A Predictive Model for Low-Scoring Sports

AUTHOR’S NOTE: In the past, my efforts to predict the outcome of sporting events have been limited to sports like Major League Baseball and NFL football that have modest to moderate scoring projections, typically anywhere from 1 run (baseball) to 28 points (football) for either team over the course of a game

I’m working on a scoring model for low-scoring sports like European football. I think this one holds some promise. I took the Fool (as 0) and the Magician (as 1) from four similar decks, shuffled them together and dealt cards for each team across the span of the event. In this example, European football games involve two 45-minute periods, but I dealt two cards for each team for each half to increase the range of the model and recognize that there may be numerous shots-on-goal. Here, Team A scores three goals during the game to Team B’s one, which is not an unrealistic projection.

For hockey I would use three periods. If I decide to apply this approach to sports that have a slightly higher scoring yield, I will most likely introduce the idea of “multipliers” (for example, the Aces and Twos of the decks) as optional factors to more accurately reflect the reality of the situation. However, the scope will become unwieldy for sports like baseball that have more than four periods of play so I will probably stick with my current methods. In some sports it could be possible to count scoring events (+1 for each) rather than total number of points in order to predict the winner; still, with baseball I would need nine each of the “0” and “1” cards (I have enough decks but they aren’t all suitable for shuffling together).

A tied game will sometimes go into the record books that way, while some sports use the “shoot-out” or “sudden death” overtime to decide the contest. If the original pull forecasts a tie and overtime play is envisioned, deal two or more additional cards to predict the eventual winner.

This pattern resembles two strings of binary computer code. Maybe we should just say to AI “Give me a random string of code that will predict the outcome of the game.” The decks I’m using here are the Golden Art Nouveau, the Golden Universal RWS (both copyright of Lo Scarabeo, Torino, Italy), the Waite-Smith Centennial Edition and the Albano-Waite RWS (both copyright of U.S. Games Systems Inc, Stamford, CT.)

Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on September 1, 2023.