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Are seven-game baseball playoffs fairer than five-game series when home-field advantage is considered?

Brian Dean
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Abstract

Conventional wisdom in baseball circles holds that a seven-game playoff series is fairer than a five-game series. In an earlier paper, E. Lee May, Jr. showed that, treating each game as an independent event, a seven-game series is not significantly fairer. In this paper, we take a different approach, taking home-field advantage into account. That is, we consider a given series to consist of two disjoint sets of independent events--the home games and the road games. We will take the probability of winning a given road game to be different from the probability of winning a given home game. Our analysis again shows that a seven-game series is not significantly fairer.

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Brian Dean. 2007-01-23. Are seven-game baseball playoffs fairer than five-game series when home-field advantage is considered?. https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0701651

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