Zoltar is my NFL football prediction computer program. It uses a neural network and a type of reinforcement learning. The Super Bowl is coming up this weekend. The Kansas City Chiefs are playing the Philadelphia Eagles. For many years, a tradition for me is to go over to the huge house of my good friend Ken L to watch the game with about 20-40 other friends and family.

I always run the Super Bowl party contest where people guess the score at the end of each quarter, and at the end of the game. I create a 10-by-10 grid with rows numbered 0 to 9, and columns numbered 0 to 9. The rows represent the last digit of the score of one team (let’s say the Eagles), and the columns represent the last digit of the score of the other team (say, the Chiefs).

If there are 30 people at the party, every person gets to pick 3 cells (leaving 10 unused cells) and write their name in the two cells. Now, suppose the score at the end of the third quarter is Eagles 23 – Chiefs 17. The person who owns cell (3,7) wins the third quarter prize. There are prizes for the score end of first quarter ($20), at half time ($40), end of third quarter ($40), and end of game ($100).

If nobody owns the cell that corresponds to a score, there are several ways to determine a winner. I use a spiral approach where I move one cell left, then up, then right, then down, continuing until an occupied cell is found.

Now, at Ken’s Super Bowl party, there are usually only two math experts — Ken and me. Everybody else, except us two, just picks random cells in the game matrix. But Ken and I are well aware that some scores are much more common than others.

I did some analysis to look at most common scores. There were 272 games played during the 2024 regular season: there are 32 teams and each team played 17 games, so (32 * 17) / 2 = 272.

The most common winning team scores are:

score  # times
30       23
34       22
20       20
23       17
26       17
24       16
27       16

The most common losing team scores are:

score  # times
10       25
17       24
20       23
13       19

So, by far the best cells to pick in the game matrix are 0, 3, 4, 7. But on the other hand, another good strategy is to pick cells not near anyone else.

The Las Vegas point spread predicts that the Chiefs are a slight favorite (1.5 points) to beat the Eagles. Zoltar predicts the Eagles will beat the Chiefs by 1 point. For the 2024 regular season, the Las Vegas point spread was correct 184 times and wrong 86 times, for 68% accuracy. This is by far Vegas’ best prediction year ever, reflecting the huge increase in sports betting.

In some years, we have a second Super Bowl party game where you have to predict the final score, for example, Eagles 21 – Chiefs 13. The 2024 season result data shows the median score was 28-17. It’s a super interesting problem to determine how to pick the best prediction. What if someone predicts very close scores, but an incorrect winner? What happens if one person is only off by 1 point for each of the two scores, but another person is off by 2 points on one score but gets the other score exactly right?

Sports betting is exploding in popularity. One estimate is that nearly 70 million people will bet over $30 billion just on Super Bowl LIX alone. The actual amount wagered is probably much, much higher if non-legal betting is counted.

Right: This is a photo of a Caesars sports desk in the Paris Hotel. Caesars is also a major player in sports betting.