Recent content by mikepage

So Alex Kazakis (824) played in the Scottish Open last May. This is what he was doing a few weeks before and a few weeks after. I'd say Athens players are pretty fortunate.

Yes, and maybe maybe we should not think of this effort that many of us will enjoy following as being just about him (or his chances of success or his motivations). What if it plays a role in inspiring others who have a bigger chance? What if we enjoy the journey? What if it inspires us to try...

So long as they keep playing a lot--which is likely if they are improving--the rating will nearly track. Look, for example, at Lukas Fracasso-Verner. At this time in 2022, he was 711 with 5288 games. He hit 6,000 games that fall. So, June 2022 - 711 June 2023 - 736 June 2024 - 748 June 2025...

Weird subtlety: an 11-10 handicap may be close to fair, but that doesn’t mean 11-10 is the most likely score in a race to 11. Because of the stopping rule, the winner must win the last rack. So 11-10 requires first getting to 10-10, while 11–9 only requires getting to 10-9. Hill-hill has more...

There isn't a "lifetime" Fargo Rating. Or if we wanted such a thing, we'd need to do a completely different computation. There is only our best estimate of current skill considering all the information. You feel like some sort of post-FargoRate assessment of a player's last 500 games would...

Golf is not a network-constructed measuring instrument. It is literally counting strokes.

I don't know the answer. Some tournament he was in at some point in his career must have been removed from the system most likely. Today, for instance, we realized the 2025 SBE pro event was duplicated, and so we removed one instance. Those players will see a reduction in robustness and won't...

Dechaine played in 2024 US Open and also in the very first US Pro Billiard Series (Predator) event in AZ in 2021.

He has about 1,000 games in the last two years

This is players under 23; At 28, he's aged out.

He won more of his games this past year than expected. The system can't tell to what extent that's an aberration (either he got more rolls than his opponents or his opponents were not as strong as we thought they were) or his baseline skill is higher than we thought. You can think of 830 as the...

Old age and medical issues These are two different things, one the system handles fine and the other it sometimes doesn't. Normal decline with age is gradual, and provided the player keeps getting games into the system it is tracked fine. I'll give you two players with more than 10,000 games...

Yes, correct.

This is your performance 300 games at a time, where each dot is estimated performance for the 300 games leading up to that date.

The player will move up at the same rate playing games against a 550 or a 350 or a 750 --doesn't matter so long as he is playing the same number of games against each.