Related papers: The Madness of Multiple Entries in March Madness
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…
Much work in the parimutuel betting literature has discussed estimating event outcome probabilities or developing optimal wagering strategies, particularly for horse race betting. Some betting pools, however, involve betting not just on a…
With an exploding global market and the recent introduction of online cash prize tournaments, fantasy sports contests are quickly becoming a central part of the social gaming and sports industries. For sports fans and online media…
This paper explores a novel way for analyzing the tournament structures to find a best suitable one for the tournament under consideration. It concerns about three aspects such as tournament conducting cost, competitiveness development and…
Motivated by a problem posed by Aldous, our goal is to find the maximal-entropy win-martingale: In a sports game between two teams, the chance the home team wins is initially $x_0 \in (0,1)$ and finally 0 or 1. As an idealization we take 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…
This paper proposes a model to predict the outcome of the March Madness tournament based on historical NCAA basketball data since 2013. The framework of this project is a simplification of the FiveThrityEight NCAA March Madness prediction…
Tournament solutions are frequently used to select winners from a set of alternatives based on pairwise comparisons between alternatives. Prior work has shown that several common tournament solutions tend to select large winner sets 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…
Baseball is a game of strategic decisions including bullpen usage, pinch-hitting and intentional walks. Managers must adjust their strategies based on the changing state of the game in order to give their team the best chance of winning. In…
Tournament solutions provide methods for selecting the "best" alternatives from a tournament and have found applications in a wide range of areas. Previous work has shown that several well-known tournament solutions almost never rule out…
Balanced knockout tournaments are ubiquitous in sports competitions and are also used in decision-making and elections. The traditional computational question, that asks to compute a draw (optimal draw) that maximizes the winning…
We investigate the problem of gambling with uncertainty in outcome probabilities. Stochastic optimization models are proposed for optimal investing on events with mutually exclusive outcomes when probabilities are estimated using…
This paper presents a novel approach for optimizing betting strategies in sports gambling by integrating Von Neumann-Morgenstern Expected Utility Theory, deep learning techniques, and advanced formulations of the Kelly Criterion. By…
Predicting the outcomes of future events is a challenging problem for which a variety of solution methods have been explored and attempted. We present an empirical comparison of a variety of online and offline adaptive algorithms for…
In a multi-battle contest, each time a player competes by investing some of her budgets or resources in a component battle to collect a value if winning the battle. There are multiple battles to fight, and the budgets get consumed over…
This study presents a rigorous mathematical approach to the optimization of round and betting policies in Blackjack, using Markov Decision Processes (MDP) and Expected Utility Theory. The analysis considers a direct confrontation between a…
Round robin tournaments are omnipresent in sport competitions and beyond. We propose two new integer programming formulations for scheduling a round robin tournament, one of which we call the matching formulation. We analytically compare…
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…
Many popular sports involve matches between two teams or players where each team have the possibility of scoring points throughout the match. While the overall match winner and result is interesting, it conveys little information about the…