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Yikes, I don’t think I’d be able to pot more balls on a carom table under those conditions.

I tend to give many of these amateurs the benefit of the doubt. They are playing on tv for the first time against a top player and on likely tighter tables and faster cloth than they are used to. That can make anyone under a 700 level look like a banger.

At least I got the number right! Thanks for that, this always stuck with me as the benchmark for world class play over the long haul.

I’m not the right person to defend the merits of Curling since I’ve only played once and did some research on practice times because I was curious. I understand golf well enough and I’ve played it a bit but never tried to get better at it. But I’m also not trying to rank golfs difficulty at all...

Thanks! This makes sense to me and aligns reasonably closely with what I was thinking was required to win at that level. I remember SJM posting that Irving Crane told him he felt you needed to average 35 balls per attempted inning in order to win a world championship. That doesn’t sound far off.

I think part of that is due to how transferrable athleticism is in some sports. When you see lists of multi sport athletes, it’s usually football players trying baseball or vice versa. But you never see athletes switch to basketball with any modicum of success, and certainly not golf.

Curling is a lot harder than it looks. I tried it a number of years ago and the target feels like it’s a mile away. Though I admit that some of the challenge seems to come from the fact that you cannot practice it. Not like we understand it on pool. There are usually too few sheets available for...

One way to find the comparable standard might be to compare the frequency of scratch golfers to something similar in pool. For example, 1.6% of golfers who carry a USGA handicap are scratch or better (40,000). So what Fargo rating accounts for 1.6% of the Fargo Rated population and how far is...

So what is “par” for pool?

I agree it’s important to compare similar types of activities. I remember ESPN had an article ranking the most difficult sports, but their criteria was silly. They had separate ranking categories for “strength”, “power” and “explosiveness”. When you are rating sports on what is essentially...

They are doing well, but let’s not count our chickens before the fat lady sings.

What would be the average for match winners out of curiosity? Do you have that public? I’d love to see!

The link I posted above is as close as you will get. The data you are looking for is there for the major tournaments but it’s not compiled in any way and I’m pretty sure no one else has done so and released it publicly.

You can records of world and national 14.1 championships here, https://www.scribd.com/user/10247027/Deno-J-Andrews I’m not aware of any site or person who has aggregated this data. But if you were to spend time copying it all into Excel, you’d be able to get some good data. The average run is...

I’d love to one day take those PDFs of the World 14.1 championships and get that data into excel. We could see who had the most 100s, the highest average high run per match, the widest point spread etc. Sadly I don’t think we could determine the 50+ rate because you could theoretically have...

I feel like that second metric is possibly even more important. In snooker, the stat that really shows the divide between the players is the frequency of 50+ and 70+ breaks. Similarly, I think in straight pool the most important stat would likely be the frequency of 50-70 ball runs. I think this...

I get that, but the point is that given the difference in how both players collected their money, it’s not doesn’t definitively establish Fedor as the better player. He may well have won more money than FSR if he had equal opportunities, but he didn’t. You can’t give him credit for what he might...

FSR has 126k from 6 tournaments. Fedor has made 137k from 20 tournaments.

He can, but Judd used to hit them a lot harder too and has backed off his speed a bit. Even world champions can find things to improve at.

My math isn’t good enough to give actual odds, but the chances of potting a ball are probably higher than most people think but lower than what would make it worthwhile. Probably 1 in 4 or 1 in 5. But then getting the max is a tall order because those smash breaks tend to send the reds all over...