Many sports that have playoffs use a best-of-seven format. This means that the two teams play until one team wins four games. If two teams are evenly matched, how many games would you expect it to take to end a best-of-seven series? Simulate this problem by tossing a coin and recording heads or tails. The first to four wins. Repeat this experiment and each time keep track of the number of games it took to end the series. Finding the mean of these values will approximate the expected number of games. In general, better approximations can be found by increasing the number of trials.
Solution:
We simulated 1000 trials using a spreadsheet.
Our simulation found that it would take on average 5.792 (about 6) games. Mathematically, the expected number of games is 5.8125 so we would expect 6 games.