相关论文: Fairer Shootouts in Soccer: The $m-n$ Rule

Penalty shootout in soccer is recognized to be unfair because the team kicking first in all rounds enjoys a significant advantage. The so-called Catch-Up Rule has been suggested recently to solve this problem but is shown here not to be…

The sequence of moves in a dynamic team tournament may distort the ex-ante winning probabilities and harm efficiency. This paper compares seven soccer penalty shootout rules that determine the kicking order, from a theoretical perspective.…

We consider a game with two players, consisting of a number of rounds, where the first player to win $n$ rounds becomes the overall winner. Who wins each individual round is governed by a certain urn having two types of balls (type 1 and…

Several sports tournaments contain a round-robin group stage where the teams are assigned to groups subject to some constraints. Hence, the organisers usually use a computer-assisted random draw to avoid any dead end, a situation when the…

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…

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 the {\em Musical Chairs} game $MC(n,m)$ a team of $n$ players plays against an adversarial {\em scheduler}. The scheduler wins if the game proceeds indefinitely, while termination after a finite number of rounds is declared a win of the…

In the game of cricket, the result of coin toss is assumed to be one of the determinants of match outcome. The decision to bat first after winning the toss is often taken to make the best use of superior pitch conditions and set a big…

In the natural generalization of tic-tac-toe to an $n \times n \times n$ board where $n \in \mathbb{N}$, it is known that the first player has a winning strategy if $n \leq 4$ and that either player can force a draw if $n \geq 8$. The…

In this paper, a new continuous scoring system for soccer is proposed, based on the proportion of time that a team is winning, losing or tied. Several simulations are made applying this technique to complete seasons of different leagues. As…

In the sport of cricket, the side that wins the toss and has the first choice to bat or bowl can have an unfair or a critical advantage. The issue has been discussed by International Cricket Council committees, as well as several cricket…

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…

We analyze a coin-based game with two players where, before starting the game, each player selects a string of length $n$ comprised of coin tosses. They alternate turns, choosing the outcome of a coin toss according to specific rules. As a…

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…

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…

The MandM Game involves two players who begin with I1 and I2 MandM's. During each round, each player tosses a fair coin: if the coin lands heads, that player eats one MandM, and if it lands tails, the player does not eat. If, at the end of…

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…

Ranking is used in sport leagues to determine a champion and/or to decide on promotion/relegation of teams. Arguably, the best known ranking method relies on scores obtained by cumulating the points associated with the wins and the draws of…

This paper studies sequential quantum games under the assumption that the moves of the players are drawn from groups and not just plain sets. The extra group structure makes possible to easily derive some very general results characterizing…

We show that there is an $m=2n+o(n)$, such that, in the Maker-Breaker game played on $\Z^d$ where Maker needs to put at least $m$ of his marks consecutively in one of $n$ given winning directions, Breaker can force a draw using a pairing…