On the distribution of winners' scores in a round-robin tournament

Abstract

In a classical chess round-robin tournament, each of $n$ players wins, draws, or loses a game against each of the other $n-1$ players. A win rewards a player with 1 points, a draw with 1/2 point, and a loss with 0 points. We are interested in the distribution of the scores associated with ranks of $n$ players after $\left(\genfrac{}{}{0ex}{}{n}{2}\right)$ games, i.e. the distribution of the maximal score, second maximum, and so on. The exact distribution for a general $n$ seems impossible to obtain; we obtain a limit distribution.

arXiv commentMain Result is proved for all values of p in the interval [0,1)