Thank you Kevin

Since listening to Freakonomic's podcast "World Cup Edition" I can summarize the points made so you don't have listen for 8:44 minutes. The second part was just game theory to PKs which we've already covered. The one addition they make to that conversation, is that kickers should kick to the center, cause one of the payoffs for the two players is not to look foolish which is not typically taken into consideration. A recap on the last game theory post:

So there's a lesson here, and it's pretty much (just to make the lesson resonate again): imagine there you are in the World Cup, you're playing for England, you have to justify your actions not only to your teammates and your manager, and your boss, but to about 60 million rather angry fans. What's the lesson here? I'm hoping it was going to be obvious, what's the lesson here? The lesson is, do not shoot to the middle. Let me qualify that lesson slightly, unless you're German. Germans can do whatever they like.

Noticeably, players also don't follow Levitt's advice, accountably for his explanation of the private payoff. Except maybe the Germans. Of note, when Levitt's in the World Cup next, goalies go for the left, as he won't be following his advice either.

The first point though: home field advantage. One aspect of this is there are two types of soccer stadiums, those exclusively designed for soccer and those which are multipurpose, e.g. track and field. The former has a much larger advantage, ostensibly for a referee intimidation factor. This is measured among others in divergences in stoppage time allotted. So basically, the close presence of the fans bullies the refs into favorably calling for the home team.

Did Not See This Coming

"Apocalypse Watch: Sepp Blatter Apologizes"

Playing for What?

Gonna try a Leithartish type post. We'll see.

James K.A. Smith, in his post "Playing for What?", bemoans the impoverished state of sports which true spirit is self-determining and true practice is its own enjoyment. Today though these are steadily being encroached upon by the "athletic-entertainment complex which has instrumentalized sport for all sorts of misbegotten ends". Emblematic of this shift for Smith are the Nike World Cup Soccer commercials, which fetishize by enrapturing the viewer in the meaning of external trappings to participants who succeed.

For a sport self-proclaiming its pride in showcasing a specific skill set, it seems at its highest level of competition to be continuously haunted by accusations lending credence to this interpretation, all the while shamefully trying to enshroud itself in pretensions of honest play. Yet as the tournament progress fans will continually be disgusted by simulations on the field and a governing body reveling in scandals and controversies, mediated only by their desire for ever escalating sponsorships.

Yea, there's no Leithart like the real thing. Sorry.

!@#$%^& %^&*!

Not gonna talk about the US game. Planning on giving a detailed overview of why the US is a second-class team later. However, I will say this, despite my dreams of being in RSA right being dashed as I'm stateside, it's nice to know most of my friends haven't changed. I've been on facebook a little bit since June 11. Okay, more in the last few weeks than since Carla and Faith talked me into opening an account in like '07(?), but that's not the point. The point is things haven't changed and I'm relieved that approximately half my friends still root for US's downfall, especially for what can be considered a moral victory for Africa. Lots of games still to go, hopefully Germany will send England packing. None of the walls have holes in them. The sun will rise tomorrow. It's a good thing I'm not overly dramatic. An amusing tidbit from a friend of mine:

Any sport where grown men sit around drinking beer to watch younger men plow into each other, catch balls, and constantly hug, slap and make physical contact with each other is just as "gay" really. American football seems to be the worst however. Fat geezers cheering for college boys with almost militant hate for anyone who tries to oppose them as if to help protect their beloved players from being owned, raped, or destroyed by the opponents. Ah...sports.

And congratulations Ghana, you deserved that win!

Nothing Substantial to Add

This is weird, as I actually have never had these conversations with soccer views, as they either have known more than me or an equal amount over the years. We've always had better things to discuss, like how much America sucks and how Americans suck and well you get the idea. Also learned some of the "American" traits like score tracking and highlights, which if you didn't get the gist from the previous post is bad. Ah, the beauty of the college years (which probably lasted a few World Cups too many and left me none the wiser!).

We've arrive at the Knockout Stage of the tourney, a source of contention for soccer fans. If at the end of extra-time (or after extra-time) there is still a tie, they then go for a tiebreaker by each side kicking 5 penalty kicks one-on-one w/ the goalie. At the national level, a win by penalty shots is considered less than a victory and a loss on penalty kicks is considered equal to a tie. How much has changed recently, to a victory by penalties counting for 2 points and a loss by penalty kicks counting, you guessed it if you've had your morning coffee, 1. Basically, TV & Newspaper folks bitched at FIFA after the last World Cup to the point where they dumbed it down. I like this new system, because A) for the first time, I don't have to reference a chart to remember it and make a bunch of fancy calculations and B) it's no less inaccurate than previous systems. So focusing, the teams draw (w/ exceptions which really aren't pertinent to any World Cup cherries), just the tiebreaker instead of being in the game arbitrary broken by factors relating to a team's soccer abilities (e.g. goals scored while playing soccer, goal-differentials), is arbitrarily decided by a sensationalized really cool televised climax.

Why I like it: it gives the under-dog a chance. Since in general, I root for a nation based on the nations wealth-standing, from bottom-up, and since generally, wealthier nations have better teams (not this tourney! ha!), it's no surprise that I'd like this aspect. Beyond though it gives better odds to the the teams I like to advance?

Why I dislike it: it's not a soccer competition as much as a craphoot. When that Libran sense of fairness kicks in, they just don't balance out, or perhaps I'm just a Debby-downer. Nothing really gets the blood pumping these days (just go ahead and ignore my explicatively titled past
post please).

So basically, PKs are unfair way of deciding unless they serve a greater fairness.

Recently though, there was a major shift, resulting in the infamous Doherty-Mal bet that somehow ended with me naked in front of about 14 people futilely arguing my point. I befriended a kraut, and started rooting for the Germans. Now obviously, they are not at the bottom of the national socioeconomic totem pole, and I did feel really guilty and strung-up inside when they beat Portugal in the Euro 08. Still, we all realize I think that I have no conscience. Oh yea, the shift, so I'm in class class ethics switching to emphasizing the unfairness again.

Traditionally, many of the players I'd like to see shooting can be banned from the game. (Note: Any dipshit that wants to pull a Zidane, deserves to help their team loss.). With the new yellow cards have having to go 5 games in a row w/out collecting two means we're probably going to be seeing more of this come into play during the finals. It also means though that THE final and semi-final it's going to be less.

Alright, I lied, I am going to contribute something to this ENDLESS debate: a game theory analysis of ties and eliminations in soccer. Don't worry, this is not technical: zero-sum games and non-zero-sum games.

A zero-sum game is an easy concept. I win, you lose. In fact, one even says it like that in explanation unless they're uber-sensitive-conscious, in which cause it's "Say you win and I lose, then..." The notion is there is a limited amount of the pot and we're all in cut-throat competition for it. There is no point where are interest match. So, if I take a point, you have to lose a point, so that it equals zero.

Most games rely heavily upon this. Poker is my fav.

A non-zero-sum game is the "win-win" scenario, where we both have something to gain, and we can even cooperate so that while one player wins more, the other player can win less but still not lose. This affects strategy in unexpected ways.

Now, most sports are a combination of the two, soccer is most definitely more of the latter than most Americans are familiar with. Still, most Americans are familiar with watching a game their team is not directly involved in, but hoping that a team with so many losses wins or losses say so that it'll affect the bracket that their team is playing in. With soccer, this is exasperated. For example, they mentioned in the Algeria game in 1982 W Germany v. Austria qualifier they colluded to exclude Algeria from the World Cup by fixing the match. I think the commentator called it the "odious Germany v Austria game". This being the second big game for this to happen, FIFA came along and ruled that group finals have to be played simultaneously.

So, all fine and dandy, what about shootouts? Obviously, in a single elimination, a draw is unacceptable, you have to have a tie-breaker. Ah, never mind. I just realized where I was going with this went back to the traditional argument of shootouts aren't soccer, making the analysis superfluous. Just go for sudden-death and long-term repercussions be damned!

Got Plans Tonight?

Why not make it a special night for that special someone and watch a special movie. If you're looking for suggestions, why not go for something seasonal, say The Game of Their Lives (also released as The Miracle Match)? Replete with historical inaccuracies, which let's face it, nobody cares about, and adapted to film by the same folks that brought you classics like Rudy and Hoosiers. This box office success has tons of surprises. Jean-Luc Picard narrates (playing a 107 year-old dead man). The head couch is Gimli, and Joe Gaetjens is portrayed by the Haitian. @ PG, it's something alright for the whole family, or that special somepersons!

Don't bomb out with the usual delivery pizza, remember after-all the word is special. Nothing less than buffalo wings or or take-out Chinese will do. Fry up some fish and chips. And why not wash this down with a nice cold Schlafly or O'Fallon?

So throw common sense out the window and enjoy!

P.S. I actually really enjoyed the film. Heard about it from an announcer during the England-US game. It's not a good film, but one can still have a good time watching it.

Game Theory and Soccer

I like game theory. Unfortunately, it doesn't have much real-world practicality to it. However, there is one important exception: soccer. This is especially true of penalty kicks.

Since it is World Cup time, I'm gonna bring out a portion of the lecture "Best responses in soccer and business partnerships" in Yale Professor Ben Polak's Game Theory course. For those not interested in a lecture, A short interview of some noone from last year's tourney is "The Game Theory of Penalty Kicks".

Those who not wanting read the entire lecture, the cliff note version is here:

So there's a lesson here, and it's pretty much (just to make the lesson resonate again): imagine there you are in the World Cup, you're playing for England, you have to justify your actions not only to your teammates and your manager, and your boss, but to about 60 million rather angry fans. What's the lesson here? I'm hoping it was going to be obvious, what's the lesson here? The lesson is, do not shoot to the middle. Let me qualify that lesson slightly, unless you're German. Germans can do whatever they like.

For those who don't wanna watch the vid, here is a printout of what the lecturer true on the whiteboard.

So this is a game that occurs in soccer and just to give an idea of how important it is for those people who are unfortunate enough not to be soccer fans here, the last World Cup was decided on penalty kicks. In England's case, England goes out of every single World Cup and every single European competition because it loses on penalty kicks, usually to Germany, it has to be said...

So what we're going to do is we're going to look at some numbers that are approximately the probabilities of scoring when you kick the penalty kick in different directions. But just make sure everyone ─ do I need to explain what's going on here? Is everyone familiar with this situation? There's one guy who's going to run up and kick the ball. The goal keeper is standing at the goal. And their aim is to kick it into the goal. That's probably enough. You've all seen this right? If you haven't seen this, go see it. I mean come on! So things you should do in life: read Shakespeare and see a soccer game.

So the rough numbers for this are as follows ─ and actually later on in the class I'll give you some more accurate numbers, but these will do for now. There are three ways, the goal─ the attacker could kick the ball. He could kick the ball to the left, the middle, or the right. And I shouldn't just say he here of course, I mean this is he or she but if I get that wrong going on, please forgive me for it. The goalie can dive to the left or the right. In principle the goalie could stay in the middle. We'll come back and talk about that later. So this is the guy who is shooting, he's called the shooter and this is the goalie.

These are roughly ─ well, let me put up the payoffs for this game and then I'll explain them. So you'll notice that I'm just going to put in numbers here and then the negative of the number and the numbers are roughly like this: (4,-4). So the numbers are (4, -4), (9, -9), (6, -6), (6, -6), (9, -9) and (4, -4). And the idea here is that the number 4 represents 40% chance of scoring if you shoot the ball to the left of the goal and the goal keeper dives to the left. So the payoff here is something like u1(left) if the goal keeper dives to the left is equal to 4, by which I mean there's a 40% chance of scoring.

So the number for the--The payoff for the shooter is his probability of scoring and the payoff for the goal keeper is just the negative of that. Let's keep things simple. As I said before, for now we'll ignore the possibility that the goal keeper could stay put. So how should we start analyzing this important game? Well we start with the ideas we learned already several weeks ago now, or more than a week ago, which is the idea of dominant strategies. Does either player here have a dominated strategy? Does either player have a dominated strategy? No, it's kind of clear that they don't.

Let's just look at the shooter, for example. So you might think that maybe middle dominates left, but notice that middle has a higher payoff against left than shooting to the left. It has as lower payoff if the goalie dives to the right. So, not surprisingly in this game, it turns out, that if the goalie dived to the left you're best off shooting to the right, second best off shooting to the middle, and worst off shooting to the left. That's if the goalie dives to the left. And if the goalie dives to the right, you're best off shooting to the left, second best off shooting to the middle, and worst off by shooting to the right; and that's kind of common sense.

Okay, so if we had stopped the class after the first week where all we learned to do was to delete dominated strategies, we'd be stuck. We'd have nothing to say about this game and as I said before, this is the most important game, so that would be bad news for Game Theory. But luckily, we can do a little bit better than that. Before I do that, let's just take a poll of the class. How many of you, if you were playing for, I guess it's going to be America, which is a sad thing to start with, never mind. You guys are playing for America and you're taking this penalty kick and it's the last kick in the World Cup, how many of you, show of hands, how many of you would shoot to the left? How many of you would shoot to the middle? How many of you would shoot to the right?

We've got kind of an even split there, pretty much an even split. We're going to assume these are the correct numbers and we're going to see if that even split is really a good idea or not. So how should we go about thinking about this? What I suggest we do is we do what we did last time and we start to draw a picture to figure out what my expected payoff is, depending on what I believe the goalie is going to do. So this is the same kind of picture we drew last time.

So on the horizontal axis is my belief, and my belief is essentially the probability that the goalie dives to the right. Now as I did last time, let me put in two axes to make the picture a little easier to draw. So this is 0 and this is 1. And you probably have lines in your notes but I don't, so let me just help myself a bit. So this is 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, so this is going to be 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10 and over here 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10, 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10. This would be the basis of my picture.

So it starts with a possibility of shooting to the left. Let's do this in red. So I shoot to the left and the goalie dives to the left, my payoff is what? It's 4. If I shoot to the left and there's no probability of the goalie diving to the right, which means that they dive to the left, then my payoff is 4, meaning I score 40% of the time. If I shoot to the left and the goalie dived to the right, then I score 90% of the time, so my payoff is .9. By the way why is it 90% of the time and not 100% of the time? I could miss; okay, I could miss. That happens rather often it turns out, well 10% of the time.

So we know this is going to be a straight line in between, so let's put this line in. So what's this? It's the expected payoff to Player I of shooting to the left as it depends on the probability that the goal keeper dives to the right. And conversely, we can put in … well let's do them in order.

So middle: so if I shoot to the middle and the goal keeper dives to the left, then my payoff is .6, is 6, or I score .6 of the time, and if I shoot to the middle and the goalie dives to the right I still score 60% of the time, so once again it's a straight line in between. So this line represents the expected payoff of shooting to the middle as a function of the probability that the goal keeper dives to the right.

Finally ─ let's do it in green ─ let's look at the payoffs, expected payoffs, if I shoot to the right. So if I shoot to the right and the goalie dives to the left, then I score with probability .9, or my payoff is 9. Conversely, if I shoot to the right and he or she dives to the right, then I score 40% of the time, so here's my payoff .4. And here's my green line representing my expected payoff as the shooter, from shooting to the right, as a function of the probability that the goalie dives to the right.

Did everyone understand how I constructed this picture? Easier picture than the one we constructed last time. So what does everyone notice from this picture? What's the first thing that jumps out at you from this picture? Assuming these numbers are true, what jumps out at you from this picture? Can we get some mikes up here? So Ale, can we get this guy? Stand up first, the guy in red. What's your name? Don't hold the mike; just shout.

Student: There's no point at which the 6, at which it shooting in the middle gets a higher payoff.

Professor Ben Polak: Exactly, exactly. So the thing that I hope jumps out at you from this picture is (no great guesses about figuring out this is a ½), so if the probability that the goalie's going to jump to the right is less than a ½, then the best you can do is represented by this green line, which is shoot to the right. So the goalie is going to shoot to the right with the probability less than a ½, sorry he's going to dive to the right with the probability less than a ½, you should shoot to the right.

Conversely, if you think the goalie's going to shoot to the right with probability more than a ½, then the best you can do is represented by the pink line, and that's shooting to the left, or if you think the goalie's going to dive to the right with the probability more than a ½, the best you can do, your best response is to shoot to the left. And there is no belief you could possibly hold given these numbers in this game that could ever rationalize shooting the ball to the middle. Is that right? So no: to say it another way, middle is not a best response to any belief I can hold about the goal keeper, to any belief.

So there's a lesson here, and it's pretty much (just to make the lesson resonate again): imagine there you are in the World Cup, you're playing for England, you have to justify your actions not only to your teammates and your manager, and your boss, but to about 60 million rather angry fans. What's the lesson here? I'm hoping it was going to be obvious, what's the lesson here? The lesson is, do not shoot to the middle. Let me qualify that lesson slightly, unless you're German. Germans can do whatever they like.

Holy Shit

Wow, just finished watching the US/Algeria game. Wow, talk about heart-pounding goal by Donovan in the first minute of stoppage time!

Thoughts: until that third picture 20 minutes later, I didn't think that the disallowed goal was a mistake. The commentators were getting the hell on my nerves, especially when they were nay-saying quick counter-attack responses (when America was kicking ass during the game) for "composured" US dominating assaults. The hand ball on Beasley, wtf!

Getting first in our group is relieved. For one, we wouldn't have to face Argentina (assuming Mexico loses) in the quarter-finals. Would still rather face Ghana than Germany as well, but Uruguay (SK will be stiff competition for them though)is going to be no cup of tea. With the new yellow card rule, Beasley, Altidore, DeMerit, and Cherundolo still have one, which we don't wanna lose Beasley for Uruguay. Was also impressed with Altidore this game.

A Theory in Process

More than myself have noticed probably all the "Go England!" chants coming from our northern neighbors. Now, I'm as guilty as the next for rooting for teams based on my political temperament, on the other hand most Americans don't seem to be. So...

I think all this is merely the "coy friend wanna-be more strategy to attract the attention of their desire". Moreover, this crap is getting old. Seriously, Canada ought just reopen negotiations to join the EU. Is it really out of the realm of possibility?

Came across this article while looking for something for this post: "I've found a perfect new member for the EU. If only it were in Europe".

Away from politics-disguised-as-sports talk and back to sport-sport talk, where's Canada's team again? That's right, they didn't qualify.

World Cup

Although you should be checking there before here:

"The Onion Sports Introduction To World Cup Soccer"

Thanks Carl.