Research on sports betting often identifies biased evaluation by bookmakers and corresponding opportunities for profitable strategies to bettors. Such studies repeatedly provide evidence for the existence of biased betting odds for different periods and leagues, leaving the impression that...

We investigate the hot hand hypothesis in professional darts in a nearly ideal setting with minimal to no interaction between players. Considering almost 1 year of tournament data, corresponding to 167492 dart throws in total, we use state space models to investigate serial dependence in...

We investigate the potential occurrence of change points—commonly referred to as “momentum shifts”—in the dynamics of football matches. For that purpose, we model minute-by-minute in-game statistics of Bundesliga matches using hidden Markov models (HMMs). To allow for within-state...

We investigate the hot hand phenomenon using data on 110,513 free throws taken in the National Basketball Association. As free throws occur at unevenly spaced time points within a game, we consider a state-space model formulated in continuous time to investigate serial dependence in players’...