Recent content by DCMike

Unless you were around before Euclid, our “usual” geometry is a series of deductions from 5 postulates in Euclid’s “Elements”. These deductions are independent of whether or not they describe the natural world Yet it turn out that this geometry (along with more bizarre and unintuitive math)...

"That is my problem with fargorate. What I’m saying is if I’m 10-1 against people that are 400’s seems to boost my fargorate score a lot less then if I get seven games in a race to 10 against a 700." A 500 FR player going 10-1 or better against a 400 is roughly twice as likely as that same...

This. Good chances I would do a similar blast against most opponents … I like my chances better with a blast than with a jump … Though against a reckless/low skilled player who cannot resist a hero shot, I might do the “make ball, call safe” idea of the OP. This is especially true if I...

Against a lot of players, this is a viable strategy. Some players are reckless, overrate their jumping, and foul a lot while doing so. Id rather watch them attempt this jump shot than do it myself. If I call safe, i’m giving them an opportunity to make a mental mistake and go for it...

… and a big thing with so many games being played… People are always pointing to the occasional presence of what they see as “aberrations” as evidence of a bad model, when in fact the opposite is true. What they see is actually a feature, not a bug

Here's more that can be deduced: Mike says you have won 225 out of 282 league games in the last 12 months. This comes out to roughly 80%. According to your screenshot, you've won 75% of ALL games in the last 12 months. (I assume the percentage given is for 12 months, because when...

If your assertion is “My FR is dragged down because I play a lot of league games that I don’t take seriously” , then I doubt people will argue with that. If your assertion is “FR should not treat league/tournament data the same” , and your evidence is merely anecdotal, then you'll get...

No matter how well you play against strong opposition, dogging it against weaker players will drag your FR down. I fail to see the controversy here.

You can use: (F - S) / % + S (Starter rating S subtracted from preliminary (unestablished) fargorate F, then divided by %, where % represents the percentage of games completed towards establishment. This computation is then added to the starter rating.) For example: with a starter...

This makes sense.... and I imagine that in some extreme cases the output of the direct method would be so unrealistic as to be considered pathological, but not so in the other case due to the filtering effect of averaging.

No, robustness is not included in either, and this brings up an important point in addition to the obvious one. The obvious point being that, for either method, a performance rating can be considered reliable for assessing performance only if opponent robustness numbers are high. The...

I believe the method that digitalpool.com uses and the method used on Tom Kerrigan's Home page differ. By experimenting a few times, I can replicate outputs on Tom Kerrigan's website by maximizing the likelihood function for all games played against all (different) opponents, and replicate...

Interesting thought experiment! I would have to agree: that the real deal with coin tossing is eerily surprising. Although the average number of heads has to "even out" to fifty-fifty (law of large numbers), the total number of heads do not. In fact, for totals, the deviations from...

For those interested in reading about how a gambler dispute lead to the birth of mathematical probability , check out The Unfinished Game by Keith Devlin. What is interesting is to see how, starting in 1654, two math geniuses, Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat, wrestle with ideas that we take...

In the Wikipedia entry you can read how the specifics of host behavior matter … go to the “other host behaviors” subsection in the link below. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem