The Straight pool league I play in has three divisions. Each division races to a pre determined number - ie - all players in the middle division race to 100. There is often too much disparity between individual player skill levels within a division. If your league individually handicaps players - how is it done? Is it done by a player's historic balls per inning average or average total points or some other method? And and all suggestions for a fair way to handicap are welcome.
How To Handicap
- Thread starter fiftyyardline
- Start date
BPI is a really, really bad way to establish handicaps unless you have no other way to set initial handicaps. Here's an article about how several rooms around here do it:
http://www.sfbilliards.com/articles/2003-06.pdf
Here are some charts that you can use to set up different match lengths as needed: http://www.sfbilliards.com/14.1_charts.htm
http://www.sfbilliards.com/articles/2003-06.pdf
Here are some charts that you can use to set up different match lengths as needed: http://www.sfbilliards.com/14.1_charts.htm
Ok - those are some good ideas. Bob - your article was excellent. Thanks for the help.
Last season I played one season in a straight pool league. The setup was simiiar, with 3 divisions playing round robin with everyone in your division. Beginners to 75, Intermediates to 85, and Pros to 100. Come playoff time, everyone's handicap was adjusted after establishing a history of playing 10-14 matches.
We had good success doing something similar to what Bob describes but with a twist. League standings are based on "payout points" earned.
So let's say the chart says Bob goes to 100 and I go to 60.
What we do is play an unhandicapped race to 100, and the winner gets a point.
A second point is awarded to the player who beats the spread. So if Bob won 100 to 50, he'd get two points and I'd get 0. If he won 100 to 70, we'd each get a point.
A point is also available to either of us for beating our current league high run. In a 14-week season, most people earned about 4 high-run points.
This format favors the better player somewhat, but not all that much.
http://www.fargobilliards.com/pool-leagues/straight-pool/
Interesting system. Are the high runs all reset at the start of the season?
Around here, high run awards are based on what each player's "goal" is and what percentage of your goal you achieve. The goal is roughly the highest run you might get in 10 seasons. The winner of the match is allowed to continue his run at the end of the game. The winning goal percentage is generally around 60-70%.
Last edited:
We will soon start our second season, so I don't know yet ;-)
I think we will reset them. Players enjoyed having their high run creep up and getting rewarded along the way. There were, of course, jokes about a player just happening to get a 17 one week, then an 18 the next and a 19 the week after.... Our experience, though, is that didn't happen.
Our handicap system is based on Bob Jewett article also. It serves us well. One difference we have is we use win / loss differential avg per game to calculate change in rating rather then up/down by arbitrary amount.
-Dennis
If everyone just plays to win, this will work. For new players, it will get them to the right rating faster. A problem only comes up if you have players who try to "game" the system. One technique is to lose by large margins when you lose and win by small margins when you win. Only a few players will try to run this sort of scam. If you're worried about it or suspicious it is possible to look at the win/loss margins for each player.
One point to note is that you should probably do the arithmetic by percentages rather than ball count for the margin. If a player loses by 20 balls, it's different if he was going to 30 or 120.
Good info here. Thanks for posting.
Kevin
Kevin
Here's the way our spreadsheet works.
Let's say Bob played Mike and the score was
Bob 120 Mike 42
The spreadsheet notes that we played 162 points of straight pool. It then uses our rating difference to determine an expected score that adds to 162. Let's say the expected score based on our rating difference is
Bob 103 Mike 59
So Bob exceeded his expectation by 17 points, and Mike fell shy of his expectation by 17 points.
The formula that we use to update the ratings has some subtleties, but it is close to the following description.
Bob's rating increase is (4.2/MBOB) * 17
MBOB is the number of matches Bob has played with the caveat that we won't let it be smaller than 3 nor larger than 30.
So if Bob is a new player (new guy, first few games of the season), then his rating goes up by 24 points [(4.2/3)*17]. By the end of a 12-week season, Bob's rating would go up by 6 points instead of 24 with the same performance [(4.2/12)*17].
Mike's rating would go down by (4.2/MMIKE) * 17
We have data for 26 players who all played 14 matches within the group. We are able to compute the optimal ratings for the group after the fact. These optimal ratings don't depend on any updating at all. Then we are able to recreate the league week by week and see how fast various update procedures converge on the actual. Something close to the above procedure gets there pretty quickly. In other words halfway through the season it doesn't matter much whether we started with good guesses or started everybody the same.