Update on the Des Moines pool scene

T-dog said:
You mean they didnt blow his head off? For some reason I associated the famous picture of the guy shot in the head with this picture but now that I think of it that other dude was vietmanese. So this guy didnt die......what an idiot.
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The guy in front of the tank was protesting the loss of govt handouts, not the loss of liberty. He now works in the flatiron building, I heard.:wink:

Rosa was not the first to refuse to move from her seat and it was a set-up....but it worked!

Wrong forum, but knowing is half the battle.

Jeff Livingston
 
chefjeff said:
The guy in front of the tank was protesting the loss of govt handouts, not the loss of liberty. He now works in the flatiron building, I heard.:wink:

Rosa was not the first to refuse to move from her seat and it was a set-up....but it worked!

Wrong forum, but knowing is half the battle.

Jeff Livingston
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I watched a two hour special on PBS about the whole incident and what was going on in China at the time in the late 80s/early 90s. They have been showing a series of shows about China through the decades, up through today. I have several pics I'd like to cycle through over time from civilian plane crashes to English first and Chinese second signage. Oh and no one knows Tank Man's whereabouts, he's most suspected to be dead.

"Know more, ask less"
 
mikeyfrost said:
I process a ton of data for work and its never taken two minutes. How do you get every tourney director to do it? That's something that would have to be undertaken by someone and babied. They'd have to go around and collect results from all tourneys to be effective. The part that gets complicated is it's not all based on how you finish. A part of maintaining handicaps is how you do against what handicap. If I am a B player and roll every A player and can't give up a game to a C player and win and I bat about 50% against other B players, what's my handicap?

You need to record the scores of all the races played. That gives you a much better picture. You move a guy up cause he snaps a tourney off right? How does that balance out against the 20 other tourneys where you go two and out. Everyone knows sometimes you get a good draw and then it seems like upsets happen that benefit you, that's not a reason to penalize a person.
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My avatar is the business intelligence software I use at work (Qlikview). I can bring data in from any format and crunch numbers. A spread sheet works just fine. I actually have the spread sheet from Jody from the sunday tournaments. I can try and set something up but Im kinda a slacker. I could do all kinds of analysis with this data. Once the structure is there, all we would need to do is feed it data.
 
T-dog said:
My avatar is the business intelligence software I use at work (Qlikview). I can bring data in from any format and crunch numbers. A spread sheet works just fine. I actually have the spread sheet from Jody from the sunday tournaments. I can try and set something up but Im kinda a slacker. I could do all kinds of analysis with this data. Once the structure is there, all we would need to do is feed it data.
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Thanks for info. I was hoping we could come up with an answer. Now we just need a plan and some action.
 
deadstroke7 said:
Thanks for info. I was hoping we could come up with an answer. Now we just need a plan and some action.
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I think we could do something that shows who beat who, that way the win loss will mean more. If say I beat Jody 7-2 and lost to my son 2-7 its better to determine who was beat instead of just win loss records. I would also have a field where I can put a check box for "oh...he just got lucky". I will default to "lucky" everytime Jody wins.
 
T-dog said:
I think we could do something that shows who beat who, that way the win loss will mean more. If say I beat Jody 7-2 and lost to my son 2-7 its better to determine who was beat instead of just win loss records. I would also have a field where I can put a check box for "oh...he just got lucky". I will default to "lucky" everytime Jody wins.
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That's arbitrary. You have to measure variance in performance. That's really the thing that seperates peoples levels. A skill rating mainly shows how consistently well you perform. If you read through the Fargo Billiards ratings the essential part is having scores for EVERY match played processed. If you don't have that you don't have anything.

In Arizona they have a ratings system where a committee has specific meetings about twice a year to rank everyone. You only change handicap at those meetings. At no other time will you be moved up or down.

I'll be the first to say that for free I would want nothing to do with it. For some money and perks I will compile the data from the Open tourneys (Friday ten ball, Sunday 9-Ball) as well as the data from the Stix tourneys on Saturday and Monday. Tuesday B-C tournament also would need to be calculated. There's a way to do it for all formats. At first it would not be all that acurate or much more accurate than the ratings are now. In a year though it would be pretty nice.
 
pooljunkie75 said:
Not sure if you guys are aware of this, but we have quite a few "high-end' IT professionals in our pool community that could build a tournament database in their sleep. John Borden-Networking, Scott Yates-Programming, Brian Dodson-Database, just to name a few. Heck, we could pull off some corporate embesselment while we are at is also. I think we could get the data from people that volunteer to run these tournaments if we hava some sort of system in place. What about making it a business? Form some sort of a Des Moines Pool Board of Directors committee(Voted in of course). It would be like running a league. Have poeple pay a nominal fee, just like in the APA,BCA, or Valley to be a part of this. You do not have to participate if you don't want to. If you want to play in a sponsored tournament you will just be rated accordingly and pay a little more. I can almost guarantee that we can find people to volunteer to do alot of this, just because they love the game. Look at Julie Guzman, do you think she gets paid to do dsmpoolplayers.com.....NO.

There are alot of people with a lot of good ideas in Des Moines....lets put them to work. Rome wasn't built in a day!!!... but it did burn down a couple of times...lol.:dance:

Just an early morning half asleep thought........zzzzzzzzz
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What about this........?
 
pooljunkie75 said:
What about this........?
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It's a nice idea if people want to get involved and volunteer that type of time. I for one will not ever volunteer that many hours of my life for that cause. I am too used to being paid when I work. Stix uses computers to input the scores, the integrity of their score keeping is very suspect though. Mark is a cool guy though and probably can print some type of report out and send that over.

A spreadsheet or a record of who beat who and when means absolutely nothing if you are not analyzing the data without any bias. You need to take just as much stock as when you win/lose against a good player as you do when you win/lose against a lower skilled player. If a player always loses 5-0 than you beating them 5-2 means you didn't play all that well at all. You can lose close and be playing better. That's why if you want to keep data than use the Fargo Billiards rating, if not I can't possibly see the reason for keeping specific match data.
 
mikeyfrost said:
It's a nice idea if people want to get involved and volunteer that type of time. I for one will not ever volunteer that many hours of my life for that cause. I am too used to being paid when I work. Stix uses computers to input the scores, the integrity of their score keeping is very suspect though. Mark is a cool guy though and probably can print some type of report out and send that over.

A spreadsheet or a record of who beat who and when means absolutely nothing if you are not analyzing the data without any bias. You need to take just as much stock as when you win/lose against a good player as you do when you win/lose against a lower skilled player. If a player always loses 5-0 than you beating them 5-2 means you didn't play all that well at all. You can lose close and be playing better. That's why if you want to keep data than use the Fargo Billiards rating, if not I can't possibly see the reason for keeping specific match data.
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No, I completely agree with getting paid to run it. I was talking about people volunteering to set up a system. Then when there is a system to run. We (the pool community) could vote for people to run it, just like a league. You would get paid similar to how league operators get paid.
 
pooljunkie75 said:
No, I completely agree with getting paid to run it. I was talking about people volunteering to set up a system. Then when there is a system to run. We (the pool community) could vote for people to run it, just like a league. You would get paid similar to how league operators get paid.
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That would be a huge change in the pool culture here and I don't think people would buy into that idea, at least not enough to put there money up. At the end of the day the tournament structure is broken. Also the establishments we play at can't really afford to put the money up that would boost the attendance at the tourneys.

I'm starting to think there is no solution.
 
I still think if you set up web-entry - each tourny director could enter results, it could publish/advertise results and we can create formulas that will auto-calculate and rate.

Really, it probably isn't a lot different than league but with more automation and a few better calculations.

I'm sure you can create a program that will analyis by opponant, etc. For gosh sakes, we went to the moon 40 years ago, and my phone now is better than any computer pre-1999. How can we not figure some of this out?

As for pro-pool. Just like us, it takes the involvement of everyone to make something go.
 
deadstroke7 said:
I still think if you set up web-entry - each tourny director could enter results, it could publish/advertise results and we can create formulas that will auto-calculate and rate.

Really, it probably isn't a lot different than league but with more automation and a few better calculations.

I'm sure you can create a program that will analyis by opponant, etc. For gosh sakes, we went to the moon 40 years ago, and my phone now is better than any computer pre-1999. How can we not figure some of this out?

As for pro-pool. Just like us, it takes the involvement of everyone to make something go.
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They wouldnt even need a web front end (although thats a good idea). They could just enter the data into a spread sheet with a predetermined structure. Then just email the spread sheet. The problem would be gettting all the tournaments to document the information. Most just have a bracket that shows win / losses. You would need the scores, and you would need this data from mutiple sources so that we have a large number of items. The data will only be as good as the information you put into. Here is where I see the problem. I could make anything and perform all kinds of analysis but without detailed data, its not going to get you very far.

I probably need to read up on the Fargo stats and go from there. Oh yeah......whos paying me? lol
 
T-dog said:
They wouldnt even need a web front end (although thats a good idea). They could just enter the data into a spread sheet with a predetermined structure. Then just email the spread sheet. The problem would be gettting all the tournaments to document the information. Most just have a bracket that shows win / losses. You would need the scores, and you would need this data from mutiple sources so that we have a large number of items. The data will only be as good as the information you put into. Here is where I see the problem. I could make anything and perform all kinds of analysis but without detailed data, its not going to get you very far.

I probably need to read up on the Fargo stats and go from there. Oh yeah......whos paying me? lol
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The web page to enter or excel spreadsheet format would be a good idea. Let's see how hard it is to get from Mike Page.
 
T-dog said:
deadstroke7 said:
I'm sure you can create a program that will analyis by opponant, etc. For gosh sakes, we went to the moon 40 years ago,
For all the skeptics, I can create this analysis even if we didnt go to the moon. lol
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I thought you hate handicapping? You just read up on it a little bit didn't you and you are intrigued. I think it's sweet! Say player A is rated a 643 and player B is rated a 626, both would be A or AA players by our standards however player A would give up a game. That just sounds like the nuts if I ever seen it.

Wait for it...
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This will be all in good for handicapping local players and you could spend a great deal of time, effort, expense and headaches in doing so. However if I remember correctly, most of the locals were okay with their handicaps for the most part. Most of the trouble was centered around the handicaps of the out of town players and there's no program we can develop to change that. :-)
 
imtheone13 said:
This will be all in good for handicapping local players and you could spend a great deal of time, effort, expense and headaches in doing so. However if I remember correctly, most of the locals were okay with their handicaps for the most part. Most of the trouble was centered around the handicaps of the out of town players and there's no program we can develop to change that. :-)
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Ohh yes there is Brian. Read up on the fargo ratings system. The handicap is dynamic. You don't get an established handicap until you have lots of play under your belt and your score starts to stabilize. So a new person sneaking in plays strong their first match their skill ranking jumps a bunch.

For instance the example Mike Page has is a player sneaks in with a 400 rating(C Player) that plays at a speed of 600 (A+ player). Well he wins his first match and his score for his second match goes up to 586 which is pretty close. If they want to sand bag it they would have to sandbag their way right out the tournament, its beautiful like that.
 
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