EURO 2024 Copenhagen
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684. Strategies for surviving single elimination tournament knockout pools

Invited abstract in session TA-16: Sports scheduling and optimization, stream OR in Sports.

Tuesday, 8:30-10:00
Room: 19 (building: 116)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. John Trono
Computer Science, Saint Michael's College

Abstract

In a typical knockout (KO) pool, each entrant must select a winning team every week of the regular season. If they fail to do so, they no longer have a chance of winning that pool since that loss (or tie), by their chosen team, has removed them from the list of entrants who are still alive in that pool. Also, each entrant is allowed to select a team just once during that season. If this style of pool is extended to a single elimination tournament (SET), like Wimbledon, the World Cup, NCAA’s March Madness, etc., then different players/teams must be taken in each round. Strategies for outlasting every other entrant in such a KO pool will be considered in this talk, and results from recent March Madness tournaments will also be examined. These strategies are quite different from those that may typically be utilized during a regular season KO pool as now one hopes to survive and advance past each round (where significantly fewer choices are available after each round, which is not the case in a weekly KO pool). Therefore, outlasting all other entrants (who have not already been knocked out) is much harder to achieve. (Many of these SET KO pools require 2 or more choices per round – at least until the semi-finals have been reached.)

Keywords

Status: accepted

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