For the last 7 years I’ve been going to Vermont with my father to golf.  For the last 5 we’ve had a contest where we take the lowest score on each hole from our 7 rounds to complete our “master card”.  Below is a visualization of the contest last year.  I made up a…

Some notes about the knockout stage:  3 of the 4 quarterfinal matches featured goals in the first fifteen minutes of the game. 20 of 28 penalty kick in the tie-breakers have been goals. Belgium had 38 (!) shots agains the USA.  Tim Howard. So far teams have averaged 0.96 goals per game in the knock-out…

Here is the third to last paragraph of the article How the Portugal Draw Boosts the U.S.’s World Cup Advancement Odds from FiveThirtyEight (emphasis added): So, why I do I say that our 76 percent figure might slightly underestimate the Americans’ chances? One reason is technical rather than soccer-related: Our simulation was programmed to resolve ties beyond goals…

  First of all, what you’re about to read has almost nothing to do with statistics, but it really made my day.  Go ahead and check out these next two pictures from facebook.  Make sure to pay attention to the captions! Now look at that “jerk who thinks he’s writing the next Pulitzer”.  What a…

Cheers.  

  I previously posted about how many goals were being scored in this World Cup, and now I’ve updated it through todays games.  I’ve also expanded the grid to 5 x 5 per request. As an American, I can tell you that there are two big complaints that Americans have about soccer: 1) Not enough…

    I don’t follow soccer/futbol too closely, but I love the World Cup (USA! USA! USA!).  I’ve been watching quite a bit of it, and there are two things that are standing out to me. It seems like there are a ton of goals being scored It seems like there are fewer draws than usual…

Originally posted on scatterplot: Hurricane Name Study, how I wish I could quit you. But an inquiry prompted me to look some more. Again, you can download the data yourself and replicate their key model, Model 4 above, using the half-tweet’s worth of code I included earlier. The table isn’t in the paper, only their…

Cheers.

Originally posted on Exploring Baseball Data with R: Creating HexBin Plots Kirk Goldsberry has attracted a lot of attention with his “geographic” shot charts for NBA players. These are examples of “hexbin” plots. Luckily, the hexbin package for R provides the ability to quickly similar plots. Here, we’ll show how to create a few quick…