Data & Sports, Gaming and ESports
In a commercial sense, data has become extremely valuable. So much so, that companies can even base their entire business model around collecting and analysing user data, making the knowledge of our clicks and preferences the product.
This information is then used to display more relevant ads, as well as to improve user experience.
As well as changing the commercial landscape, data has also revolutionised the worlds of sports, gaming, and even poker. Here we take a look at the impact on each.
World Cup 2022
The most recent and prolific use of data driven technology in sports was at Qatar 2022, the first men’s World Cup to make extensive use of semi-automated technology.
Dedicated cameras were used to track the movement of both the ball and the players, with 29 data points delivered for each person on the pitch, presented live to a data control panel 50 times every second. The ball itself also contained a sensor to feed into this data.
One of the purposes of this technology was to inform more accurate decisions for offside rulings. Along with VAR, this is a revolutionary change in the world of football.
Data driven sports
It’s not just football that has been shaped by a more extensive use of data. Take golf, for example, which has long been a sport rooted in data, down to the scoring system itself. Greens-in-reg (GIR) tells us the number of times a player finds the putting green in the appropriate number of shots.
A more recent use of data expands on this. Strokes-gained delves deeper, describing how much a player gained an advantage from shots that landed on the green and how close those shots got to the hole. Golf has hundreds of data points that can be used by coaches and players, and fed to audiences for a more engaging experience.
In other sports, especially those that depend on set pieces and preplanned movements such as basketball and the NFL, tracking technology and wearables can be utilized during training and gameplay to give a more accurate picture of what is happening on the pitch.
Even off-pitch factors like sleep and diet can be improved upon to optimize performance and reduce the risk of injuries.
For audiences and wannabe analysts, sports odds can be used to understand team’s performances and chances of progressing in a match or across the season.
Sports purists have mixed feelings on the use, or overuse, of data when it comes to tactics, gameplay and broadcasting. But there’s no doubt it’s had a huge impact on nearly every aspect of the game.
Data in poker
The digital gaming industry is in a unique position when it comes to data, as many of the data points are readily available and inherent to the design of the game or platform.
When it comes to gaming platforms, data collected on end-users is often used to analyse preferences, time spent playing and high scores. As in golf, where data is really important as we have seen, data has been used in the gaming sector to optimise the gaming experience, for example, by analysing drop-off points, the moments when players tend to quit and get bored.
Poker players themselves use data to improve their decisions on what is an inherently mathematical game. The equations can be so complex, that some even use software programs known as solvers to work out whether they played a certain hand optimally.
Esports data points
When it comes to competitive gaming, data is used in much the same way as the traditional sports described above are starting to adopt, especially when it comes to enhancing performance.
In the world of esports, there are multiple statistics that are useful for both casual and pro alike. Win rate is the simplest, and often the most telling of these.
In first-person shooters, the kill-to-death ratio is considered a decent starting point as a measure of skill. This can be refined further by looking at stats such as headshot percentage, which, combined with kill counts, can help a player to gauge their accuracy.
The creep score is one that may be less familiar to casual players. It is a measure of how many minions you have farmed for experience or gold during a game. Gold per minute is another one which indicates how quickly a player has gathered resources. These data points are used in games like League of Legends.
As with traditional sports, these statistics can be applied both to individual players and to the team as a whole, the aim being to identify weak spots and make improvements where needed.
