Wow, tough question. Personally, I love Fargo, but it has one seriously glaring weakness and that is the overweighting of matches played more than a year ago.
In my opinion, for Fargo to advance to the next level, it will have to assign a greater weight to results in the past year of play than results older than a year. Similarly, Fargo shouldn't count matches in the distant past at all, because such results are not an indicator of current playing speed.
Fargo, as currently computed, does not penalize those who do not participate in competition, making pool the only sport I know of which has this problem. The result is that players who rarely or never compete maintain their ratings from the past, when in far too many cases their skills have diminished.
sjm,
The Fargorate system is almost identical to the USCF (U.S. Chess Federation) rating system. And that system calculates your rating off of a combination of your current score, and your most recent tournament.
I do have an issue with the idea that a Fargorate can "float" a couple of points here and there based on what the previously played opponents have accomplished recently. There's no need for that. Calculate the Fargorate for each player on a tournament-by-tournament basis, and then leave it the hell alone. There's no need to "penalize" a player for not playing.
Realistically, ratings stay pretty static, and floating the rating the way Fargorate does is not gonna make much of a difference. If I haven't played a Fargorate event in 2 years.... If the calculation was done on a tourney-by-tourney basis, what effect does my rating have on the rest of the population? None. But by continuously recalculating against the entire Fargorate membership... This injects a lot of uncertainty into the ratings. Fargorate should just copy USCF/FIDE's algorithm's carte blanche. But, I think that Mike is seeing Fargorate mainly as a revenue stream for himself and the BCA, and not as the governing tool that makes measurement possible, and absolutely critical to the sport's growth.
What I mean by that, is a USCF rating is the be-all, end-all of chess in America. FIDE, overseas. Which means, that to call yourself a serious chess player, you MUST have either a USCF or FIDE rating.
I personally think that is the route Fargorate should have went, from the beginning. Just copy the whole USCF system, top to bottom. Work on providing tools to tournament directors to make the process invisible to the tournament director. Work on ingesting every single tournament table you can, to get EVERYBODY a preliminary rating, to give them what the USCF gives chess players.. An ego kick that player "A" is better than you..... So you BETTER start practicing and playing tournaments to get that rating up. And the USCF provides a calculator tool that you can input the match scores and pre-tournament rating of those you played, and it will tell you what your new rating should be! Fargorate has no such thing.
THAT is what Fargorate is missing. There's zero incentive to raise one's Fargorate, and every incentive to sandbag it. Even with the BCA adopting it... Still comes down to the same thing.... The BCA and Fargorate need to find a way to reward the most improved Fargorate, acknowledgement in a BCA/Fargorate online periodical, etc.
Fargorate as it stands now is little more than an extra requirement to play a league. That is not a recipe for growth. I looked at the league management site/software/LMS whatsit that Fargorate has put out, and it made me immediately shy away from trying to get Fargorate started over here in Germany. For one thing, Germany already has better League management Software than any league system in America. So, the only way to get Germany onboard is to make it SO easy for a motivated tournament director to get started, with the smallest possible tournaments, that players will gladly fork over the $20.00 a year or whatever. When I looked at that site, it was just all so confusing, and not polished at all. I simply don't think Fargorate as a product is polished enough at the moment, and not likely to become so. There's no easy avenue for a person to say, "Hey, I think I wanna run a Fargorate tournament tonight, but I've never run one. How would I do that?", and then, get an easy answer.
When I really got the pool bug back in the mid-90's I played in a room that recorded the top three finishers of the weekly 9 ball event on the wall. Had some of the best players in WA state every week. The motivation to get your name up on that wall controlled all my waking moments.
Where is the equivalent for Fargorate? USA top 100 lists? Hmmmpfh. Sure, If you wanna compare yourself to people who will generally beat you 9-0, 9-1, 9-2 in major events. And sure.. There are prolly similar list within that Fargorate LMS site.........IF you already have an active membership. But where is the well-polished site where any potential pool player in the world can go and see the ratings for all their local players, sorted by state? If it exists, it exists behind that LMS site membership wall, which closes off anyone without a current membership.
Just my humble opinion, but Fargorate is simply not ready for prime time yet. It could be so much more than it is, and could definitely be used to grow the sport, but is being mismanaged.
capable of occassionally playing at near-professional levels.