Dear Mr. JB Cases. You commented "Makes perfect sense". Would you please use your own words to describe this thing. I just don't get it.
I will try.
In you pool room you might have all of your regular players rated perfectly so that they can always match up fairly.
Let's say that your ratings go in 100 increments. Bill is a 400 and Joe is a 600.
Joe could be a pro speed player or a apa speed and no one knows outside your room because the ratings are only relevant to your room and each players rating is assigned by you based on your own criteria.
How Joe and bill play even and the outcome is known to you and everyone else. Regardless if a 400 in your room is an apa 2 the outcome is nearly always the same for these two players. Now,
If Joe and bill decide to mess with everyone they can let bill win their match ups for a few weeks and joes rating goes down and bills goes up if you think bill has gotten better since you assign the ratings.
When a new person, Jodie walks in, you don't know how to rate her. She is an apa 5 in Peoria but an apa 3 in denver.....so you either guess or you rate her high and wait.
Now, what if though all your players were rated by everyone they ever played in competition. In other words bill and Joe aren't rated by just how they play each other but also how they do against everyone else? Now bill and joes match ups against each other have less weight while all the people they ever played together determines their rating. Now the rating becomes not only super hard to manipulate but it also becomes more accurate because of the literal thousands of cross references between all the players bill and Joe and Jodie have played and who they played.
So now when Jodie walks in and says she is a 500 then she will match up with Joe accurately because a 500 in your room is the same relative skill level in Denver and Peoria. Jodie is no longer a big fish in a little Peoria pond and a little fish in a big denver pond...she is exactly the same everywhere.
She can literally do nothing to manipulate her ranking because it would be far too labor intensive and expensive to sandbag into a low rating which would only shoot up after she beat some good players who were themselves tied to everyone else.
Mass makes class essentially. Because everyone is tracked and games not sets are recorded the sheer amount of interconnected data makes it pretty bulletproof.
Bad data entry and not enough individual data about the only ways to see an inaccurate rating. The latter takes care of itself over time.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-N900A using Tapatalk