The unestablished fargo player
- Thread starter JC
- Start date
established players are sandbagging, too...
Got that right. I know a couple players that keep their FR around 530 even though they both are probably 600 maybe a tad higher. I don't see how this can ever be stopped. Some will always cheat the system.
I think you should be a little more circumspect here.
Let's take a look. Here are the divisions
Bronze2: 270-388
Bronze 1 389-441
Silver 2 442-482
Silver 1 483-518
Gold 519-563
Platinum 564 - 620
Elite - over 620
Distributed amongst these divisions are 930 players, of which 641 have established Fargo Rating and 289 don't. So let's say for those who don't have an established rating you do your best guess. In some cases you'll be high and in other cases you'll be low but you hope to get it about right on average.
Let's say you DO --get it about right on average, that is. What would you expect?
You would expect that if you looked at ALL the matches across the board where one player was established and the other wasn't, you'd see about half--close to 50%--won by the established player and about half won by the unestablished player.
Here there were 724 established/unestablished matches, and 354 (49%) were won by the established player. Exactly half would be 362, just a few more. This is a result you might expect if you flipped a coin 724 times. So the big picture is things are good. Things are about right on average.
30% of the players are unestablished. At first glance you might think this means 30% of the division winners might come from the unestablished group. Here that would be 2 out of the 7 divisions, when this year it was actually 4 out of the 7 divisions won by an unestablished player. This is pretty small numbers for identifying a statistical problem. This is what your "against all odds" comment references.
But let's think this situation through a bit more. Let's say you have a division that goes from 475 to 525. Your established players in this group average 500. Your unestablished players in this group--those with guessed ratings-- average 500 in actual skill as well. That's what the 50/50 match win statistic tells us. But wait! There is more slop --more variance-- in the guessed ratings than there is in the actual ratings. As a result, there is BOTH more likely to be an unestablished player with skill notably below the range and notably above the range. For this reason you might actually expect more than a statistically proportional number to be division winners.
This is all true even if there is no hanky panky/funny business.
What about sandbagging?
Detecting this before the fact is sometimes easy and sometimes not easy. After the fact is a different story. Now that these division winners are known, we can simply look at their game history. Did they just finish a league season where their performance was notably below prior tournament performance? Do they have suspiciously poor match scores in some small weekly tournament?
We see nothing--no evidence of funny business. One unestablished division winner had a preliminary rating based just on 130 tournament games played in Western BCA 7-8 years ago. Sure it would be good if he had recent league games in (don't know why his division is not using LMS). But there is nothing suspicious.
Another unestablished division winner had a 425 starter rating and 8 weeks or so of recent league data. And week after week those league games were bringing his rating up. This not what you expect to see for someone trying to protect a low starter rating for the purpose of entering a tournament.
There may be some things WBCA could do to protect the field a little. Move unestablished players who fall in the top third of a division up a division is one example. But there really is nothing broken here. Chicken Little can settle down...
You are so right! Meanwhile my team is unable to compete in some BCA tournaments because the cap for Fargo ratings is 2900 for the team, which prevents a 5-man team of players rated around 600 from competing. So, doing the math, we'd have to sub in a player rated around 500 or less in order to play as a team. But it's not common to have a 490 or 510 player playing on a team with 600+ rated players.
In BCA events here you can recruit players. Two players from the same league team must play every round. The others don't even have to play in the same league.
The cap for our team event is 3,200. There will be some very strong teams. I think the cap is too high but that is just my opinion. My team is around 3,000.
Ha,Ha, chicken little,thats some funny shit.
I think that is getting more and more common as people realize there are different ways to create a strong league team.
Here are three competitive 4-player teams in my league division. Mixing in one or more lower-rated players with team caps gives an opportunity to mentor an emerging player or play with a good friend without sacrificing the competitiveness of the team
Attachments
JC
Coos Cues
You have access to all this data Mike, all I have is my lying eyes. As a field things are probably pretty good as you say but somehow there seems to be that one who slips through the cracks somehow and dominates the field where some human thought they belonged. There will be a new batch of them along next time, count on it.
It only takes one bad apple to spoil the barrel you know.
I am not criticizing Fargo. I'm a huge believer. What I mentioned had little to do with the rating system and more to do with human behavior. I only mentioned 6 divisions because the Elite division the players are all well known.
BTW the stats in LMS have a small issue where they aren't adding up correctly. I mentioned it to Gary a while back but as of this morning it's still a glitch. Go to Statistics/Teams and click on a team. The individual players winning percentage is correct but the team's winning percentage appears to have an incorrect formula.
JC
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I like the idea of providing opportunity for lower-rated players with potential. And league play should be enjoyable too, not all about fargo ratings.
I don't do leagues. What i'm talking about is tournament play. Here in my area there's a lot of Fargo events that are usually 600/under, 575/under etc. Not naming players or places but more than a couple keep their FR artificially low to get into certain events. Its not a lot of people i know but it still looks bad.
.
Playing on the lemon... or stalling.... Happens all the time, at all levels.
From sfbilliards web site... Stall:
As in "Joe get off the stall, I know you're a better player than this." The person is
playing below his ability in order to obtain a more favorable match at a later time.
Hiding your true skill.
.
Playing on the lemon... or stalling.... Happens all the time, at all levels.
From sfbilliards web site... Stall:
As in "Joe get off the stall, I know you're a better player than this." The person is
playing below his ability in order to obtain a more favorable match at a later time.
Hiding your true skill.
.
There are tons of claims like that. When we DO get names (there are a lot of rating-detectives out there) and we look into it, the story is almost always not what the reporter thinks it is.
There are some awkward realities with attempts to "manage" a rating.
$10 tournaments are usually races to 2 or 3
$10 league nights are usually 5 or 6 games
Let's take someone pays that $$ and dumps.
First week: lose 3-1 and 2-0 . --now you've logged 6 games
Second week: lose 3-1 and 2-1 --you've logged another 7 games, 13 total
It'll look really bad if you go two and out three weeks in a row, so now you win a match or two but still donate your $10
Do this for 6 weeks or 10 weeks and hope FargoRate doesn't catch it as a statistical anomaly and suspect data and nobody puts it all together on facebook generating all the picture of people eating popcorn. Damn it sure would be good if all these tournament brackets weren't public!
Then you enter a $50 xxx&under tournament hoping you found a tournament for which xxx is a little under where you really play and above your sculpted rating---That part's not so easy because is's not a very big window.
So you enter the 520 & under tournament when you really would have been 528 had you not done your craft. It's a race to 7 because it is a bigger tournament. You win the first two, lose the 3rd, and then win 3 of 4 matches on the B side to finish 5/6 and get paid $200. But damn, you've logged 84 games at full speed in the process. These games on this day have as much influence as half a league season or 10-weeks of the weekly tournament.
It's possible for the big picture to be good and for JC's point to be valid. Even if the majority of unestablished players are rated about right, and even if the errors are normally distributed, the most underrated players are still likely to win their divisions. They don't need to be sandbagging intentionally, for sure, but I'd expect a lot of the players who went deep into the tournaments to be unestablished. My guess is that a lot of unestablished players were 2-and-out as well.
Yes. Another complication is that in the higher divisions nearly everybody is established. In the lowest 3 divisions, established/unestablished is
102/63
106/60
53/64
Isn't it true that a tourney winner will play well in the event?
Dumping and dogging look similar, so do winning and coming off the stall.
Dumping and dogging look similar, so do winning and coming off the stall.
I’ve played on a Bca league for two years now, almost every week. And I only have 186 games in Fargo. I don’t know if my LO isn’t entering everything or Fargo hasn’t processed the entries yet. I just know that I’ve paid my dues and played my games and it wouldn’t be right to keep me out of a bca tournament if I showed up.