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Scouting is a major part of talent acquisition for any professional sports team. In the National Hockey League (NHL), the market for scouting is set by the NHLs Central Scouting Service which develops a ranking of draft eligible players. In…
In J. Schwenk.(2018) ['What is the Correct Way to Seed a Knockout Tournament?' Retrieved from The American Mathematical Monthly], Schwenk identified a surprising weakness in the standard method of seeding a single elimination (or knockout)…
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…
Despite the many recent practical and theoretical breakthroughs in computational game theory, equilibrium finding in extensive-form team games remains a significant challenge. While NP-hard in the worst case, there are provably efficient…
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…
Problem definition: Professional sports leagues may be suspended due to various reasons such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic. A critical question the league must address when re-opening is how to appropriately select a subset of the…
League competition is investigated using random processes and scaling techniques. In our model, a weak team can upset a strong team with a fixed probability. Teams play an equal number of head-to-head matches and the team with the largest…
Given a mapping from a set of players to the leaves of a complete binary tree (called a seeding), a knockout tournament is conducted as follows: every round, every two players with a common parent compete against each other, and the winner…
Drafting strong players is crucial for the team success. We describe a new data-driven interpretable approach for assessing draft prospects in the National Hockey League. Successful previous approaches have built a predictive model based on…
There seems to be an upper limit to predicting the outcome of matches in (semi-)professional sports. Recent work has proposed that this is due to chance and attempts have been made to simulate the distribution of win percentages to identify…
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…
If the final position of a team is already secured independently of the outcomes of the remaining games in a round-robin tournament, it might play with little enthusiasm. This is detrimental to attendance and can inspire collusion and…
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…
Knockout tournaments, also known as single-elimination or cup tournaments, are a popular form of sports competitions. In the standard probabilistic setting, for each pairing of players, one of the players wins the game with a certain (a…
We consider a deterministic game with alternate moves and complete information, of which the issue is always the victory of one of the two opponents. We assume that this game is the realization of a random model enjoying some independence…
Knockout tournaments constitute a popular format for organizing sports competitions. While prior results have shown that it is often possible to manipulate a knockout tournament by fixing the bracket, these results ignore the prevalent…
This paper explores multi-entry strategies for betting pools related to single-elimination tournaments. In such betting pools, participants select winners of games, and their respective score is a weighted sum of the number of correct…
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…
In the four major North American professional sports (baseball, basketball, football, and hockey), the primary purpose of the regular season is to determine which teams most deserve to advance to the playoffs. Interestingly, while the…
Lookahead search is perhaps the most natural and widely used game playing strategy. Given the practical importance of the method, the aim of this paper is to provide a theoretical performance examination of lookahead search in a wide…