Heart Rates in Lawn Bowling, Hot Hands in Pro Tennis, etc.
I've been reading some fascinating proceedings from the 8th Australasian Conference on Mathematics and Computers in Sport. (Don't ask why.) I have learned some fascinating stuff, including:
- The average heart rate for lawn bowlers is 57; the peak heart rate is 78 (1)
- There is a hot hand phenomenon in pro tennis, with top players tending to do better in adversity than an assumption of probability independence would suggest (2)
- You can eliminate tennis's first-service effect -- the psychological advantage obtained by the first server in any set -- by allowing the other service to serve two games in a row at some point (3)
- There are exploitable inefficiencies in the betting market for international one-day cricket matches (4)
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