NJIT Vector

Issue date: 4/29/08 Section: Sports

Math professor Bruce Bukiet's mathematical system for predicting Major League Baseball games has proved itself reliable over seven seasons, and he's gaining attention because of it.

Bukiet has received a lot of press, including radio talk show interviews and newspaper articles for his predictions in baseball, and with good reason. In the seven years he's run the code, his system has won in five years, lost in one, and come out even in the other.

Bukiet analyzes the games not because he enjoys it, but because the results "come out well." He adds that in his system, there are not many games worth betting on, but the ones that are, he highlights and suggests who should win on his website, eGrandSlam.com.

The site, designed by Bukiet's son, allows users to register for free and see his predictions, as well as get some tips on casino games, all which are based on math. The site is meant for educational purposes only, but it shows how successful he is each season.

He spends about half an hour each day updating results of previous games and inputting the day's games into his system. Every month or two, he updates the line-ups, which takes about two days.
Bukiet may be glad that April is coming to a close, as it is usually the worst month for his predictions. He is down this year, and has been in five of the seven years he has done the predictions.

It is a complex system, and all started prior to his current job in 1989, when he worked at Los Alamos. In the library there he came across a book about the mathematical prediction of tennis. He fully understood the simple method used for tennis and wanted to apply a similar system to his favorite sport, baseball.

Bukiet started by having a line-up of equal batters and finding the runs scored per game, but the computers took far too long after a few batters to compound the results. So he decided to research the subject and found that there was already a method found of how to get the equal batter system done.

By about 1993, Bukiet was able to write a code using dot products to find the amount of runs per line-up. The code used the fact that there can be only 25 situations in a game. Zero, one, or two outs, with eight different combinations of runners on base, giving 24 situations and the 25th being three outs and the inning being over. He just had to make sure that he kept track of the change in situations and how many runs scored.

Bukiet explained that with nine batters, there are 362,880 possible ways to put them in order. He jokes about a time he heard a coach say that he would go with the best line-up after trying them all, which would actually take thousands of seasons to do.

Continued...

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