http://sixman.guru/tags/janowicz/Recent content in Janowicz on sixman.guruHugo -- 0.155.3en-usFri, 30 May 2014 00:36:47 +0000http://sixman.guru/posts/predicting-federer-friday-french-open-matches/Fri, 30 May 2014 00:36:47 +0000http://sixman.guru/posts/predicting-federer-friday-french-open-matches/<!-- AdSense Now! V3.40 --> <!-- Post[count: 1] --> <div class="adsense adsense-leadin" style="float:right;margin: 12px;"> <!-- Guru2013 --> </div><p>Today I was enamored with the FiveThirtyEight.com article, <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/inside-the-shadowy-world-of-high-speed-tennis-betting/" title="538.com">Inside the Shadowy World of High-Speed Tennis Betting</a>. The article mentions the courtsiders who would sit court side at a tennis match and try to relay information quicker than the tournament computers to betting partners. Great read. Not sure these courtsiders were really doing anything illegal.</p> <p>Buried deep in the article was a mention of the system this one organization created to predict the outcome of tennis matches for betting purposes. It links to a website, Summer of Jeff, and a post, <a href="http://summerofjeff.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/python-code-for-tennis-markov/" title="Summer of Jeff">Python Code for Tennis Markov</a>. If you follow the links to the gitHub site, there is some pretty elaborate Python code for generating probabilities based on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain" title="Markov">Markov Chain theory</a>. The code is pretty easy to use, if you understand Python and statistics, although it needs some cleaning up if you plan on using it for entire match prediction (hint: the matchProbs function needs some fixes to run).</p>