On Round-Robin Tournaments with a Unique Maximum Score

Abstract

Richard Arnold Epstein (1927-2016) published the first edition of "The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic" in 1967. He introduced some material on round-robin tournaments (complete oriented graphs) with n labeled vertices in Chapter 9; in particular, he stated, without proof, that the probability that there is a unique vertex with the maximum score tends to 1 as n tends to infinity. Our object here is to give a proof of this result along with some historical remarks and comments.