Game theory

Sports

  • New frontiers in mountaineering

    The leopard changes his spots

    May 20th 2012, 14:39 by L.F.

    OUTSIDE the rare air of mountaineering circles, reaching the summit of Mount Everest is widely presumed to be the sport’s signature achievement. However, true aficionados like Mike “Twid” Turner, a board member of the British Mountaineering Council, dismiss the highest point on Earth as “only for medal collectors”. To impress their competitors and, more importantly, the grant bodies that provide financial sponsorship for expeditions, mountaineers must come up with ever-more-innovative goals, such as yet-unclimbed peaks, new routes or speed records.

  • Financing football stadiums

    Bread, circuses and leather balls

    May 17th 2012, 20:55 by D.R. | NEW YORK

    THIS week's issue of The Economist includes an article on stadium financing in the United States. Read it here. Our sister blog, Free Exchange, has also published a post on the topic here.

  • German football success

    A league apart

    May 16th 2012, 14:55 by I.M.

    FOOTBALL matches pitting English against German teams are inevitably depicted as a clash between Anglo-Saxon resolve and Teutonic efficiency. But the contrast between England’s Chelsea and Germany’s Bayern Munich (pictured), set to meet on May 19th in the Champions League final, is stronger off the pitch than on it. Bankrolled by Roman Abramovich, a Russian billionaire, Chelsea has spent millions in its determination to win Europe’s most prestigious club competition, racking up losses of nearly £68m ($108m) last financial year. By comparison, Bayern Munich, which made a profit of €1.3m ($1.65m) over the same period, is a model of prudence.

  • Sailing in crisis

    The fast and the failures

    May 11th 2012, 16:27 by G.D.

    HELD once every four years, the Volvo Ocean race, the biggest round-the-world event in the sailing calendar, is renowned as one of sport’s toughest slogs. Over eight months, competitors face a 39,000-mile battle against the elements, braving rough water and stormy weather. But this year they also have to contend with apparently unseaworthy vessels. Since the start of the race in Alicante, Spain on November 5th, every single boat has run into problems. More than half lost their masts. Just one finished the recent leg from New Zealand to Brazil via Cape Horn.

  • Obituary

    Amarillo Slim

    May 10th 2012, 17:42 by D.R.

    THIS week's issue of The Economist includes an obituary of Amarillo Slim, a renowned poker player. Read it here.

  • Court surfaces in tennis

    Feeling blue

    May 10th 2012, 16:33 by I.M.

    TENNIS players compete on such a variety of court surfaces that changing one’s typical appearance would seem to be a fairly innocuous move. Yet the decision by the organisers of this week’s Madrid Open to use blue clay, instead of the normal red, has provoked a hostile reaction from some of the sport’s stars. Having struggled to overcome the low-ranked Daniel Gimeno-Traver in his first match of the competition, Novak Djokovic, the current world number one, denounced the surface as “impossible”.

  • The NHL and Canada

    Southern discomfort

    May 9th 2012, 17:36 by C.W. | OTTAWA

    CANADA’S hockey fans have been left bitterly disappointed by the playoffs for this year’s Stanley Cup, awarded annually to the winner of north America’s National Hockey League (NHL). Neither Ottawa nor Vancouver, the only two Canadian teams to qualify, made it past the first round of the competition. For the first time since 1997, not a single Canadian team is left at the second-round stage.

    Although this year marks an unusual low, Canada has been in decline since the 1990s, when teams were lured to America by the promise of bigger audiences and a more lucrative television market.

  • Casino gambling

    Making the house beat itself

    May 5th 2012, 18:32 by J.F. | ATLANTA

    WHICH casino game offers the punter the best odds? Ask three gamblers and you'll get three different answers; cases can be made for baccarat, craps and blackjack. Of those three, blackjack is the dullest, the least romantic. Baccarat has a James Bond appeal (even though Mr Bond actually played a stutifyingly boring variation called chemin-de fer). Craps has a certain seedy, baffling charm. Blackjack, in contrast, is a grinder’s game. Learn the rules, decide on a strategy, stick to it, perhaps try to (unobtrusively) count cards if you’re able, play the odds, don’t take unnecessary risks, and you could go home a winner.

  • India’s sports leagues

    Not cricket

    May 3rd 2012, 11:49 by D.R.

    SCHUMPETER, our sister blog, has just published a post on new sports leagues in India. Read it here.

  • Elitism in Chile’s national sport

    Rodeo rift

    May 2nd 2012, 14:26 by O.C. | SANTIAGO

    THE 50,000 fans who travelled to Chile’s National Rodeo Championship Finals in late March may have been surprised to see that Michelle Recart had qualified. As an amateur and mother in her late 40s, Ms Recart looked the very antithesis of the typical competitor in what is a famously elitist and chauvinistic sport. But apart from being a woman, Ms Recart was little different from her rivals. Like them, she comes from a wealthy family that has been involved in rodeo for generations. Her father is the former president of the Federation of Chilean Rodeo.

    Chilean rodeo is a maze of contradictions.

  • Crowdfunding football

    Buy this team

    Apr 27th 2012, 13:59 by D.R.

    THIS week's issue of The Economist includes an article on a scheme in which supporters of the Portsmouth football club could jointly purchase the team. Read it here.

  • Decision making in cricket

    In the blink of an eye

    Apr 23rd 2012, 12:30 by B.R.

    IT IS described by those who witnessed it as the greatest over ever bowled: Michael Holding, taking the new ball for the West Indies in the 1981 Test against England at the Kensington Oval in Barbados. They called him “whispering death”. His run-up, which started close to the sight-screen, was so graceful, the feet so light upon the turf, that it was said that the umpires couldn’t hear him approach. The action was beautifully languid, so that he appeared to put no effort into the delivery. And yet the ball would whistle past the batsman’s nose at unplayable speed.

  • Perfect games in baseball

    An imperfect measure of excellence

    Apr 22nd 2012, 10:55 by D.R.

    PITCHING a perfect game is baseball’s most sublime individual achievement. Batters have no equivalent accomplishment: hitting four home runs in a game might be the closest, but even batters who manage that could conceivably have hit five, or even six, if they had got enough at-bats. In contrast, there are only 27 outs in a game (unless a tie calls for extra innings). Sending 27 men in a row back to the dugout without reaching base is the theoretical pinnacle of the pitching profession—it can never get any better than that. The only major sport in which it has a direct parallel is bowling, in which perfect games with a score of 300 are no longer an extreme rarity among elite players.

  • Predicting performance in basketball

    The elephant on the court

    Apr 20th 2012, 3:42 by Daryl Morey | HOUSTON

    The invited guest author is the general manager of the Houston Rockets. He can be reached on Twitter at @dmorey.

    IN A famous detective story by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Purloined Letter”, a minister steals a letter containing compromising information from a woman and uses it to blackmail her. The police scour every corner of his hotel room in search of the document: they check behind the wallpaper, under the carpets, and even examine the tables and chairs with microscopes, all to no avail. Defeated, they summon C. Auguste Dupin, an amateur detective, to help them with the case. Mr Dupin surmises that the minister would try to outwit the police by leaving the letter in plain sight.

  • Bahrain

    Wrong formula

    Apr 19th 2012, 16:40 by D.R.

    THIS week's issue of The Economist includes a story about the upcoming Formula One Grand Prix in Bahrain. Read it here.

About Game theory

On this blog, our correspondents analyse and report on sports minor and major, addressing the politics, economics, science and statistics of the games we play and watch.
Send story ideas to gametheory@economist.com

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