I joined a BCA league a few months ago. My Fargo rating at that time was around 580, which was I got when I played pool regularly & went to Vegas BCA every year. I've played a lot less pool over the last few years. The league I joined is on 7ft Diamonds & is run in the same format as Vegas is, teams of 5 & everyone plays everyone else in a one rack race. I've been playing ok, winning about 75% of my racks, broken & run maybe twice with a couple of table runs. My Fargo is now at 664, which is ridiculous. Is there any path I can take to challenge this or can someone throw some light on how this number could have gone up so much? TIA.
Can I question my Fargo rating?
- Thread starter roger.p
- Start date
More info.
- I'm racing to one.
- the opponents are generally between 450 - 550, a few 550 - 600 & even fewer 600+.
- There is no handicap in the one on one matchups, the handicap comes in at the team level where each team totals its Fargo ratings and the difference is used to add a points handicap. Again, at the team level.
Yes. That is how BCA works here also. I play in a BCA 8 ball league using the same structure. The 10 point scoring system.
Races to 1 have a large variance, so the Fargo Rate must average over many single game matches. Since you have been playing for months, 5 games a week, you likely have 100 or more games to average. Which in theory should provide a fairly good approximation of your Fargo Rate. I have no direct knowledge of the math involved. In the end your Fargo Rate is a probability of winning against other Rated players. If you know the Fargo Rates of all your opponents you could use one of the online calculators to approximate your rating.
Races to 1 have a large variance, so the Fargo Rate must average over many single game matches. Since you have been playing for months, 5 games a week, you likely have 100 or more games to average. Which in theory should provide a fairly good approximation of your Fargo Rate. I have no direct knowledge of the math involved. In the end your Fargo Rate is a probability of winning against other Rated players. If you know the Fargo Rates of all your opponents you could use one of the online calculators to approximate your rating.
If your opponents are between 450 and 550, we might imagine they average 500.
In a league for which opponents average 500,
a 600 is expected to win 67% of the games
a 660 is expected to win 75% of the games
a 700 is expected to win 80% of the games
It sounds like it all kinda fits. If your rating is in fact running a little high, it will likely come down with more play.
In a league for which opponents average 500,
a 600 is expected to win 67% of the games
a 660 is expected to win 75% of the games
a 700 is expected to win 80% of the games
It sounds like it all kinda fits. If your rating is in fact running a little high, it will likely come down with more play.
How much does starter rating influence one's rating?
Take two people of equivalent skill but no rating. They each start on a league, but one is given a starter rating of 500 and the other 600. How long would it take for their rating to converge? Is that where the 200 robustness comes from? I, guess, ultimately, the question is: how long does the starter rating influence a player's actual rating?
There is no way someone jumps speeds from a 580 to a 664 (unless they are a kid/teenager coming up...). Your 580 must have been with just a few games in the system is my guess. Do you know what your robustness was when it was 580? And/or, was it one of those "starter ratings" made by the leagues when there were not enough games for you to have an "established" fargo rating? Do you know what your robustness is now?
Thanks for the answers so far. My robustness is currently 221. I think it was less than that when I joined this league a few months ago. I used to play in a BCA league for years & go to Vegas on a team every year, enter the open singles but would rarely cash. I stopped that a few years ago when I moved to another state. A current team mate is around 610 and (obv.) plays in the same league. He wins around 75% of his matches too and his handicap barely moves. Mine's gone up by 80 points. Maybe my "robustness" plays a factor as I haven't been playing in anything that would expose me to Fargo over the last few years. It feels like a decent player, with maybe low robustness, playing in a league where the standard isn't particularly high would be in the same boat.
If your opponents are generally between 450-550, you might be rated be about right. At my peak (long before Fargorate) in BCAPL wining 75%, I have to believe the average player in our league would have been rated ~400. 500 on average is twice as good as 400.
I'm confused, you are winning 75% of racks but not sure why your Fargo is going up?
Simple math, if you are playing against someone and are winning half the time, you are the same level. If you are winning 75% of the time, that makes you better. Your 664 means you are beating high 500 and low 600 level players at a good pace, not quite 2-1 in racks but likely 3-4. It's impossible to accidentally become a 600+ Fargo without playing well against some good players.
One thing about your level though, you did not say how many games you played. For a 664, having two break and runs is pretty low unless it's for maybe a dozen games, if it's like 30 games, two break and runs is more like a 550 or less.
Since you are playing one rack a person that means that per group of people of about the same rating you are winning at a 75% pace. So you play 8 550s, you would win 6 of those games, if you play 8 650s, you would win about 4 of those. A single race is tough to get a good feel for since you can get lucky or unlucky and win on a single ball (you run 8 miss the 9, you lose, the other player looks like a genius), but 50 races to one against similar skilled opponents will end up about the same as playing a single player race to 50.
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I thought the expected to win percentages would be higher, especially for the 660 and above...
Once again, thanks for the replies. If I was winning 75% of my matches against 600+ ratings this might make some sense, but that's not who I'm playing. There are only a few of those in the league. I come back to my team mate (and a handful of others in the league) who win 75% of their matches, playing the same opponents I am, without their handicaps going up 80 points. In fact they barely move at all.
That's a point I'm yet to see with any ranking system out there in pool. There is such thing as inflation. Applied to sporting rankings, good system is supposed to take that into account. In case of a pause a player's ranking value should decrease accordingly. The longer his abscence from the game, the lower their current ranking numbers should be. That's a proper way to go.
Hopefully Mike Page implements this into FargoRate. Would do the system only better.
FargoRate is actually based on a 2:1 win ratio for a 100 point difference in ratings. That's 66.7% wins for the better player.
In addition, if you are 200 points above your opponent, you are expected to win 80% -- a 4:1 ratio.
Similarly:
300 points 8:1 ratio for 89%
400 points for 16:1 or 94%
etc.
In addition, the formula that defines the system fills in all the in between win ratios and rating differences.
I'm just an interested observer to all this, but tell me this, what is the robustness of your teammate and the others who are winning 75% like you? If I understand it correctly, the fewer games you have in the system, the more your rating is apt to move, compared to those with more games in the system. From what I've read, the system only starts to get close until you have 200 games in the system, and if I recall correctly, you only have a little more than that.
Again, I just read this stuff and am interested. Mr. Page is the guy to direct this stuff to...
You can put your opponent at 600 in the APP, like I did here, and see what fraction of the games you are expected to win at any rating. 75% against 600+ is pretty much world class play.
There is an easy way to get your Fargorate down.... Stop winning.
Just play the game and don't worry about it. It will average out in the end.
Just play the game and don't worry about it. It will average out in the end.
The thing with pool is that there are very few scouts that look for and set a player's skill like a baseball player getting older. Like making women automatically lower than men, just saying that if a player has no Fargo games for 6 months to lower the rating seems would cause issues. Also, who is to say if a player is not playing at home or in other events that don't report to Fargo? A guy gambling for a year at Hard Times would be pretty well into playing but Fargo won't know.
One of the things I absolutely hate about most leagues is that they bounce skill levels too much. A player can be a 6 out of 7, then somehow drop to a 3 or a 4 (I have witnessed this happen personally), because they did not play for a few months and lost a few games. You don't just forget how to play week to week or month to month unless there is a sudden and impactful medical condition. A guy who reached a certain level in skill, outside of physical issues, would not drop down much at all even if not playing for a while. When this happens, the result is they get cheap easy wins till the handicap catches up to their actual level instead of some fictional level due to simply losing.
Edit... I read Bob Jewett's post, it seems my logic is flawed...
Maybe my logic is off here, but if a 100 point difference in Fargo is double the games needed for an even race, that is 100% increase, correct? So a 600 vs a 675 would be a 75% increase. But the calculator shows that you need to be 160 points over for that. I am probably comparting stats incorrectly though LOL. From this, a 646 would only need to be winning against 500s or 550s at a 75% rate to be ranked that.