
Football penalty shoot-outs are unfair (2010) - bookofjoe
http://www.lse.ac.uk/website-archive/newsAndMedia/newsArchives/2010/12/Penalties.aspx
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mpweiher
They're not primarily designed to be fair. They're designed to get a necessary
result with a little more player input than a coin toss.

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contravariant
It's a shame they didn't take their solution all the way and recommended the
Thue-Morse sequence.[1]

[1]:[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thue%E2%80%93Morse_sequence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thue%E2%80%93Morse_sequence)

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karmakaze
The article makes a good point, but I can't even get to thinking it matters
when the metagame of players diving vs refs/VAR decides far more matches.

This seems like a perfect application of ML. Upgrade the VAR to decide all
potential fouls without real-time human intervention. Humans can only take
part in offline training supervision. We'll just have to deal with the fallout
of machines being able to accurately assess humans trying to lie to them.

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PhantomGremlin
American football has a similar problem. If the score is tied in regulation,
then there is a coin toss. If the team that gets the ball first scores a
touchdown, then game over immediately. The other team doesn't even get to try
to score.

Don't like that? Well, then play better in regulation.

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perl4ever
The rules in the NFL were changed a while back to prevent winning during the
first overtime possession by a field goal, in the name of "fairness".

That goal always struck me as self-contradictory. The fact that you've gotten
to overtime, and that you have overtime, inherently means the teams are nearly
equal, but we don't want a tie. The whole point of overtime is to prevent an
equal score, so inherently it requires amplifying tiny differences and getting
an arbitrary result. Trying to give the teams each an equal chance just
demonstrates that people don't know what they want.

It appears that in 2017, overtime periods were shortened from 15 minutes to 10
minutes, out of concern for the fatigue of extra playing time. If I was in
charge, I'd just say no overtime in the regular season and go back to having
ties like in the old days. That seems "fair" to me.

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pdpi
Like you said — it should be about amplifying the skill difference (e.g.
Tennis is phenomenally good at this.) rather than arbitrarily giving one
ransom team a bigger chance at winning.

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perl4ever
Amplifying anything amplifies the noise, and being tied at the end of
regulation is prima facie evidence that the difference is just noise. Even
after the fact you can argue about whether one team was better, or just lucky,
and people do.

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elygre
With 60-40 advantage, the article says "The coin gives a 20 per cent advantage
to the team that shoots first"

Not particularly strong on statistics, but is this not a 50% advantage?

