Siming Chen vs Donny Mills

iusedtoberich

iusedtoberich

AzB Silver Member
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mikepage said:
They played 109 games. Had they stopped at 100 games, the score at that point was 55 to 45, consistent with 30 points apart.

And had Siming just closed out the last two games from there, the 102 games would have worked out to exactly a 35-point spread. Now I know that didn't happen and instead they played 9 games from there with Donny winning those 7-to-2.

But think about how easily it could have turned out that Siming wins those 2 games. And think about how different the Monday morning story on AZ Billiards would be. Do people really want their whole view of where the ratings of women belong to be contingent on Donny closing out with 7-to-2 (what actually happened) rather than Siming winning 2 games. These swings are a ridiculously small amount of data.
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Those 109 games were enough to move Chen 2.9 points. IMO, that is HUGE.

I'm going to figure out some bet for the action room and any takers, that the top 10 women will come down a bit in about 3 years time, as there becomes more and more direct coupling. I'll need a fair way to compare now and future ratings, and figure out number of movement I can get good action on:)
 
MattPoland

MattPoland

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mikepage said:
We haven't looked at this for SVB in particular. But yes, the expectation is the ratings are the same.
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I would guess SVB B gets to put more packages together and thereby wins by higher margins, e.g. has a higher win percentage.

SVB A wins by more narrow margins because his opponent gets more chances to break, e.g. has a lower win percentage.

Wouldn’t a player with a higher win percentage have a higher rating? Looking at AtLarge stats, the professional that breaks has better chances of winning the individual game.




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donuteric

donuteric

always a newbie
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MattPoland said:
I would guess SVB B gets to put more packages together and thereby wins by higher margins, e.g. has a higher win percentage.

SVB A wins by more narrow margins because his opponent gets more chances to break, e.g. has a lower win percentage.

Wouldn’t a player with a higher win percentage have a higher rating? Looking at AtLarge stats, the professional that breaks has better chances of winning the individual game.




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The reverse is also true. There are plenty of players in the world that can put packages against Shane, and have routinely done so. The most recent one I can recall is at the International when little Ko ran a 5 and out. With more accumulating data, this sort of difference tends to fade away.
 
iusedtoberich

iusedtoberich

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skip100 said:
It would be one thing if people were making reasoned cases about weak couplings and ratings being off by 5-10 points.

Instead we were treated to arrogant, chauvinist claims about Chen having no chance against any kind of decent male pro because she's a girl. No surprise that argument was proven wrong.

Anyone who watched, say, the early rounds of Turning Stone knows that pros in the mid to high 700s are damn good but they also miss shots.
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A lot of the "chauvinists" as you and Russ are calling us, had the opinion that Siming was going to lose not because we are pigs, but because of history. That history, at least in my case, was based on seeing other TOP TOP women play with our own eyes 5 feet away from us. I watched Karen play many times in regional events in the Philly area when she was at her best in the 2000's. She was even, if maybe a slight underdog, with the top Philly players Like Eddie Abraham, Josh Brothers, and Bob Maidoff. Those guys are also a bit off their peeks today, but they would have been low to mid level pros at their peaks, like a Mike Davis speed, IMO.

So for another woman to come along and be WAY better than Karen, seemed quite improbable.

Its like when you compare Mosconi, to Harold Worst, to Buddy Hall, to Earl Strickland, to Shane. Each was the top tier in their generation. From many accounts of people that saw multiple generations, none of these top guys played "better" than any other, there are simply "more" top guys in newer generations. So with that logic, if there was a male player today that someone said was 40% BETTER than Shane, that would be super super super hard to believe, as in the last 50 years, the names I gave above were probably all coin flips if we can match them all up in their primes.

Well, that is what we had with Siming. The numbers say she is WAY better than Karen, who has stood the test of time as the top tier woman from about the late 1990's to the early 2010's. HISTORY says that's not possible.

Couple HISTORY with the FargoRate for the top Asian women being like a desserted island, and you have people like me, who you and Russ call Chavanists, to bet on Donny. It has nothing to do with we are pigs, and everything to do wiht we have a lot of HISTORY of decades of women not being anywhere near a top man.

All that said, I'm a believer that Siming is damn good, after watching her play. I do think now she will beat Donny in the long run. I also still think her and her top piers are still overrated in FargoRate, and that as a group they will shift downwards as more direct coupling happens.
 
MattPoland

MattPoland

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donuteric said:
The reverse is also true. There are plenty of players in the world that can put packages against Shane, and have routinely done so. The most recent one I can recall is at the International when little Ko ran a 5 and out. With more accumulating data, this sort of difference tends to fade away.
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Yes but. Wouldn’t the highest rated player in the world ON AVERAGE put more packages and bigger packages on everyone else more often than they put packages on him. In general doesn’t winner breaks favor the stronger player to win by slightly wider margins than alternate break?


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mikepage

mikepage

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iusedtoberich said:
Those 109 games were enough to move Chen 2.9 points. IMO, that is HUGE.

I'm going to figure out some bet for the action room and any takers, that the top 10 women will come down a bit in about 3 years time, as there becomes more and more direct coupling. I'll need a fair way to compare now and future ratings, and figure out number of movement I can get good action on:)
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Well the TOP WOMEN came down about 0.9 points, not 2.9 points. The rest is personal to Siming. One difference between you and me is I have been watching these tide shifts for a long time, and my sense of them is they shift a half point in one direction. Then the next time a point in the other direction, and so forth. It's not like there is evidence they're itching to go preferentially in one direction.

Donny/Siming is not the only coupling through Donny

He has also played
Chezka Centano [747] (7-11) and
Karen Corr [721] (8-9)

So with 18 games against a 747, 17 games against a 721, and 109 games against a 783, it is as though Donny has played 144 games against a 771.

His record is 67 wins, 77 losses --pretty much right where it is expected to most likely be.
 
BeiberLvr

BeiberLvr

AzB Silver Member
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iusedtoberich said:
A lot of the "chauvinists" as you and Russ are calling us, had the opinion that Siming was going to lose not because we are pigs, but because of history. That history, at least in my case, was based on seeing other TOP TOP women play with our own eyes 5 feet away from us. I watched Karen play many times in regional events in the Philly area when she was at her best in the 2000's. She was even, if maybe a slight underdog, with the top Philly players Like Eddie Abraham, Josh Brothers, and Bob Maidoff. Those guys are also a bit off their peeks today, but they would have been low to mid level pros at their peaks, like a Mike Davis speed, IMO.

So for another woman to come along and be WAY better than Karen, seemed quite improbable.

Its like when you compare Mosconi, to Harold Worst, to Buddy Hall, to Earl Strickland, to Shane. Each was the top tier in their generation. From many accounts of people that saw multiple generations, none of these top guys played "better" than any other, there are simply "more" top guys in newer generations. So with that logic, if there was a male player today that someone said was 40% BETTER than Shane, that would be super super super hard to believe, as in the last 50 years, the names I gave above were probably all coin flips if we can match them all up in their primes.

Well, that is what we had with Siming. The numbers say she is WAY better than Karen, who has stood the test of time as the top tier woman from about the late 1990's to the early 2010's. HISTORY says that's not possible.

Couple HISTORY with the FargoRate for the top Asian women being like a desserted island, and you have people like me, who you and Russ call Chavanists, to bet on Donny. It has nothing to do with we are pigs, and everything to do wiht we have a lot of HISTORY of decades of women not being anywhere near a top man.

All that said, I'm a believer that Siming is damn good, after watching her play. I do think now she will beat Donny in the long run. I also still think her and her top piers are still overrated in FargoRate, and that as a group they will shift downwards as more direct coupling happens.
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I don't think you are a chauvinist. Just someone that doesn't quite understand how FR actually works.
 
JB Cases

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The IPT was a good test of women against men in the same way that 20 600-700 speed players going against 100 750 speed players is a test to see how well the lower speeds do against a field of far stronger players. What would be interesting is to plugin the fargo rates for each match and then see how the actual scores per match correlated to the predictions.

I am going to bet that the scores were mostly close to prediction regardless of whether the match was male/male, male/female, or female/female. It is CLEAR that the AVERAGE strength of women is lower than the AVERAGE for men. But what is ALSO clear is that the average strength is now both higher than it as 10 years ago and that the gap is narrowing a bit.

The world top 100 for men goes from 821 to 764 with an average (estimated) of about 790ish.

The world top 100 for women goes from 780 to 594 with an average (estimated) of about 700ish.

With a 100 point difference the higher rated player is expected to win games at a 2:1 ratio. Or to put it another way the player at 100 points higher is twice the player. So ON AVERAGE the male players are about twice as good as the female players when looking at the top 100 players. Now if we took out the female players the top 100 the average would shift down slightly for the males but would not be much different.

So that much is clear. It's not really any different than comparing the average speed of the players in OKC to the top 100 players on Earth. YOu can pick any demographic you want, all players named John, and the average skill of those players is likely to be far less than the average of the strongest players on earth.

But, and this is the important part, for the first time we have a way to couple the performance data and tie all players together regardless of gender or group and rate them accurately. So that now it's not about women being on average weaker than men on average but that any given woman can be accurately rated against all other players accurately and treated accordingly. I.e you don't play good for a girl if you're a 600 speed player, you're just simply a 600 speed player.
 
JB Cases

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MattPoland said:
What you had two SVBs: A & B.

A exclusively plays alternate break events.
B exclusively plays winner break events.

Would they both end up with the same rating?


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According to Mike's experiments doing just that sort of data analysis the answer is that the Shane A and Shane B would likely have a rating within a few points or a few tenths of a point in both scenarios.
 
ShortBusRuss

ShortBusRuss

Short Bus Russ - C Player
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iusedtoberich said:
So for another woman to come along and be WAY better than Karen, seemed quite improbable.
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Not improbable at ALL. Jay Helfert told everyone on the forum 9 years ago when Siming Chen was 16 that she was likely top 50 in the world, both men and women included. And that she was FAR better than any woman who had come before her.

I can't help it that so many problem gamblers with a wee chauvinistic streak simply couldn't believe him.

It's not like Jay Helfert had a REALLY strong record of handicapping pool, and had the strongest players in the world practicing at his house for days at a time, or anything silly like that.
 
JB Cases

JB Cases

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iusedtoberich said:
Those 109 games were enough to move Chen 2.9 points. IMO, that is HUGE.

I'm going to figure out some bet for the action room and any takers, that the top 10 women will come down a bit in about 3 years time, as there becomes more and more direct coupling. I'll need a fair way to compare now and future ratings, and figure out number of movement I can get good action on:)
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Is it "huge"

What was the rating "supposed" to do?

I love how everyone is now trying to decipher Fargo to poke holes in it. That's actually great because it forces Mike to defend and justify and if someone finds any holes then he can address them.

In the meantime people who think that their gut is more reliable than the data are going to lose a lot betting against the statistics. Some of them are going to have win streaks but the majority will be overall loser imo.
 
A

AtLarge

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Cory in DC said:
Didn't AtLarge find very similar performance for pros across winner and alternate break formats?
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I don't recall doing anything on that. But here are some quotes by Bob Jewett from a thread a few months ago.

Bob Jewett said:
Since the choice of winner/alternate makes no difference to the better player's chance of winning (ignoring psychological stuff), the choice is for other reasons.

With good players alternate break will give slightly longer matches. For players who can't remember who won the flip, winner breaks is better.

To those not familiar with the game, alternate break seems fairer although it is not. Imagine tennis with winner serves. Surprisingly, it makes no difference at tennis either except winner serves would produce shorter matches.
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Bob Jewett said:
The amazing result is that the format does not matter. All of the following are equivalent as far as the match odds go:

Winner of the lag breaks the first N games in a race to N and the opponent breaks the rest until there is a winner.
Winner of the lag chooses who will break each game but cannot give either player more than N breaks.
Loser breaks.
Winner breaks.
Alternate breaks.

I didn't believe they could all be the same until I looked at it carefully. The reason for this is that you can recast each of those formats into simply playing 2N-1 games with one player breaking N times and then rearranging the order of the games to fit any of the formats. That rearrangement doesn't change who got N games or more so it doesn't affect the odds of who won. The match odds in all of the formats above can be calculated from the odds of each player winning N games out of 2N-1 with appropriate break apportioning.
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Bob Jewett said:
I should be clear that if your only concern is the odds of how likely the better player is to win the match, then the formats are equivalent. There may be other reasons why one format is preferable to another, such as perceived fairness, or possibilities of 10-packs or increasing/decreasing the average match length.
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jasonlaus

jasonlaus

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ShortBusRuss said:
Not improbable at ALL. Jay Helfert told everyone on the forum 9 years ago when Siming Chen was 16 that she was likely top 50 in the world, both men and women included. And that she was FAR better than any woman who had come before her.

I can't help it that so many problem gamblers with a wee chauvinistic streak simply couldn't believe him.

It's not like Jay Helfert had a REALLY strong record of handicapping pool, and had the strongest players in the world practicing at his house for days at a time, or anything silly like that.
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Jay bet on Donny lol.
Jason
 
O

overlord

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
ShortBusRuss said:
Not improbable at ALL. Jay Helfert told everyone on the forum 9 years ago when Siming Chen was 16 that she was likely top 50 in the world, both men and women included. And that she was FAR better than any woman who had come before her.

I can't help it that so many problem gamblers with a wee chauvinistic streak simply couldn't believe him.

It's not like Jay Helfert had a REALLY strong record of handicapping pool, and had the strongest players in the world practicing at his house for days at a time, or anything silly like that.
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Ms. Chen is the product of a system that has nothing in common with players in the West.

Data is not Chauvinism. You seem to be confused. Did you think that the hockey team of the former Soviet Union were really amateurs like our US team at the time too?

I think woman who play at the pro level world wide were forced to play with the top men on a tour they would have to be subsidized to survive.
 
iusedtoberich

iusedtoberich

AzB Silver Member
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BeiberLvr said:
I don't think you are a chauvinist. Just someone that doesn't quite understand how FR actually works.
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I'd bet I understand it better than you, if we could prove it:). I've been keeping my own spreadsheets on it. I've read and watched every youtube video Mike made on it. I've read through his whole site and all his FAQ. I've read the vast majority of his posts on Fargorate on here, and all of his blog posts. I've asked him questions on here over the years since he has introduced the system. I know how to use his fair match site very well, and use it all the time. You could say, I'm stalking him.

I actually don't think there is any flaw in the system. My only contention is that the TOP women will come down as more coupling happens. We will know one way or the other who was right in a few years time. The women will be playing in a lot more traditionally male events, I hope, now that Matchroom is making the US Open so huge. Maybe one day we can even get DCC out of the Stone Age and record actual match scores. Maybe we will have more direct head to head male/female matches like this week. Pool is really picking up in the past 5 years, and I hope the momentum continues, and the women add to that momentum.
 
ShortBusRuss

ShortBusRuss

Short Bus Russ - C Player
Silver Member
overlord said:
I think woman who play at the pro level world wide were forced to play with the top men on a tour they would have to be subsidized to survive.
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You mean like the vast majority of male pros with Fargo rates under 800, who don't win 4 big tournaments a year?

Oh boy, yer really reaching there, eh?
 
JB Cases

JB Cases

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ShortBusRuss said:
Not improbable at ALL. Jay Helfert told everyone on the forum 9 years ago when Siming Chen was 16 that she was likely top 50 in the world, both men and women included. And that she was FAR better than any woman who had come before her.

I can't help it that so many problem gamblers with a wee chauvinistic streak simply couldn't believe him.

It's not like Jay Helfert had a REALLY strong record of handicapping pool, or anything silly like that.
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And WHY would it be improbable anyway? He saw ONE top woman player up close. So did I, Kelly Fisher, and I told everyone how strong I thought she was but I didn't have the "guts" (or money then) to put her into action against the best players at the time. Kelly was without a doubt the best woman player I knew and to me she is world class. But now I know where in the world class she fits in skillwise and she is much farther from Shane than I thought BUT much better than a lot of shortstops think she is.

If there is one thing we pretty much know it is that if you see one person do something then it's a good bet that someone else can do it to. If Karen Corr is the best you have seen then she is the best someone else has seen and thus is a player to become better than if you want to win as much or more than she has.

So my thought on seeing Kelly Fisher play for example was not that I would never see any woman play better, my thought was that Kelly herself could get much better and that there is no effective upper limit. So there is zero surprise to me that there are women who are better than her now. Especially after I got to China and saw how they train there. Where Kelly had some help I can say with 100% certainty that she was not trained as hard as the Chinese trainers train their players. And they had Kelly and others to use as inspiration and also as targets for their players to use as goals to surpass.

Now imagine for a moment that we over here did the same sort of training done in Europe and Asia? Imagine that we didn't care if a player was a male or female we just trained them hard and the best rose up to become world class players.

Until we do that we will never know how far our players can go. Perhaps the next 820 player has the desire but not the right conditions to ever reach their full potential and how much more of a tragedy if that player is a woman and had to fade lower expectations and patronizing treatment when trying to learn.
 
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