On the existence of kings in continuous tournaments

Abstract

The classical result of Landau on the existence of kings in finite tournaments (=finite directed complete graphs) is extended to continuous tournaments for which the set X of players is a compact Hausdorff space. The following partial converse is proved as well. Let X be a Tychonoff space which is either zero-dimensional or locally connected or pseudocompact or linearly ordered. If X admits at least one continuous tournament and each continuous tournament on X has a king, then X must be compact. We show that a complete reversal of our theorem is impossible, by giving an example of a dense connected subspace Y of the unit square admitting precisely two continuous tournaments both of which have a king, yet Y is not even analytic (much less compact).