In sports, score is an abstract unit that represents a quantitative indicator of success in competition with opponents. Most sport games use score to determine winners, requiring that one team obtain more points than its rival in order to win. In some sports, such as boxing and mixed martial arts, matches are run within an agreed number of timed rounds, with a winner being declared at the end of each round regardless of point-based victory.

There are many different ways that a game can be scored and the scoring systems of different sports differ greatly from each other. For example, American football has different scores for touchdowns, conversions, safeties and field goals while rugby uses a complex scoring system that involves different scores for tries, conversions and penalties. Esports are also a popular form of sports and have an even more complicated scoring system.

Despite the increasing popularity of professional sports, relatively little is known about how the dynamics of scoring events in these sports work. However, analysis of data sets from a number of games in each of the major American sports shows that there are several common patterns and trends in scoring dynamics.

For example, the empirical distribution of a team’s winning event follows a Poisson process with a sport-specific rate. Similarly, the probability that a team wins an event as a function of its lead size follows a Bernoulli process with a parameter that changes according to the size of the lead.