Best Strategy for Each Team in The Regular Season to Win Champion in The Knockout Tournament

TL;DR

This paper investigates strategic losing in knockout tournaments, showing that under certain conditions, teams can benefit from intentionally losing to improve their chances of winning, using probability and game theory analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a model for when teams should intentionally lose in a tournament to optimize their winning probability, considering different opponent strategies.

Findings

Teams can benefit from losing intentionally in certain scenarios.

Optimal losing strategies depend on other teams' behaviors.

Analysis includes probability calculations and game theory models.

Abstract

In J. Schwenk.(2018) ['What is the Correct Way to Seed a Knockout Tournament?' Retrieved from The American Mathematical Monthly], Schwenk identified a surprising weakness in the standard method of seeding a single elimination (or knockout) tournament. In particular, he showed that for a certain probability model for the outcomes of games it can be the case that the top seeded team would be less likely to win the tournament than the second seeded team. This raises the possibility that in certain situations it might be advantageous for a team to intentionally lose a game in an attempt to get a more optimal (though possibly lower) seed in the tournament. We examine this question in the context of a four team league which consists of a round robin "regular season" followed by a single elimination tournament with seedings determined by the results from the regular season [4]. Using the same probability model as Schwenk we show that there are situations where it is indeed optimal for a team to intentionally lose. Moreover, we show how a team can make the decision as to whether or not it should intentionally lose. We did two detailed analysis. One is for the situation where other teams always try to win every game. The other is for the situation where other teams are smart enough, namely they can also lose some games intentionally if necessary. The analysis involves computations in both probability and (multi-player) game theory.