Vegas BCAPL 2016, fargorate problems

You sound like you are *****ing

I think it was a great initial post. He pointed out some potential problems and then offered possible solutions. If that's considered whining then there's not much point in critiquing anything on here.

I really liked the idea of giving teams with established players a higher limit than teams filled with a bunch if guys with starter rating.

Scholar,

Wish my team and league had such a problem. The team I play on each week in Rochester has a total Fargo of 2657! That was when Fargo had me at 668. If you take the top five players from our league by their 16 week average, it only jumps to 2710. Where the hell are we going????? Incidentally, Fargo dropped me to 618 with me not playing a single rack!!!

If I cared to play out of Vegas, the team I play on there has a Fargo of 3277. If we found a player with a lower Fargo to drop our number so we can play, our chances of winning against the other top teams diminishes greatly. Your assessment of the situation hits spot on.

Lyn

Bella Don't Cry said:

Practice is supposed to make a player better. :thumbup:
Only in American Pool is the player handicapped for practicing and becoming better...
Makes no sense.

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Bella,

My BCAPL league in Rochester plays on a ten point system as most do for 8 ball. To penalize me for being the "best" player in the league, I have to play as a 11.5! To add insult to injury, the league says I'm too good to participate in the individual season end awards. They're correct. I am the best player in the league. I practice virtually every day for a few hours. I'm going to be 72 this year. I'm only trying to maintain, not improve.

Of course there is no penalty to those players who only show up on Monday nights to play. They get higher handicaps as they do not play well. How about practicing? How about raising their average to 9 and force them to practice? Not a chance. Easier to $hit on me!

Sorry for the rant but it goes directly to your comment. And yes, I'm angry!

Lyn

I'm curious how this "Fargo" rating is compiled. I know my ranking is higher than plenty of players I've never beat nor consistently finish as well in any tournament as them. My ranking would consider to be close of "pro" but I'm merely a once every 5 year amateur tournament winner. Sounds like this is yet another mistake for ratings and handicapped league pool. -Jason

cardiac kid said:

Bella,

My BCAPL league in Rochester plays on a ten point system as most do for 8 ball. To penalize me for being the "best" player in the league, I have to play as a 11.5! To add insult to injury, the league says I'm too good to participate in the individual season end awards. They're correct. I am the best player in the league. I practice virtually every day for a few hours. I'm going to be 72 this year. I'm only trying to maintain, not improve.

Of course there is no penalty to those players who only show up on Monday nights to play. They get higher handicaps as they do not play well. How about practicing? How about raising their average to 9 and force them to practice? Not a chance. Easier to $hit on me!

Sorry for the rant but it goes directly to your comment. And yes, I'm angry!

Lyn

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I can only emphasise with you Lyn.
At the age of 72 (hope you don't mind me quoting this) you'd think that the younger crowd would have a bigger point to prove by 'whooping your a$$? Just goes to show that without immediate gratification their commitment to anything in life is non-existent.

Talent (or good practice) should be rewarded not sanctioned :thumbup:

Bella Don't Cry said:

Practice is supposed to make a player better. :thumbup:
Only in American Pool is the player handicapped for practicing and becoming better...
Makes no sense.

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AMEN!!:thumbup:

poolscholar said:

[...]

For people who have rose colored glasses and say it will all work out. People will find a way to stack a team when a lot of money is at stake. [...]

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Thank you for your comments.

I'm pretty sure reality falls somewhere in between the rose-colored glasses view and the business-as-usual doom and gloom view.

One thing you can be assured of is there has been a lot of discussion of all these sorts of scenarios,and a lot of thought and discussion went into the published guidelines.

Most of the things you refer to are the same problems that have been around all along. Those problems will be smaller this year--I think significantly smaller. And as we move forward they will be smaller still.

Assigning numbers to players makes these issues more apparent, not bigger. All of the players you refer to as "unrated" that have a starter rating of 525 are players we previously referred to as rated open. Don't get me wrong, I understand some of these players play at a higher level, and I understand some of the team building exercises will involve scouring the room for under-the-radar players. I also understand that teams built from players with established ratings can only get so strong. This is not unlike the old system, where members of a team that did well got bumped to advanced and therefore couldn't team-up the next year. And good players who played a lot were properly characterized as advanced or master, whereas someone who didn't play regularly might have been an "open" that played at a higher level.

We certainly will try to have a mechanism to get team games into the system.

Putting too much effort into elaborate approaches to the starter-rating problem is really just trying to fix the old system in disguise.

Teams like Brian (664), Jared (652), Mike (670), Jesse (737), Dustin (682) are just not going to happen. You may be right that a team of unestablished players will win. We will have to wait and see. But I truly believe a team near the cap will be a competitive team and the team skill range will be far narrower than before. These waters will be less shark infested than ever...

More data makes us better, always.

poolscholar said:

There are two divisions in vegas BCA teams this year, five man teams. Lower div capped at 3000 total fargo rating, the upper at 3250. See form http://www.playcsipool.com/uploads/7/3/5/9/7359673/2016_bcapl_mixed_teams_entry_form_fillable.pdf

My prediction. The winning team in the lower division will be composed of mostly unrated players in the fargo rating system.

I have 7 guys now on my roster. Looking at my team now, putting together a good team for the lower division will be impossible, as we are slightly over the 3000 cap unless we play with our very weak, unseasoned player and leave out our strongest. Also if i put my strongest 5 players up we are slightly over the upper cap (by 7 points). Our team would get killed in the upper bracket if we dropped two strong players.

The problem is there are plenty of guys that play 600+ skill that have a "starter rating" of 525. They may never play singles or an event that uses fargorate and will never get a rating.

Possible solutions
-Limit the amount of unrated players on a team

-Increase the "starter rating" to encourage people to play singles and get a real rating, they can still sandbag but at least it would make them play an event or two

-Allow teams with all established ratings a bit of a bit higher cap or allow them to take a one game handicap. It is silly that the players that play the most and have real ratings are being punished in the "largest tournament in the world"

-Hopefully they figured out scoring for teams so that individual fargoratings will adjust during teams (doubt it but I can hope)

For people who have rose colored glasses and say it will all work out. People will find a way to stack a team when a lot of money is at stake. Strong master teams have robbed the lower div in the past (I know one of these teams personally). Given the previous snafu with the Asian pros coming over and robbing the singles...hopefully they are mindful of these issues

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I have never played in an event that uses Fargo Ratings. They told me I was a 625 and another person said I was a 525. The 625 was because they googled and I have won tournaments before. I dont like this now, I am debating about going. There are so many unkowns...like where would I rank, if they give a bunch of starter ratings to others that play better than me (525) how do I even have a chance?

mikepage said:

Putting too much effort into elaborate approaches to the starter-rating problem is really just trying to fix the old system in disguise.

Teams like Brian (664), Jared (652), Mike (670), Jesse (737), Dustin (682) are just not going to happen. You may be right that a team of unestablished players will win. We will have to wait and see. But I truly believe a team near the cap will be a competitive team and the team skill range will be far narrower than before. These waters will be less shark infested than ever...

More data makes us better, always.

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Mike,

Agree the waters may be less infested next year but not this year. Wish I had the problem of your example. The best five players from our Rochester league barely crest 2700. My weekly 5 man team is barely 2600. Where are we going in an ocean of 3000? Trophy Teams? Not on your life. My Vegas team is over 3250. Not going there either.

Going to wait to enter the singles events in Vegas till the very last moment. I can play the "regular" 8 and 9 ball or the 9 ball and Senior event. I'll give it this one year. I'll be 72. If I feel I'm being thrown to the 50 year old sharks, it will be my last. I have airline reservations already. Thankfully on Southwest.

My guess is there are a lot of players (and teams) in my position. Really, really hope BCAPL made the correct decision for this year. Perhaps the future will be brighter? Can't tell for sure as my crystal ball is still somewhat clouded!

Lyn

mikepage said:

Assigning numbers to players makes these issues more apparent, not bigger. All of the players you refer to as "unrated" that have a starter rating of 525 are players we previously referred to as rated open.

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Have you run an analysis on the 200 number? For example, if you take all the people who have over 200 games, at what point in their progression was their rating without the influence of the starting point, more accurate (i.e. closer to their eventual rating from that point on) than the one with it?

As all FargoRatings become more robust, the speed at which players approach their 'actual' rating from their starting rating should increase. And reducing that number would have the perceived effect of seeming more fair.

Is there a more reasonable decay rate for starting rating than the current linear one?

Thank you kindly.

mikepage said:

Most of the things you refer to are the same problems that have been around all along. Those problems will be smaller this year--I think significantly smaller. And as we move forward they will be smaller still.

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There is an irony that being more transparent might lead to more complaints.

But I think another problem is false precision. The starter ratings, like mine of 525 based on zero games, give a sense that it's more accurate than "open" or "casual" but they're really not. I don't know if you should do it differently - how do you say 500-ish or "95% CI 400-600"? But as long as exact-sounding numbers are used, you're probably going to have more complaints than if general categories are used, fair or not.

Corwyn_8 said:

Have you run an analysis on the 200 number? For example, if you take all the people who have over 200 games, at what point in their progression was their rating without the influence of the starting point, more accurate (i.e. closer to their eventual rating from that point on) than the one with it?

As all FargoRatings become more robust, the speed at which players approach their 'actual' rating from their starting rating should increase. And reducing that number would have the perceived effect of seeming more fair.

Is there a more reasonable decay rate for starting rating than the current linear one?

Thank you kindly.

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This is a good post, but don't you suppose that the convergence point happens at around 200 games?

I would hope, at least, that they simply didn't take the yards of data they have acquired over the years and arbitrarily assigned the point at which they labeled a rating as being robust.

Also, I'm assuming that the starter ratings were set according the the mean/median of the correlating category group.

I'm sure Mike Page can bring some clarity to these point.

Corwyn_8 said:

Have you run an analysis on the 200 number? For example, if you take all the people who have over 200 games, at what point in their progression was their rating without the influence of the starting point, more accurate (i.e. closer to their eventual rating from that point on) than the one with it?

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We have done a variety of analyses, but not that one. I like it.

As all FargoRatings become more robust, the speed at which players approach their 'actual' rating from their starting rating should increase. And reducing that number would have the perceived effect of seeming more fair.

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Yes, and the density of our data is region specific. So a new player playing games in a well established region converges to a reliable rating more quickly than a player playing games in a region we are sparse.

Is there a more reasonable decay rate for starting rating than the current linear one?

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I don't know. Maybe.

For the most part our attention and interest is in rating players accurately and uniformly when we DO have data, not so much on rating players when we don't have data or don't have much data. The whole starter-rating thing is merely a mechanism to include people who are not yet established in some reasonable way into events that are set up in the language of the ratings. If we can treat those players more-or-less as they were treated before (players rated master higher than those rated advanced higher than those rated open higher than those rated leisure), then we are doing OK.

When players who are unestablished say "you have me as a 525, when all these people who everybody knows play way better than me are also 525," my response is...

Yes, of course. So what? You are not yet rated. You have to play to get rated. And if you don't play now, you will have to play later to get rated. And before, you were called "open," and those people who play better than you were called "open" as well. The DIFFERENCE is now when you all play, you contribute to making your rating and everybody elses rating more accurate. This was not the case before, except in the instances where a player got bumped up a division based on performance

yelvis111 said:

[...]
I would hope, at least, that they simply didn't take the yards of data they have acquired over the years and arbitrarily assigned the point at which they labeled a rating as being robust. [...]

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The decision to use 200 games is not arbitrary. It is an approximate balance of a number of different considerations.

It is not unlike choosing a person's 18th birthday as the moment he or she goes from

no voting rights to full voting rights
no ability to enter into a contract to full ability to enter into a contract
no autonomy over his or her body to full autonomy over his or her body.

Is 18th birthday an arbitrary point? No not really. It is a considered point. Everybody would agree 9 years old is too early as it includes too many people who are sufficiently developmentally immature to make reasonable decisions and allowing 9-year olds full personal autonomy and rights of a citizen has bad effect on them and others. And everybody would agree 32 years old is too late as it excludes many people perfectly capable of making rational decisions who should have personal autonomy and participate in a democratic society.

So where between 9-years-old and 32-years old is the right line? I don't know. Is 18 good? Well it's not crazy. It's probably the right ballpark. Would 17 or 19 be better? I don't know. It depends on how you weigh the harm of more or immature people making decisions that affect themselves and others versus the benefit of not excluding people who actually are ready accept that responsibility.

So no, the line is not arbitrary. It is a considered balance. As is our "200 game" line.

Also, I'm assuming that the starter ratings were set according the the mean/median of the correlating category group.

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they were set with full awareness of the range of player ratings in each of the former groups.

mikepage said:

It is not unlike choosing a person's 18th birthday as the moment he or she goes from

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This really is not even close to being the same kind of argument. Don't take this as a knock, but your being a mathematician, I would have expected an entirely different sort of answer from you.

Pax,

Taek Chang