You keep projecting your beliefs. That's not good.
No one has to spend money on lessons to get better. You can still have players that will show up just to have a good time.
A League That Encourages Improvement
- Thread starter BeiberLvr
- Start date
You keep projecting your beliefs. That's not good.
No one has to spend money on lessons to get better. You can still have players that will show up just to have a good time.
Well then sir the title of your thread is misleading. It suggests you are dangling larger payouts in each upper bracket to encourage people to improve. My beliefs ? Is not that what every one else that is posting in this thread ....their beliefs?
Not trying to be argumentative but again you are stating that you want to implement a league where people will want to improve by dangling larger payouts in the higher levels .
Well how do people improve ? By taking lessons and buying instructional material. Now you state that they dont need to take lessons .....they can just show up and have fun. That sounds just like what kind of league apa is reputed to be.
I will say that breaking the league into brackets will address the complaint higher levels have against teams dumping low level players on them. But then again you will.have some that are at the bottom of their level complaining they should be in the next lower level. Kinda sounds like bcapl don't it ?
I really am not trying to be a negative nelly towards your ideas....just being realistic on how the average pool player thinks.
It's been said many times on here that if you dont like what a league has to offer then start your own. I am sure some will like your ideas but be aware of the saying....you can't please everyone. Good luck to you if you do attempt this endeavor.
The best way to encourage people to better their game while eliminating sandbagging is to have a scratch league. Our league has been handicap-free for almost 40 years. We pay out to between 1/4 - 1/3 of the league, and those that did not win money during the regular season get their own tournaments at the end of the season. I can't explain the reason why some of the weaker players have been playing in and enjoying this league for so many years after never winning money, but they do. And most prefer to play against the better players. I have dabbled with the idea of limiting team strength, having dual stats (one scratch, one w handicap), but in the end a simple format that people understand seems to be the best.
To the OP...why reinvent the wheel with your handicap system? Use straight Fargo ratings and submit games into Fargo regularly. No need to tinker.
To the OP...why reinvent the wheel with your handicap system? Use straight Fargo ratings and submit games into Fargo regularly. No need to tinker.
Don is the "O" of OB Cues. Smart guy with a technical background and a lot of interesting ideas.
I have an idea why lower level players that don't win keep coming back. It's the room you play out of and the players you play with. I just had a conversation with a lower level player after a tournament, he showed up one day for the tournament, then kept coming back every week and even joined the league. He asked me about the 3 foul rule and that he has seen players just keep trying to 3 foul and asked me about how proper that is. I told him that in some situations you need to try that to win, you are not responsible to make the opponent win easier, however, with a weaker player it is very easy to 3 foul them almost every game but it is not something a decent player should try to do. It will lead them to being frustrated with the game and quitting because some ass decided to just try to win while beating down some player that can't run 2 balls yet. That type of stuff is what makes new players quit, or those that don't win quit. If they play in a nice place with nice people, they will be back.
You know why the better players 3 foul weaker opponents? Not because it's an easy win, or because they're mean.
It's because of ball spot handicaps.
It also happens a lot when the better player is giving a large ball spot AND the breaks. Now you've got a weaker player that can't break, and doesn't get a good spread of the balls.
What else is the better player supposed to do there?
Get rid of handicaps all together, or at the very least go to a game spot handicap. I bet you'd see weaker players getting 3 fouled a lot less often.
With your proposed system you move way too much with each loss and it is too easy to intentionally move down, a lot, and quickly. Lots of the people would rather be the top dog in a division with less money, where they are likely to win a good portion of that money, than to be the little dog in a division that has lots of money it it but where they are unlikely to get any of it.
Now if you worked into your formula a method so that a player moved less and less the more games they played and the longer they were in the system, it would mostly solve this issue. But if you make this improvement and the others that are needed, you start to sound just like FargoRate, which already has all those improvements. Might as well just use FargoRate to begin with since it is as good as a rating system can get, and is as difficult as possible to sandbag in.
As to whether your more money in the more skilled divisions part of the idea works or not, the jury is still out. I have proposed the idea before on here and I think others have as well, and it has been discussed a bit and the everybody is just guessing on how well it would work but I don't recall wide optimism. I am guessing that if done smartly it could have a little success in some limited applications but more often than not it would probably be ineffective or even counterproductive to participation numbers.
I really think what I proposed, where the higher rated player is given a small advantage in every match up, has the highest chance for success as a league if your goals are to have a league with as many participants as possible, and where every player has a built in incentive to improve. I think you would have to run it using the Fargo ratings, and my guess is that the advantage would have to be kept pretty small, probably somewhere around the 55 or maybe 60% range but it really depends on the size of the field or the length of the session (the more the participants or the longer the session the smaller you would have to keep the advantage), because otherwise it would prove too difficult for the weaker players to ever win an event/session or even to make it into the money if the advantage for the stronger players is too much. A bunch of small upsets in a row will happen often enough to keep the weaker players happy and interested, but a bunch of big upsets in a row would rarely if ever happen.
Last edited:
I didn't read the rest of your post since it seems you missed the 3 or 4 time I mentioned that I would change how losses were handled. Instead of 20% of the difference being deducted, it would only be 5%.
So let's say a 350 beats a 410. The 410 would only go down 3 points instead of the 12 points that was originally proposed. Therefore a player would have to lose more matches then he/she wins in order to stay at the same level. And I don't know of many leagues that pay out players with losing records.
Now that you know this. How would my system be easy to manipulate?
*I will update my OP
I didn't miss your change where the loser only goes down 5% instead of 20% of the difference. I was the one that brought the need for the change to your attention.
Again, your system still results in too large of movements for losing, although it is definitely better than what you initially proposed. If somebody wants to make the cut for a lower division, they can do so easily, even if they aren't all that close to the cut line, just by losing some or all of their last matches. Lets say the difference between myself and my last four opponents is 100 points on average. I just lose all four of those matches and I have gone down 20 points instantly. That is a huge change in rating from only four matches, and I could easily accomplish that in a single league night, the last night before the event where I am trying to make the lower cutoff.
Sure, you can make it to where you go down even less when you lose, like only 2% of the difference, but another problem with systems where you go down a lot less for a loss, than what you go up for a win, is that your rating tends to stay artificially inflated for extended periods of time, and as you pointed out it takes forever for it to come back down, and people get pissed off as a result and quit and your participation numbers suffer. Once people see that there is a huge disparity in how wins and losses are treated and how long it takes to come back down to a fair and honest rating number they say screw that, I'm not going to stick around and keep putting up with all this losing for an extended period of time until my rating finally adjusts back to fair so that I can finally be competitive again, and they choose to quit instead.
Another of the many changes the type of rating system you are suggesting would need is that you would need to go up or down a different amount not based just on the point spreads between the players, but also based on whether the person you won or lost to was higher or lower rated than you are. If I am a 600, it doesn't make sense for me to go up the same 20 points when I beat a 500 or a 700, nor does it makes sense for me to go down the same 5 points if I lose to a 500 or 700. Yet again, FargoRate already takes all this into consideration and has a beautiful solution in place for it. For the record, variations of the handicapping system you are proposing have already been done and used, and it would take a good bit more tweaking to get it half decent, but it will still pale in comparison to FargoRate.
My thought is that FargoRate already does a great job doing ratings, the best that can be done, and it is also very difficult to manipulate, probably also the most difficult that can be possible, and so I think the smart thing is to use FargoRate because you aren't going to improve on it, and instead look for your ways to build in the incentive for improvement in other ways outside of trying to do a better rating system (which is impossible) such as the way that you choose to handicap matches (like what I suggested), or in how you spread the money around (one of the things you suggested), etc.
Last edited:
Your memory might be letting you down.
My initial post of suggesting the change was made on post #17 before you even posted in the thread. So need to take credit
The portion in bold is true, but again, you are completely missing the obvious.
If you are constantly losing matches to manipulate your ranking, then your record at the end of the session will be terrible.
And if your record is terrible, then...WAIT FOR IT...you aren't going to cash.
Now I suppose a player could waste a session throwing matches to be moved down to a lower division, and then cash the next session. Two flaws with that
1. Most likely wouldn't be +ROI considering weekly dues and the fact that the lower division pays out less money.
2. If the players does do well in the lower division, then they probably get moved up again to the next division.
Your memory might be letting you down.
My initial post of suggesting the change was made on post #17 before you even posted in the thread. So need to take credit
The portion in bold is true, but again, you are completely missing the obvious.
If you are constantly losing matches to manipulate your ranking, then your record at the end of the session will be terrible.
And if your record is terrible, then...WAIT FOR IT...you aren't going to cash.
Now I suppose a player could waste a session throwing matches to be moved down to a lower division, and then cash the next session. Two flaws with that
1. Most likely wouldn't be +ROI considering weekly dues and the fact that the lower division pays out less money.
2. If the players does do well in the lower division, then they probably get moved up again to the next division.
I did miss or had forgotten where you suggested the option to have losses only be 5% instead of 20% before I had mentioned the issue.
As for the rest of your post, I think some of it holds true for players that are nowhere near the cut off line, like 100 points away. But for a large portion of the players, it is too easy to manipulate their handicap very quickly and easily to come down 10, 20, 30, or 40 points. Your system allows too large of downward movements too quickly. For a large portion of the players they won't have to do a ton of losing like you are suggesting, they will only have to do a very small amount of losing at the right time, and it will have huge positive affects on their ROI. Again, all the losing I need to do to make the cut off for the finals of a league session, or for a big tournament, etc, even if a pretty large move is needed, can be accomplished in a single league night at a cost of the $10 weekly due.
Plus you still have the issue I mentioned where many people just aren't going to put up with the disparity in the rate at which their rating goes up compared to the rate that their rating comes down. I think you will see your participation numbers plummet in pretty short order if you try to do this.
As I said before, I also think you are barking up the wrong tree tying to find improvements that are drastic changes from FargoRate. You just aren't going to improve on it in any meaningful way. Anything you can do differently that might be a little bit better in one way, is going to come with an even bigger drawback. There is always going to be a trade off that on net you will be worse off for. Now the other ideas we have had outside of changing the rating system may be worth exploring further to see if they have the desired effect and how people respond to them when they are actually put into use. Among those would be giving a larger portion of the prize fund to the division with the more skilled divisions, giving the more skilled player a slight advantage in every handicapped match up, etc, although I'm sure all of these have been tried in varying scale and degrees as well, but perhaps not with a big enough sample size in enough different areas to know anything for sure. What I am sure of though is that you aren't going to come up with a rating system that is overall better than FargoRate.
Most people will improve without lessons or instructional material, because most people have the motor skills and mental capacity to learn the game. With that, it's just a matter of experience and/or practice to improve, to a point. As with anything, the more you improve the harder it becomes to improve, so you have to get instruction or get better experience - AND you have to practice.
There are plenty of people in the world who don't have the desire to improve beyond their natural abilities. They don't really want to practice, they just want to play the game and have fun with their friends, and if they improve a little along the way, great. There's nothing wrong with that. There are also plenty of people who have the desire and the drive to become the best player they can be, and there's nothing wrong with that, either. But I believe this second group is going to look somewhere other than a league to improve. I can see them playing in a league where the prize money is slanted toward the better players. They like to have fun with their friends, too. But if that's not their primary reason for playing, I just think it's going to be hard to keep them.
To the OP, here's a thought. If you want to encourage people to want to improve, I think you should go a little further with your idea. Take the pot for each 'tier' in your league, and put some percentage of it (just use 50% as an example) into a random drawing among the people in that tier. Every game you win gets you one ticket in that drawing. Now you not only have players striving to get into the next tier, but you also have players playing hard at the end of the season when they're too far back in the standings to win anything that way.