Recent content by mikepage

And along the lines of the cognitive dissonance of a middle-aged SD Kid, Gary Spaeth's FATHER was the Cincinnatti Kid ;-).

Is there any evidence he has or has ever had a passport?

I see two separate issues. (1) transferability of skills can be asymmetric It can, for example, be easier to go from Violin to Viola than from Viola to Violin, (and perhaps snooker to American pool, over American pool to snooker) without violin being a harder or somehow more impressive...

Big and little Ko don't have 1,000 games. But they have about 800 games and they're behind only Filler

Filler/Gorst Wiktor Z.

What I have here is performance for all games over the last 12 months with everybody who has 1000+ games during that time. (So Ko's are excluded). Importantly these numbers ignore the player's Fargo Rating. So no veteran is buoyed by past success and no rising star is held down by earlier play...

Prior opponents doing poorly is rarely the main story. Think of it like a 401(k). Your account usually does not fall because one stock had a bad day. It falls because the whole sector you were heavily invested in got repriced. Fargo works similarly. If most of your opponents come from the same...

An average day has 35,000 - 40,000 new games added to the system. This in general gives us a better understanding of how everybody plays, including all your opponents and you. This part, even without new play from you, could raise or lower you by a few tenths of a point or even points. Any...

Some people's impression of the "shootout" match approach was solidified based on an earlier inferior incarnation of the approach, when a shootout occurred simply when players split the first two races to 4. That's too many shootouts. Now you need to split two races to 4 AND get to hill-hill on...

This is a subtlety. But the FargoRate approach doesn't require or assume that a late-stage high-pressure match is somehow the same as an early-stage match in a lower-profile tournament. Rather it assumes that averaged over your high-pressure matches, your opponents were also playing in...

Nice list! Mine is mostly similar but a few new names (1) Moritz (22) (2) Szymon (21) (3) Bernie (21) (4) Kledio (20) (5) Felix (18) (6) Albert (17) (7) Yannick (21) (8) Manas (18) (9) Maks Benko (16) (10) Dennis Laszkowski (20) Then Arseni (22), Karl Gnadeberg (20), Mika (19), Walter Laikre...

It's about 35% between 450 and 550 (shown). If you have excel, you can input this formula =NORM.DIST(550,469,106,TRUE)-NORM.DIST(450,469,106,TRUE) 106 is the standard deviation, and this gets the fraction under 550 and subtracts from it the fraction under 450.

Amongst players with an established rating, it is mean (average) 469, median (middle person) 471

What we did was look at the historical records of just the 63 players entered in this specific event. This is key. Lots of data makes things average out, yes. But it doesn't wipe out the signal; it reveals the signal if there is one. This is actually what we would expect to see for the winner...