The probabilities of winning a racquetball doubles match motivate a fairer side-out scoring scheme for singles and team events
-
James E. Peters
and
Christopher J. Peters
Abstract
We explore the probabilities of winning a best-of-three doubles racquetball match given the probabilities that each of the participants wins a point while serving. We restrict our attention to the cases where these probabilities are between 0.4 and 0.6 for all participants; in other words, the cases where all of the players are moderately evenly matched. In doing so, we find it sensible to suggest changes to the side-out scoring schemes in singles and in team events. These changes would cause each game played to be more fair while preserving the fairness of a match, for which there seems to be adequate impetus.
Acknowledgment
The authors would like to thank the editor and the reviewers.
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©2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- The advantage of lefties in one-on-one sports
- A mathematical optimization framework for expansion draft decision making and analysis
- Analysis of a constructive matheuristic for the traveling umpire problem
- A Bayesian method for computing intrinsic pitch values using kernel density and nonparametric regression estimates
- The probabilities of winning a racquetball doubles match motivate a fairer side-out scoring scheme for singles and team events
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- The advantage of lefties in one-on-one sports
- A mathematical optimization framework for expansion draft decision making and analysis
- Analysis of a constructive matheuristic for the traveling umpire problem
- A Bayesian method for computing intrinsic pitch values using kernel density and nonparametric regression estimates
- The probabilities of winning a racquetball doubles match motivate a fairer side-out scoring scheme for singles and team events
