Related papers: Anyone for chess? Analysing chess ratings above hi…
The Swiss-system is an increasingly popular competition format as it provides a favourable trade-off between the number of matches and ranking accuracy. However, there is no empirical study on the potential unfairness of Swiss-system chess…
Any collection can be ranked. Sports and games are common examples of ranked systems: players and teams are constantly ranked using different methods. The statistical properties of rankings have been studied for almost a century in a…
We study biased Maker-Breaker positional games between two players, one of whom is playing randomly against an opponent with an optimal strategy. In this paper we consider the scenario when Maker plays randomly and Breaker is "clever", and…
In the classical secretary problem, one attempts to find the maximum of an unknown and unlearnable distribution through sequential search. In many real-world searches, however, distributions are not entirely unknown and can be learned…
We introduce a compact probabilistic model for two-player and two-team (four-player) squash matches, along with a practical skill-comparison rule derived from point-scoring probabilities. Using recorded shot types and court locations, we…
Do AI systems truly understand human concepts or merely mimic surface patterns? We investigate this through chess, where human creativity meets precise strategic concepts. Analyzing a 270M-parameter transformer that achieves…
A famous (and hard) chess problem asks what is the maximum number of safe squares possible in placing $n$ queens on an $n\times n$ board. We examine related problems from placing $n$ rooks. We prove that as $n\to\infty$, the probability…
Various social dilemma games that follow different strategy updating rules have been studied on many networks.The reported results span the entire spectrum, from significantly boosting,to marginally affecting,to seriously decreasing the…
In a generalized tournament, players may have an arbitrary number of matches against each other and the outcome of the games is measured on a cardinal scale with a lower and upper bound. An axiomatic approach is applied to the problem of…
In this note, I introduce Estimated Performance Rating (PR$^e$), a novel system for evaluating player performance in sports and games. PR$^e$ addresses a key limitation of the Tournament Performance Rating (TPR) system, which is undefined…
Patterns of wins and losses in pairwise contests, such as occur in sports and games, consumer research and paired comparison studies, and human and animal social hierarchies, are commonly analyzed using probabilistic models that allow one…
What would you do if you were invited to play a game where you were given \$25 and allowed to place bets for 30 minutes on a coin that you were told was biased to come up heads 60% of the time? This is exactly what we did, gathering 61…
In a function that takes its inputs from various players, the effect of a player measures the variation he can cause in the expectation of that function. In this paper we prove a tight upper bound on the number of players with large effect,…
This paper considers the effect of riffle shuffling on decks of cards, allowing for some cards to be indistinguishable from other cards. The dual problem of dealing a game with hands, such as bridge or poker, is also considered. The…
Consider a card guessing game with complete feedback in which a deck of $n$ cards ordered $1,\dots, n$ is riffle-shuffled once. With the goal to maximize the number of correct guesses, a player guesses cards from the top of the deck one at…
In fantasy sports, strategic thinking-not mere luck-often defines who wins and who falls short. As fantasy cricket grows in popularity across India, understanding whether success stems from skill or chance has become both an analytical and…
We introduce a novel system of matching and scoring players in tournaments, called Multi-Tier Tournaments, illustrated by chess and based on the following rules: 1. Players are divided into skill-based tiers, based on their Elo ratings. 2.…
We study poker hand rankings in the partially generalised setting of a deck with $r$ ranks, rather than the typical 13 ranks. We provide the hand rankings for all $r$ and observe some interesting phenomena such as the smallest $r$ such that…
The popularity of computer games is remarkably high and is still growing every year. Despite this popularity and the economical importance of gaming, research in game design, or to be more precise, of game mechanics that can be used to…
The demand for global university league tables has been high over the past two decades. However, significant criticism of their methodologies is accumulating without being addressed. I revisit global university league tables by normalizing…