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To answer the question posed in the title, we first need to define what we mean by "better." In this talk, we will look at the tournament designs of football and table tennis from an optimal stopping perspective. In particular, we consider the problem of finding the optimal scheme for a knock-out tournament with 2^n players, aiming at determining the top player. In each game in the tournament, we observe a real-time score, modeled by a Brownian motion with drift where the drift reflects the players' relative abilities. We can stop observing the game when the outcome seems clear and decide who advances. However, the longer a match is played, the more cost one needs to pay. We formulate and solve a stopping problem to minimise the probability of eliminating the best player while keeping the cost of observation low. The result will tell us how to smartly distribute the time cost across tournament games, and thus, reveals which sport has a superior design. Additionally, we discuss a few variants of the problem and some possible generalisations.

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