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Football Pools, Part 3

By Matt, on January 31st, 2010%

This is the third in a series of posts about pools used for betting on the outcome of football games (part one can be found here, and part two here).  Let me briefly recall the setting, which is probably familiar to anyone who has been to a Super Bowl party.  Typically, one bets on the outcome of a football game using a 10 x 10 grid.  People can buy any number of the 100 squares on the grid, and when all the squares have been purchased, each row and each column is assigned a random digit from 0 to 9.

Suppose, for example, that you buy four squares, and after the rows and columns have been labeled, you find that you own square 3-7, square 2-5, square 9-0, and square 6-6.  You will win money if, at the end of any one of the four quarters, the last digit in each team’s . . . → Read More: Football Pools, Part 3

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More on Football Pools

By Matt, on October 10th, 2009%

Update: Part 3 of this series of posts can now be found here.

This post is a follow-up to an earlier post that looked at betting squares for football scores. In particular, we analyzed the distribution of the second digit of final football scores, and compared that to the digital root of final football scores (recall that the digital root of a number is found by iteratively calculating the sum of the digits in that number until you come up with a single digit number from 1 through 9). We found that on average, the final digits of football scores do not distribute themselves evenly – a score ending in 2 or 5 is much rarer than a score ending in 7 or 0, for example. However, the analysis of the digital root suggested that digital roots may become evenly distributed on average.
We now turn to a related question . . . → Read More: More on Football Pools

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A Variant of the Traditional Football Pool

By Matt, on February 19th, 2009%

Update: Part two of this three-part series on football betting pools can be found here.  Part three is here.

During this month’s Super Bowl, like many of my fellow Americans, I participated in the great tradition of the football pool. This method of betting on a football game is quite simple. For those of you who have never partaken in this activity, here’s how it works:

You begin with a 10 x 10 grid of empty squares, which you auction off at a certain price ($1 per square, say). When someone buys a square, they put their initials in that square.
Once all the squares have been purchased, each row and each column in the grid is randomly assigned a digit from 0 through 9. This means that each box will correspond to a unique pair of digits, from the 0-0 square through the 9-9 square. Since the assignment . . . → Read More: A Variant of the Traditional Football Pool

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