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Understanding and predicting how individuals perform in high-pressure situations is of importance in designing and managing workplaces. We investigate performance under pressure in professional darts as a near-ideal setting with no direct interaction between players and a high number of observations per subject. Analyzing almost one year of tournament data covering 32,274 dart throws, we find no evidence in favor of either choking or excelling under pressure.

Summary 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 throwing performance. In our models, a latent state process serves as a proxy for a player's underlying form, and we use auto‐regressive processes to model how this process evolves over time. Our results regarding the persistence of the latent process indicate a weak hot hand effect, but the evidence is inconclusive.

Betting markets have grown considerably lately. Despite their impact on the economic importance of professional sports, they just received academic interest recently. This article determines factors affecting the amount of money bet as well as the number of matched bets placed on the largest European soccer league, namely, the English Premier League between 2009-2010 and 2015-2016. Data from the betting exchange Betfair suggest season progress, weekday, number of substitutes, both teams market values, as well as uncertainty of outcome to determine market transactions and, hence, the economic importance.

Recent years have seen several match-fixing scandals in soccer. In order to avoid match-fixing, existing literature and fraud detection systems primarily focus on analysing betting odds provided by bookmakers. In our work, we suggest to not only analyse odds but also total volume placed on bets, thereby making use of more of the information available. As a case study for our method, we consider the second division in Italian soccer, Serie B, since for this league it has effectively been proven that some matches were fixed, such that to some extent we can ground truth our approach. For the betting volume data, we use a flexible generalized additive model for location, scale and shape (GAMLSS), with log-normal response, to account for the various complex patterns present in the data. For the betting odds, we use a GAMLSS with bivariate Poisson response to model the number of goals scored by both teams, and to subsequently derive the corresponding odds. We then conduct outlier detection in order to flag suspicious matches. Our results indicate that monitoring both betting volumes and betting odds can lead to more reliable detection of suspicious matches.