I'd love to join a APA group but because of my location, it is not a consideration. Can someone please suggest a less costly way to get a handy-capping method for players?
:wink:
I really depends on what you are trying to accomplish and your post is a bit too vague for us to know for sure. If you just kind of want to know what your rating would be under various rating systems you hear being thrown around all the time (examples, "he is a 'B' player", or "he is an APA 6", or "he has a 620 Fargo rating" etc) then this will be your best resource by far:
http://billiards.colostate.edu/threads/ratings.html
This chart gives a rough equivalency comparison between various rating systems:
http://billiarduniversity.org/documents/BU_Rating_Comparisons.pdf
If you are looking to find out which rating/ranking system is the most accurate then the answer is FargoRate and nothing else is even remotely close.
http://fargorate.com/
http://fairmatch.fargorate.com/
If you are looking to find the rating system that is the most easily adaptable for handicapping in various ways then again it is FargoRate and also NPL.
If you are looking for the best handicap system to use in a local league or tournament (which is what it sounds most like), and are wanting to be independent and not officially sanctioned or affiliated with a national organization, then based on the accuracy and ease of adaptability the best would be FargoRate if most of your players have current established Fargo ratings, and NPL if they don't.
If you go with FargoRate for your unaffiliated league that is not reporting results, you would have to look up each players rating every week so that you know how to handicap their matches for the week. You can do this by clicking on "Look Up a Player" at
http://fairmatch.fargorate.com/. Their Fargo ratings are based on actual match performance data. The use of FargoRate for unaffiliated local leagues where matches are not being reported is probably only best in cases where a majority of your players have matches included in the FargoRate database somewhat regularly through other means (in other words their ratings are both established and current). For people that don't have an established Fargo rating or whose FargoRating is based solely on very old matchs you will have to guesstimate their rating every week based on how their play compares to the play of others you know who do have more current Fargo ratings and of course this subjectivity leads to some inaccuracy in those particular cases based on how well you judge their speeds (which is why you would highly prefer most of your players have a current established Fargo rating). You can look up how to handicap the matches based on each players rating by clicking on "Find a Fair Match" at
http://fairmatch.fargorate.com/. The developer and owner of FargoRate goes by "mikepage" here on AzBilliards.
If you go with NPL for your unaffiliated local league, you have to use your best guess to set people's initial rating and may have to manually move their rating on rare occasion particularly in the beginning (as would be the case with any handicap system where you have to subjectively rate everyone to start with which would mean pretty much all of the handicapping systems except for FargoRate in cases where they already have established and current Fargo ratings) but after some time people's ratings will work themselves out and the system will prove to be accurate locally. The developer of the rating system behind NPL goes by "Bob Jewett" here on AzBilliards. More information about this system can be found at the links below:
http://www.sfbilliards.com/Misc/NPL_info.txt
http://www.sfpool.net/cgi-bin/pool.pl?pChoice=fairness
http://www.sfbilliards.com/Misc/argonne8.pdf
If you want to start a local handicapped league and have it be sanctioned by a national league organization then I would suggest the USAPL which is owned by Mark Griffin (goes by "Mark Griffin" here on AzBilliards) under the CueSports International (CSI) parent organization. USAPL bases their handicapping on the most accurate FargoRate system and everyone's match results are all uploaded to FargoRate, and I believe they even have league software that makes all of the reporting of results and such pretty easy and by being sanctioned league members also have the option of going to the National event in Las Vegas etc.
http://www.playcsipool.com/usapl.html