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.
[Abstract]: http://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.91.062815
Original Submission
(Score: 4, Informative) by simpgeek on Saturday July 04 2015, @04:20PM
This is actually becoming well trodden ground in the sports analytics arena. There are many site where you can see live estimates of win probability for various sports.
Brian Burke of advancedfootballanalytics [advancedfootballanalytics.com] has done a lot of work regarding advanced football stats and analysis. His site offered a live graph during games, but unfortunately he has been acquired by ESPN and the box score links seem to have broken subsequently. http://www.pro-football-reference.com/ [pro-football-reference.com] has win probability graphs as well and the methodology is explained here [pro-football-reference.com], the Seahawks were involved in a couple high profile games you may have heard something about with pretty wild graphs: Superb Owl vs New England [pro-football-reference.com] and NFC Champ Game vs Green Bay [pro-football-reference.com] (Seattle was estimated to have well less than 1% WP with 5 minutes to go in this one).
Inpredictable [inpredictable.com] is a great site for sports fans inclined towards analytics. It has a variety of tools for various sports. For NBA you can see win probability graphs of past games [inpredictable.com] and live games [inpredictable.com] during the season. There is also a tool to calculate WP based on a game state [inpredictable.com].
Baseball is probably the most well know for advancing sports statistics. Fangraphs [fangraphs.com] is an excellent resource which includes in-game WP on their scoreboard [fangraphs.com].
I am not personally a hockey fan but I have to imagine there exist resources similar to the ones I've listed. One way to extrapolate an estimated WP would be to check sports books that offer in-game betting. These sites tend to have done their homework and if they are still in business it stands to reason that they are offering somewhat accurate lines. Keep in mind that they are shading the odds in their favor on both sides though (this is what gamblers call "vig").
(Score: 4, Funny) by dyingtolive on Saturday July 04 2015, @06:03PM
With any luck we can improve the accuracy of this until there's no longer a reason for anyone to watch at all.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 1) by cellocgw on Saturday July 04 2015, @06:43PM
Just sayin'
Physicist, cellist, former OTTer (1190) resume: https://app.box.com/witthoftresume
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday July 04 2015, @07:34PM
That's what SHE said!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---