The first sentence is fine, and the second sentence is not a good summary of our concern.
Why won’t FargoRate process Round-Robin events?
The short answer is the format is a slime magnet
While data integrity can’t be guaranteed for any event, several small factors typically work together to encourage it. I’ll list some of those for an example event and then comment on round robin format
Typical event: Wednesday race-to-3 9-Ball at Joe’s poolroom run by TD Bill
Factors that contribute to data integrity.
(1) TD Bill runs regular events and has a reputation in the local pool community to protect
(2) Proprietor Joe has a reputation in the local pool community to protect
(3) This event, advertised in advance, is either open to anybody or open to anybody who meets a rating range or other broad criteria. This means I as a player cannot choose my specific opponents and I cannot choose who is in the event.
(4) If I play well, I may log 30 or more games into FargoRate. But if for some reason I significantly underperform, I am likely logging fewer than 10 games into FargoRate. Fewer games means less influence on a rating and also higher per-game investment.
(5) Because the event is open to a broad range of people, I don’t know who will be looking at the online bracket and perusing the scores.
(6) Because it is a random group of players, it’s hard for us to collude on things like playing for less than the stated entry fee or playing for nothing or recording wrong scores or putting players on the bracket who are not playing.
Many of these protections, which are not perfect but are pretty good, are lost with round-robin events.
Round Robin events are often run by one-off “TD”s who for some reason are anxious to get games into FargoRate. They can be run at a pool room, at the bar, at a house, or not be actually run at all. We've had a number something like this: the “TD” has 4 “opponents,” all 100 points lower and the “TD” loses 1-9 1-9, 3-9, and 2-9. We’ve seen ones with “opponents” who have been curiously inactive for the last few years and even dead. We’ve seen ones from TD’s who we’ve had significant interactions with and seem legitimate with a handful that look fine, and at some point things change. When you can choose a small number of participants, you can choose some who want a higher rating and some who want a lower rating. You can choose some who don’t care and others who do. You can avoid inviting anybody who wouldn’t put up with shenanigans. You can include phantom players and not play at all. So long as your phantom players are not people checking their game history, a RR event can be the work of just a single person with no checks or balances.
We can run statistical checks to see how well data from a particular category match with expectation. The answer is FINE for high-entry tournaments, FINE for league games, FINE for low-entry-fee tournaments, and NOT FINE for round-robin events.
You may be thinking well *I* am a trusted person who doesn’t do these things, is honest and above board and public and all that and *our* events are legitimate. And that’s probably true. But we have to look at the category of event as a whole, and this one is a slime magnet.
When I lose against way less skilled opponents it's almost always because of this. I suppose in the overall FR scheme, this sort of win at all costs strategy and its impact on your rating is probably fairly negligible, say maybe 25 points at most.