Question

Baseball's World Series is a maximum of seven games, with the winner being the first team to win four games. Assume that the Atlanta Braves and the Minnesota Twins are playing in the World Series and that the first two games are to be played in Atlanta, the next three games at the Twins' ballpark, and the last two games, if necessary, back in Atlanta. Taking into account the projected starting pitchers for each game and the home field advantage, the probabilities of Atlanta winning each game are as follows:

Game	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
Probability of Win	0.7	0.45	0.49	0.55	0.47	0.45	0.6

Set up a spreadsheet simulation model for which whether Atlanta wins or loses each game is a random variable. What is the probability that the Atlanta Braves win the World Series? If required, round your answer to two decimal places.
What is the average number of games played regardless of winner? If required, round your answer to one decimal place.

Answer 1

We simulate each game as below

• Generate a uniform random number between (0,1) using =RAND()
• If the number is less than the probability to will that particular game, then the winner of that game is Atlanta Braves (AB), else the winner is Minnesota Twins

We go to games 5,6, and 7 till one of the team wins 4 games

The following spread sheet shows the setup

Columns A to I

J to M

The rest

get the values below

Duplicate the rows to make 1000 trials.

Paste the random numbers as values to avoid changes

the probability that the Atlanta Braves win the World Series is (count of number of times Atlanta wins)/1000

The average number of games is the average of the column corresponding to the total number of games

The following gets these numbers

get these values