Or, “How to get your five-year old recruited into Stanford or Harvard for sports in 2027”…Or, “It helps to be tall”
Category: Games & Sports
Use a spreadsheet to check Matthew Berry’s Top 200 Fantasy Football Rankings results from Week 1
“It’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future” – Various
Usually, improvement in prediction-making comes in two steps. Step 1: Make a Prediction. Step 2: Evaluate how accurate the prediction was, and learn from it. Often times, Step 2 can get overlooked as we move on to future predictions and future weeks of fantasy football. Spreadsheets can help us quickly evaluate how our predictions were, and quickly point out where we might have erred.
Fantasy Football Player Combos – an exercise in spreadsheet treasure hunting
In many parts of life, having a combination of two things can lead to better outcomes. Having stocks and bonds means sometimes the stocks do well while at other times the bonds do well, resulting in better overall portfolio performance. Also, the driver of this truck pictured below probably has at least one of his teams doing well.
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What are the chances a Little League baseball player gets to the Major Leagues someday?
It’s that time of the year when Little League World Series coverage heats up on ESPN, and viewers get to see a miniaturized version of baseball played at the highest level. This year has been especially impressive with a super-team from Las Vegas that rarely makes errors, the Chicago team that beat them, and of course the sensational female pitcher Mo’ne Davis, who throws as hard as some high school pitchers. Every Little Leaguer dreams of making it to the big leagues, someday making a career of playing the game they love. But how hard is it to get there? This is a question that we will try to solve this week with the help of a spreadsheet.
A Simple Fantasy Football Draft Spreadsheet
Fantasy Football Season is here! It’s that time of the year where we sit down on the couch every Sunday to cheer for our group of superstar mercenaries as they help our team embarrass (avoid embarrassment?) those of our friends. Fantasy Football drafts are coming up and this post will hopefully help you with your draft, and of course continue to help you learn how to use spreadsheets. Continue reading “A Simple Fantasy Football Draft Spreadsheet”
The Basketball Bank Shot – visualize it with spreadsheets!
Spreadsheets are at their best when they are helping us solve useful problems. And what could be more useful than getting better at basketball? Perhaps this spreadsheet could help you dominate avoid getting kicked out of your local pickup game..
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Bayes’ Rule, Oscars, & Golden Globes
Have you heard of Bayes’ Rule? Let’s use an intuitive example to understand an application of this rule. What’s the probability American Hustle wins the Golden Globes given it wins the Oscars? Continue reading “Bayes’ Rule, Oscars, & Golden Globes”
Conditional Probabilities & the Academy Awards
What’s the probability American Hustle wins the 2014 Oscars? Let’s talk Academy Awards, spreadsheets, and conditional probabilities! Continue reading “Conditional Probabilities & the Academy Awards”
Top 3 Spreadsheets You Need (but Never Knew!)
Look no further! Whether you are a traveler, student, teacher, parent, or coach, here are our top 3 spreadsheets that can benefit you. Select any choice below to access both our spreadsheet and video tutorial.
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Play Time! Build a Lottery with Spreadsheets
Play time! How do I create my own lottery or random prize drawing? Of course, you can always list entries on sheets of folded paper, drop them into a hat, and then have a friend reach in to select one. But to build one that can be used anywhere at any time and designed any way you’d like – check out our spreadsheet template “Lottery / Random Prize Drawing.”
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Predicting a Tennis Pro’s Weight based on Height
With a Grand Slam approaching, let’s talk tennis! If we were to predict a tennis pro’s weight based on his height, where would we begin? How will our understanding of the best-fit line and spreadsheets help us make this prediction?
We’ve collected the heights and weights of tennis pros including Federer, Djokovic, Nadal, Murray, Azarenka, Sharapova, and Williams, along with another 192 top players. Let’s investigate how to 1) calculate the correlation of weights and heights, and 2) draw a best fit-line and scatter plot in Google spreadsheets to extrapolate or make predictions!
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Splitting Group Costs with Spreadsheets
After a beach outing, ski trip, or joint roommate purchase, we just might need to split shared expenses among a group. A spreadsheet can serve as an efficient and practical tool to do just that! See this framework live in action in our 6-minute video below.