Recent content by mikepage

Yeah Xue Zhenqi just won two matches 9-1 to qualify for elimination stage Filler will have to get past Yang Zhiping to survive. Yang Zhiping (780) is not on the Asia top 150 list we just posted because he has 284 games and needs 300--so after this tournament he will be. He did not make it out...

Well good job putting the breaks on that trend yesterday!

We've done those types of comparisons for long running handicapped tournaments, and the results are as we expect them to be. Here are the 160 entrants in the "Fairmatch" singles event at BCAPL in Vegas this year. Average rating 492 with a large spread. Matches depend on rating difference and...

Here are Bergmans games in the last 6 months against opponents under 625. These opponents have a (game weighted) average of 582. Nothing surprising here. Many of these tournaments are in a part of the country where FargoRate is pretty unestablished. What that means in practice is many but not...

Those lists are live in the APP, and they change every day. I'm pretty sure every single one of them has changed from the snapshots we posted for the purpose of cleaning up names/locations.

Anybody have information on China Open? I believe qualifying events going on now and stage 2 Sept 10-14. Any brackets for stage 1?

Yes, APA is a good example of blending players over a wide skill range so they can have effective actual competition. Beyond that, though, we tend to exaggerate how prevalent handicapping is amongst serious players in USA. And we have this fantasy that handicapping doesn't happen elsewhere...

Yes. If he hasn't played much of the other games, it would not be surprising to see him underperform his Fargo Rating. Yes. I don't understand this.

Yes, this is a bigger issue. A single one-pocket game appears to be somewhere between a single 9-Ball game and a race to 2. The issue, though, of whether this category of games--or for that matter any category of games-- helps or hurts Fargo Ratings is about whether the clump of games as a...

This is where Bayesian reasoning comes in. My initial response to Rocket354's claim that Ameer will probably end up much lower (780-820) began with: Let me unpack that. That "Lower? Probably" wasn’t a hunch—it was a Bayesian statement. Here's what that means, in plain English: When a new...

The FargoRate optimization uses all the games but pays far more attention to recent games. The really old games are for all practical purposes ignored. We can still estimate the performance in 500-game chucks, though. You can see that for Morra--you're going to estimate a little below 800...

Lower? Probably As far lower as 820? More likely no than yes. But perhaps. As far lower as 780? Quite unlikely we think One way to think of this is to take someone with a lot of games who is a little under 800 [e.g., John Morra, 794, 22,000 games] and interrogate John's record to see whether...

My son lives in London (Wapping), and has an inkling to get out and play some pool. Anybody know of places to play American pool? Weekly or weekend tournaments? He's about mid to upper 500s.

0-0 is fine. It'll either be ignored or go into the system as 0-0. Either way no harm no foul.

Many people don't internalize very well the role of fluctuations and regression to the mean. What I mean by that is that when you take a little run of unusual success, like Yapp now or Mickey Krause for a bit there or FSR a few years ago, what you're likely seeing is a chance alignment of three...