IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/eca/wpaper/2009_025.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

A stochastic analysis of some two-person sports

Author

Listed:
  • Davy Paindaveine
  • Yvik Swan

Abstract

We consider two-person sports where each rally is initiated by a server, the other player (the receiver) becoming the server when he/she wins a rally. Historically, these sports used a scoring based on the side-out scoring system, in which points are only scored by the server. Recently, however, some federations have switched to the rally-point scoring system in which a point is scored on every rally. As various authors before us, we study how much this change affects the game. Our approach is based on a rally-level analysis of the process through which, besides the well-known probability distribution of the scores,we also obtain the distribution of the number of rallies. This yields a comprehensive knowledge of the process at hand, and allows for an in-depth comparison of both scoring systems. In particular, our results help to explain why the transition from one scoring system to the other has more important implications than those predicted from game-winning probabilities alone. Some of our findings are quite surprising, and unattainable through Monte Carlo experiments. Our results are of high practical relevance to international federations and local tournament organizers alike, and also open the way to fficient estimation of the rally-winning probabilities, which should have a significant impact on the quality of ranking procedures.

Suggested Citation

  • Davy Paindaveine & Yvik Swan, 2009. "A stochastic analysis of some two-person sports," Working Papers ECARES 2009_025, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
    • Handle: RePEc:eca:wpaper:2009_025
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://dipot.ulb.ac.be/dspace/bitstream/2013/57556/1/RePEc_eca_wpaper_2009_025.pdf
    File Function: RePEc_eca_wpaper_2009_025
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. D F Percy, 2009. "A mathematical analysis of badminton scoring systems," Journal of the Operational Research Society, Palgrave Macmillan;The OR Society, vol. 60(1), pages 63-71, January.
    2. John Simmons, 1989. "A Probabilistic Model of Squash: Strategies and Applications," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series C, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 38(1), pages 95-110, March.
    3. David Strauss & Barry C. Arnold, 1987. "The Rating of Players in Racquetball Tournaments," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series C, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 36(2), pages 163-173, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Christophe Ley & Yves Dominicy, 2017. "Mutual Point-winning Probabilities (MPW): a New Performance Measure for Table Tennis," Working Papers ECARES ECARES 2017-23, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Gonzalez-Cabrera Ivan & Herrera Diego Dario & González Diego Luis, 2020. "Generalized model for scores in volleyball matches," Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, De Gruyter, vol. 16(1), pages 41-55, March.
    2. Galeano, Javier & Gómez, Miguel-Ángel & Rivas, Fernando & Buldú, Javier M., 2022. "Using Markov chains to identify player’s performance in badminton," Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Elsevier, vol. 165(P2).
    3. Jeryl L. Mumpower, 2011. "Playing Squash Against Ralph Keeney: Should Weaker Players Always Prefer Shorter Games?," Decision Analysis, INFORMS, vol. 8(1), pages 71-77, March.
    4. Christophe Ley & Yves Dominicy, 2017. "Mutual Point-winning Probabilities (MPW): a New Performance Measure for Table Tennis," Working Papers ECARES ECARES 2017-23, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
    5. S Lessmann & M-C Sung & J E V Johnson, 2011. "Towards a methodology for measuring the true degree of efficiency in a speculative market," Journal of the Operational Research Society, Palgrave Macmillan;The OR Society, vol. 62(12), pages 2120-2132, December.
    6. Wright, Mike, 2014. "OR analysis of sporting rules – A survey," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 232(1), pages 1-8.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eca:wpaper:2009_025. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Benoit Pauwels (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/arulbbe.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.