Related papers: How to Choose a Champion
The availability of massive data about sports activities offers nowadays the opportunity to quantify the relation between performance and success. In this study, we analyze more than 6,000 games and 10 million events in six European leagues…
A tournament is a method to decide the winner in a competition, and describes the overall sequence in which matches between the players are held. While deciding a worthy winner is the primary goal of a tournament, a close second is to…
We consider the manipulability of tournament rules, in which $n$ teams play a round robin tournament and a winner is (possibly randomly) selected based on the outcome of all $\binom{n}{2}$ matches. Prior work defines a tournament rule to be…
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…
A tournament is an orientation of a complete graph. A vertex that can reach every other vertex within two steps is called a \emph{king}. We study the complexity of finding $k$ kings in a tournament graph. We show that the randomized query…
We consider clustering player behavior and learning the optimal team composition for multiplayer online games. The goal is to determine a set of descriptive play style groupings and learn a predictor for win/loss outcomes. The predictor…
Baseball is one of the few sports in which each team plays a game nearly everyday. For instance, in the baseball league in South Korea, namely the KBO (Korea Baseball Organization) league, every team has a game everyday except for Mondays.…
Competitive balance is the subject of much interest in the sports analytics literature and beyond. In this paper, we develop a statistical network model based on an extension of the stochastic block model to assess the balance between teams…
The locker puzzle is a game played by multiple players against a referee. It has been previously shown that the best strategy that exists cannot succeed with probability greater than 1-ln2 \approx 0.31, no matter how many players are…
This research work aims to develop an analytical approach for optimizing team formation and predicting team performance in a competitive environment based on data on the competitors' skills prior to the team formation. There are several…
Starting in the 2024/25 season, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) has fundamentally changed the format of its club competitions: the group stage has been replaced by a league phase played by 36 teams in an incomplete round…
Models in which the number of goals scored by a team in a soccer match follow a Poisson distribution, or a closely related one, have been widely discussed. We here consider a soccer match as an experiment to assess which of two teams is…
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…
A tournament is a complete directed graph. It is well known that every tournament contains at least one vertex v such that every other vertex is reachable from v by a path of length at most 2. All such vertices v are called *kings* of the…
In this research, we examine the capabilities of different mathematical models to accurately predict various levels of the English football pyramid. Existing work has largely focused on top-level play in European leagues; however, our work…
While PageRank has been extensively used to rank sport tournament participants (teams or individuals), its superiority over simpler ranking methods has been never clearly demonstrated. We use sports results from 18 major leagues to…
Challenge the Champ is a simple tournament format, where an ordering of the players -- called a seeding -- is decided. The first player in this order is the initial champ, and faces the next player. The outcome of each match decides the…
We present here a simple mathematical model that provides a successful strategy, quantitatively, to ending the continued championship futility experienced by Canadian Hockey Teams. Competitive Intransitivity is used here as a simple…
Many sports tournaments are organised in a hybrid design consisting of a round-robin group stage followed by a knock-out phase. The traditional seeding regime aims to create balanced groups roughly at the same competition level but may…
Several variations of hat guessing games have been popularly discussed in recreational mathematics. In a typical hat guessing game, after initially coordinating a strategy, each of $n$ players is assigned a hat from a given color set.…