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AnonTechie writes:

You're glued to the TV as your favourite team is winning with 10 minutes left in the game, but you have pressing work to attend to. Should you switch it off, confident they have an unassailable lead, or stay tuned and agonise over each remaining second?

After analysing more than a million encounters in basketball, hockey and American football – sports where contests have a fixed duration – Aaron Clauset of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his colleagues have developed a way to help you decide.

Their data set revealed that much of the dynamics of these competitive team sports can be accurately captured by a simple model in which the score difference randomly moves up or down over time. The researchers used their model to work out the probability that a lead would be "safe" at any given time.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27836-winning-formula-reveals-if-your-team-is-too-far-ahead-to-lose.html

[Abstract]: http://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.91.062815