales and supermartingales that enable us to prove the results regarding…
A popular challenge on the social media app TikTok is to place the output of a random number generator in ascending order without arriving at a contradiction. Most players rely on intuition to construct their sequences and debate has…
Win statistics, including the win ratio, net benefit, and win odds, summarize treatment effects on hierarchical composite endpoints by sequentially comparing patient pairs on component outcomes ordered by clinical importance, proceeding to…
The outcome of some football matches has benefited both teams at the expense of a third team because head-to-head results were used for breaking ties. Inspired by these examples, our mathematical analysis identifies all possible collusion…
Maddox, et al. [9, 10] establish Bayesian methods for estimating home-team in-game win probability for college and NBA basketball. This paper introduces a Bayesian approach for estimating in-game home-team win probability for Division-I FBS…
How much does luck matter to a criminal defendant in a jury trial? We use rich data on jury selection to causally estimate how parties who are randomly assigned a less favorable jury (as proxied by whether their attorneys exhaust their…
In the run-up to any major sports tournament, winning probabilities of participants are publicized for engagement and betting purposes. These are generally based on simulating the tournament tens of thousands of times by sampling from…