Mike Page, FargoRate, Greg Hogue, and the Mosconi Cup
- Thread starter SEB
- Start date
Yeah.. Like I said.... Mike Page is more interested in making a buck right now, than building a rating/tracking system that can be easily adopted at a national level. And he has basically ZERO competition as far as pool ratings are concerned, so it is really just a matter of getting the product out in front of groups of players. This is just another example of the American pool community taking the easy way out for money right now, rather than taking the long view.
This s**t is dead simple. Take some of the earnings from BCA, and upgrade the database capacity... Go to the tournament web sites that smaller clubs/pool halls are using to run their tournaments.. Offer them free code to send the results to Fargorate that they can just plug in to the site. Offer this functionality at a greatly reduced rate, or FREE, for 6 months to a year. This will seed Fargorates for players that might otherwise have never played a BCA event, or the U.S. Open.
Once these lower level players see their Fargorate, they now have a reason to practice and play, that goes beyond just getting to the money in their tournament. Mike Page needs to decide what he wants to do... Make as much money as quickly as possible off his Fargorate implementation, or grow pool. Can't do both. It is so frustrating watching Fargorate get so severely mishandled on an international level. It could be SO much more than it currently is. The rating system itself WORKS, but he is just not doing the work to get as many players adopting it as possible, even if it means delaying profit for 6-12 months. Fargorate as it stands is a rating system that really only provides value to players above 550, as that is kind of the minimum level needed to be competitive at the size of event that tends to be Fargorated. Chess has no such limitation. Chess players often start out in with provisional ratings of ~800 or so (equivalent to D-ish player in pool..) by simply playing in a weeknight blitz tournament. We have no equivalent way to get casual players into Fargorate. How the actual FARK do we expect to grow the game?
I would literally pay $20-$40 just for the privilege of importing already formatted tournament matches to Fargorate. I think one of the main issues is that American pool is full of hustlers who would take the opportunity to submit manipulated scores for the purpose of sandbagging to prepare for bigger tournaments. USCF has a means of dealing with this, called "rating floors". Which means if you reach a specific rating level, you get "locked in" to a lower boundary. Hit 2400 rating? You can now no longer fall below 2200, which limits the ability to sandbag.
In the end, the key to mass adoption is that tournament directors needs an easy means of just running a tournament, and then clicking a button to submit to Fargorate. Can come with a $20 fee or whatever... But he NEEDS to provide a means to encourage Fargorate adoption by players in the 400-550 skill level range. These people are not playing regional events and going to the U.S. Open.
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I think if you use Digitalpool.com to run your tournaments and leagues the matches are automatically uploaded into FargoRate.
It is only in pool that for some reason people want to believe that private businesses should instead be run as a charity for the primary benefit of the sport rather than as what they actually are which is a private business for the primary benefit of the proprietor. We see it constantly. Nowhere else do we seem to have his unreasonable expectation though.
What the reasonable expectation would be, and the one that we have with everything else, is that a private business should care about the sport only to the extent that it is in the best interest of their company. Many things they do will in fact be the best for both the business and the sport, but in cases where it can only be best for one or the other they should always be choosing what is best for the business (whereas a charity should always be choosing what is best for the sport (or whatever their cause) in such cases).
FargoRate clearly thinks the decisions you have referenced are currently the best ones for their business or else they would be doing something else. We can of course disagree with them on what is best for their business, but if any part of our argument starts to put the benefit of the sport above the benefit of their business then we have become illogical and unreasonable in our thinking and are unfairly expecting that they act as a charity rather than a business. Not saying this is what you are doing, but it sounds like it could be.
I am not wanting Mike Page to do anything for free. I want him to stop ignoring thousands upon thousands of pool players who WANT to be Fargorated, but a. Don't want to play leagues for whatever reason or b. They are not quite good enough yet to compete with the better players in their area, but want a measuring stick a little bit more precise than whether they went out one round later in their regional event.
USCF has a system put together which makes it extremely easy to submit tournaments automatically and have it update the USCF database. They charge a small fee for every rated tournament. This encourages MANY more tournaments than if this system were not in place. Tournaments promote improvement. This ease of tournament rating is the main thing keeping chess healthy in America.
Mike Page can do business EXACTLY as he is now, and just add an easy option for a self-run Fargorated small tournament. Charge $10-$20 per tournament, +$1-$2 per player. Free money. Give all players fair warning that if your Fargorate performance magically goes up by 200 points only at big money events, then you risk forfeiture of all prize monies and banning from any future Fargorate events. Or add rating floors as I mentioned before.
I am asking for one small change that will BOTH make Mike Page more money, AND promote more pool playing in America. And screw that.. Not only in America. Here in Europe, if I want to move my Fargorating, I have to go play a EuroTour event. I would play MANY more events here in Germany if I had a way to get the tournament results into Fargorate.
And as far as sandbagging... You know what the solution to that is? Get AS MANY people using Fargorate as possible, even if it means giving them free usage of the rating system for a few months to figure things out. Then, when EVERYBODY is using it.. Change ToS to clearly, emphatically state that sandbagging to win events will not be tolerated, with the punishment stated above, forfeiture of prize monies, and banning. When almost all the tournaments are Fargorated, then people have a lot more incentive to keep their nose clean.
As it is.. It just smells too much like Mike Page jumping in bed with the first big league system to throw money his way.
One more point about how holding tons of small, rated tournaments improves the game. In chess.. You have master level players who will jump in small Swiss 4 player tournaments, just to fill out the quad, and give the lesser players a chance to earn some ratings points. We have an aging demographic of pool players who simply don't have either much motivation or opportunity to play. This sort of small rated event gives them a chance to nurture lesser players. This small tournament system would likely result in a lot of Fargorated matches played in man caves and garages. All good for the game, and increases the player population, which Mike Page will ALSO benefit from.
If I were to magically obtain ownership of Fargorate tomorrow, the very first thing I would do is to finance an app that allowed people to set up their own Fargorated events reporting directly into the database, and let people use it FOR FREE for three months or so. I wrote a python program in a weekend to pull the data off my German league and present it in an excel sheet that would import directly into Fargorate's database. This stuff IS NOT hard. On the tournament visibility side... I would get the tournament software to pull expected match outcomes for established players from Fargorate based on the formula they use at BCA for the pro events...
Let me tell you.. I remember very clearly being a young, improving player. If you could have given me an expected match outcome for the beating I was about to take from a regional champ.. My goal would have been to do everything I can to skew that result by getting an extra game or two. Hell.. My home pool hall in Tacoma, WA used to put top three players from each Wednesday tournament on butcher paper on the wall. That was my entire goal in life, to get on that wall. Fargorate has so much more going for it, than how it is being currently used. There's a LOT of money being left on the table.
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Apparently Mike doesn't think that is best for his business at the moment for whatever the reasons, right or wrong. For all we know it could just be that he couldn't currently handle the additional administrative workload, and hiring and training additional employees isn't currently feasible.
Except for the Predator Pro Billiard Series (and possibly not even there to some extent?), to my knowledge Mike has zero say over who can or can't play in events using FargoRate, and whether any particular player gets paid their prize--and getting that ability doesn't sound particularly feasible outside of him running his own league and tournaments which is clearly the direction he doesn't want to go.
Mike has explained that he doesn't feel sandbagging is a particularly big issue in FargoRate and has given some data to back up that assertion.
You can still get games into the system through the Salotto app. It may not be your preference but unless there is something I am unaware of it is an option contrary to your claim. Mike's agreement with them could also be why he isn't taking random league and tournament results even when they get submitted in the correct format if that is indeed the case.
I too would be curious to hear why Mike wasn't interested in free tournament or league data if it is properly formatted and he has reason to believe the data submitted is legitimate. I've seen you bring it up before but it seemed that Mike wanted to ignore the topic rather than address it (but I could also completely be misremembering that or missed the response).
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No, you're right. I have brought it up multiple times, and Mike has ignored it every time.
And it is so frustrating. If he made any agreements that prevent him from releasing the ability to ingest small tournament data, then that is just a horrendous decision, as I believe that has the potential to single-handedly revive pool on America. Kids need to play to improve. Child chess players get crazy motivated for every little point gain. The same would be true for youth pool players who had a super easy way to get rated and measure their improvement, without having to go to nationals. Young pool players need to play under the Fargorate system to understand what an effort a 50 point improvement takes.
How are you accomplishing that?I run small tournaments and they all get added to Fargo, and it costs me nothing.
I use challonge.com brackets and the Fargo team picks them up from there.
Woodshaft
Do what works for YOU!
Fargorate is a "for-profit" business.
Mike Page does what he needs to do to make a solid living off it, whether you like it or not.
Salotto is also "for-profit". And can be used by cheaters to keep their ratings "down".
Mike is VERY proud (arrogant) of his formula and data analysis, even though the fargorate standard deviation is actually almost comical.
My advice to skeptics is to avoid playing in ANY fargorate handicapped events. It's NOT ACCURATE AT THE AMATEUR LEVEL.
A couple of our local 640's, for example, entered a "650 and under" $500 entry fee tourney and got their asses handed to them lol. There definitely were some short-stops in that tourney lol.
And don't even get me started about the 550 and 580 capped tourneys. I guarantee the top players in those play wayyyy better than their rating lol.
As I've said a million times, FARGORATE IS NOT THE HOLY GRAIL POOL RATING SYSTEM AT THE AMATEUR LEVEL.
And the people who know this are definitely taking advantage of this fargorate ignorance.
Mike Page does what he needs to do to make a solid living off it, whether you like it or not.
Salotto is also "for-profit". And can be used by cheaters to keep their ratings "down".
Mike is VERY proud (arrogant) of his formula and data analysis, even though the fargorate standard deviation is actually almost comical.
My advice to skeptics is to avoid playing in ANY fargorate handicapped events. It's NOT ACCURATE AT THE AMATEUR LEVEL.
A couple of our local 640's, for example, entered a "650 and under" $500 entry fee tourney and got their asses handed to them lol. There definitely were some short-stops in that tourney lol.
And don't even get me started about the 550 and 580 capped tourneys. I guarantee the top players in those play wayyyy better than their rating lol.
As I've said a million times, FARGORATE IS NOT THE HOLY GRAIL POOL RATING SYSTEM AT THE AMATEUR LEVEL.
And the people who know this are definitely taking advantage of this fargorate ignorance.
And yet.. When measuring expected outcome between two "legit" Fargorated players, it is accurate to within a game or two, no matter how far apart the skill levels are.
Methinks this sandbagging is not nearly the problem you think it is. I could literally give two craps about trying to "manage" my Fargorate to enter a specific event.
And the only reason that ISa problem, how minor, at this point is, because Fargorate does not have widespread enough adoption. Once it does, people are welcome to sandbag if they like, knowing if they get caught, they get permanently banned from all Fargorate events, and once they are almost all Fargorated events (like every single money chess tournament in the U.S. is USCF rated..), then the player is playing with fire risking their ability to play ANY decent tournaments, just to "possibly" win a single event.
We all know pool players stupid enough to do this, though.
might be 2 and out, he's facing a top 35 player next. duong quoc hoang, fargo 800.
Some things about the comparison with USCF (chess) may interest you.
12,000 Chess tournaments go into USCF database in a year: (0.8 million chess games) [a fee is charged]
16,000 Pool tournaments go into FargoRate database in a year: (6.5 million pool games) [FargoRate assumes the expense]
The FargoRate database (27 million games) is much larger than the chess database, and the rating calculation is much much more involved.
That's all you took/got out of the suggestions/ideas he had?
I mean, it's not like any of them were terrible ideas... in fact, they appear to be great ideas that would benefit you, pool and many of the average players in between.
I donno, maybe it's just me...
No idea what some of you are going on about. It’s not difficult to set up for Fargo.
There are too many incorrect premises intertwined with misconceptions about what we're already doing. I fear a losing game of whack-a-mole.
PracticeChampion
Well-known member
That kid plays great, definitely going to be big trouble for the field for the next 40 years, same with kashton.. He might be young but plays big money matches often so pressure shouldn't be a problem.
We’ve seen a lot of posts here over the years about people sending their stuff to Fargo and getting no response. Obviously there is some kind of submission mechanism as new tournaments get added all the time, but it’s not clear what that mechanism is.