TPA's of today vs TPA's of yesterday

Curt said:

It seems to me that the play of the top flight players of today is better than say 25 years ago. Is this true or is just the jumping and kicking more impressive? Does anyone have a way of comparing TPA averages in major tournaments 25 years ago to those of today? Just curious!

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Accu-Stats used the same rating system 25-30 years ago that they use today. Back then anything over .900 was a really good score for a match. Now that is common among the top players and now they are playing Ten Ball, and that game was pretty much non existent as a tournament game until maybe the last 10-12 years.

You are correct when you say there have been improvements in the top players ability to jump and kick balls. Today's players are far better at these two skills. We used to just kick to hit the ball and try to get lucky. Jumping was avoided whenever possible, with a kick shot preferred. Now good players are jumping to make all kinds of shots.

Knowledge and safety wise, the older players knew how to move pretty well, perhaps because they were all so well versed in Straight Pool. I think only a few of them (Sigel, Buddy, Earl and Varner) missed as infrequently as today's best players. Sigel was in a class by himself when it came to playing error free pool. He might make 3-4 errors (missed position, missed ball, scratch etc.) per 100 shots and the next best were in the 5-7 range.

Curt said:

... Does anyone have a way of comparing TPA averages in major tournaments 25 years ago to those of today? Just curious!

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From 1984-1987, Pat Fleming produced a newsletter with stats, including TPAs, from each of the pro events. Bob Jewett obtained permission to post those newsletters on the website of the San Francisco Billiard Academy. The 22 issues of the newsletter can be found here: http://www.sfbilliards.com/accustats/index.html, and would be fertile ground for investigating your question.

Another source of TPAs on matches going back about 20 years is the Accu-Stats catalog. TPAs are shown for quite a few of the videos listed for sale. https://issuu.com/accu-stats/docs/cat2019

jay helfert said:

Sigel was in a class by himself when it came to playing error free pool. He might make 3-4 errors (missed position, missed ball, scratch etc.) per 100 shots and the next best were in the 5-7 range.

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Sigel averaged over .900 for entire tournaments.