Related papers: What is the most competitive sport?
When $n$ teams play in a football league with home and away matches against every opponent there are $M = n \cdot (n-1)$ matches. There are 3 possible match results: a victory is awarded 3 points, a draw 1 point and 0 points for a defeat.…
In recent years, data-driven approaches have become a popular tool in a variety of sports to gain an advantage by, e.g., analysing potential strategies of opponents. Whereas the availability of play-by-play or player tracking data in sports…
Machine learning has become a common approach to predicting the outcomes of soccer matches, and the body of literature in this domain has grown substantially in the past decade and a half. This chapter discusses available datasets, the…
We study the competition for partners in two-sided matching markets with heterogeneous agent preferences, with a focus on how the equilibrium outcomes depend on the connectivity in the market. We model random partially connected markets,…
Game theory is the study of tractable games which may be used to model more complex systems. Board games, video games and sports, however, are intractable by design, so "ludological" theories about these games as complex phenomena should be…
Recent research in industrial organisation has investigated the essential place that middlemen have in the networks that make up our global economy. In this paper we attempt to understand how such middlemen compete with each other through a…
We investigate the dynamics of football matches. Our goal is to characterize statistically the temporal sequence of ball movements in this collective sport game, searching for traits of complex behavior. Data were collected over a variety…
We introduce an evolutionary game with feedback between perception and reality, which we call the reality game. It is a game of chance in which the probabilities for different objective outcomes (e.g., heads or tails in a coin toss) depend…
From the viewpoint of networks, a ranking system for players or teams in sports is equivalent to a centrality measure for sports networks, whereby a directed link represents the result of a single game. Previously proposed network-based…
Rating systems play an important role in competitive sports and games. They provide a measure of player skill, which incentivizes competitive performances and enables balanced match-ups. In this paper, we present a novel Bayesian rating…
Winners-take-all situations introduce an incentive for agents to diversify their behavior, since doing so will result in splitting an eventual price with fewer people. At the same time, when the payoff of a process depends on a parameter…
Evaluating the accuracies of models for match outcome predictions is nice and well but in the end the real proof is in the money to be made by betting. To evaluate the question whether the models developed by us could be used easily to make…
Despite the massive popularity of the Asian Handicap (AH) football (soccer) betting market, its efficiency has not been adequately studied by the relevant literature. This paper combines rating systems with Bayesian networks and presents…
We consider a Bradley-Terry model in random environment where each player faces each other once. More precisely the strengths of the players are assumed to be random and we study the influence of their distributions on the asymptotic number…
In this work, a machine learning approach is developed for predicting the outcomes of football matches. The novelty of this research lies in the utilisation of the Kelly Index to first classify matches into categories where each one denotes…
We provide scientific foundations for athletic performance prediction on an individual level, exposing the phenomenology of individual athletic running performance in the form of a low-rank model dominated by an individual power law. We…
National teams from different continents can play against each other only in afew sports competitions. Therefore, a reasonable aim is maximising the number of intercontinental games in world cups, as done in basketball and football, in…
Competition is a primary driver of player satisfaction and engagement in multiplayer online games. Traditional matchmaking systems aim at creating matches involving teams of similar aggregated individual skill levels, such as Elo score or…
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…
Competitor rating systems for head-to-head games are typically used to measure playing strength from game outcomes. Ratings computed from these systems are often used to select top competitors for elite events, for pairing players of…