Penalty shots in International water polo: Regular opportunities with robust success despite a greater impact on the game under current rules
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of changes in the official water polo regulations, effective since 2005, on the impact, frequency and success of penalty shots relative to the game situation. Analysis of official records from the 192 games of the 2007 and 2009 World Championships compared with 216 games of 1998 and 2001 tournaments revealed a greater impact of penalties on the game under current rules. Penalties more than doubled, were distributed across more games, contributed double to the proportion of all goals scored, and affected the outcome of 20% of games. However, penalty shot success rate remained robust (77%) and was unrelated to aspects of the game situation that prescribe the importance of a goal to winning: the closeness of the score, the quarter or criticality of the game. Analyses of the 438 penalties from all games established that the frequency of occurrence and success of penalty shots did not differ from that expected under any particular situational combination of game criticality, quarter or closeness. The penalty shot thus remains a regular opportunity, unrelated to the game situation describing the importance of a goal, consistently executed with high success by élite water polo players.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".