How to find out, how far away is your high run goal .

kanzzo

hobby player
How far away are you from shooting your first 100 (or 200, or 630)?

I think I found a way to calculate for every player, how far away he is from his first 100 or whatever high run goal at straight pool he has.

Why someone should be interested?
I wanted to shoot 100 balls since I am playing pool but never knew, how far away I am from this goal. Analyzing the world record attempts from John Schmidt, that are free available at facebook and playing with the numbers I found a way to calculate this. With this method every player can find out, how far away he is from his high run goal :)

Like a player like me, who shoots regularly 42 to reach 100 or someone like Hohmann, Feijen or Harriman to reach 630.

The math goes like this:
if you play like Shmidt and can reach 100 on average every third attempt, than you need 3^2 (9) attempts to reach 200, 3^3 (27) attempts to reach 300 and so on…
((3^4) 81 for 400
243 for 500.

Lets say John Shmidt has to play slow to play this good (6 min per rack) and averages 7 racks per inning). Than one attempt would be 42 min, 8 min break between attempts and 9 attempts on average playing 8 hours. Playing 22 days a month makes 198 attempts. So he can expect to shoot on average every day 200+ and twice a month 400+. He should be able to reach 526 in 2,6 months.
But say he is able to play that good but it requires ton of mental energy and he chooses another path. For the first 200 points he plays faster and less concentrated and needs 4,5 tries on average to reach 100. Average attempt is now 64 balls but he plays much faster, 3,5 minutes per rack and an attempt takes on average 15 minutes.

Now the math would be:
4,5 attempts for 100
4,5^2 (20,25) for 200
(410 for 400, 8303 for 600)

so now he needs 20 attempts to get to 200 but can manage 30 attempts per day, so he will still shoot 200 once a day on average but would need 14 months on average to get to 600. (But if he can switch to a slower and better game after 200 points than 600 needs like 81 200+ attempts to start with. With the expectation of 9 400+ on this way. As far as I am informed, these numbers are not to far off. (Update 20/05/08: I read in an interview today that he had 8 400+ runs in his lifetime, 9 counting the 626)

And now every player just needs to put his numbers in to find out how far he is from his goal.

Say I get through the rack every 4 attempts and need on average 16 attempts to get to 30 points. Than for me getting to 60+ would need 16^2 attempts and 90+ 16^3 (4096) attempts. Playing 40 concentrated attempts per training session I am about 100 training sessions away from shooting my first 90.

And recording my attempts every session I can see, if my numbers are still accurate or worse/better when expected. To get 40+ schould need 16^1.3 (36,75). So if I average about one 40+ in my 40 innings training seesion, I am on a good way. I should be shooting 60+ about every 8-9 sessions and so on. And obviously I could search for ways to improve my game and get better stats for getting through the rack and reaching 30. If I work on my fundamentals and improve my pattern and this way improve my stats to get through the rack to 1 out of 3 instead of 1 out of 4. Than reaching 30 gets to every 10th inning and 60+ are expected every 100 attempts, so once every 2-3 training sessions. Now I am only 25 training sessions away from shooting my first 90+ .

Same math for someone with playing ability of Hohmann, Feijen or Harriman to reach 630. Just calculate how many attempts you need on average to reach 100 and how long an average attempt takes you. This (attempt) number ^6.3 will tell you, how far away you are from a new world record. :D

Hope someone finds this helpful.
 
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sjm

Older and Wiser
Silver Member
Certainly a reasonable presentation of the probabilities. Yes, if p is the probability of success, then the odds of achieving n consecutive successes is p to the nth power ….. but remember that probability theory assumes statistically independent successive trials. It, therefore, ignores, undeniable factors called physical and mental fatigue.

If one has the skills to get there, is one just as likely to run the 30th rack as the 5th rack? I say no, and that's why nobody should be so surprised that Schmidt got to 400 a lot of times before finally reaching 500. There are both physical and mental aspects to the stamina required to keep on going during a run.

The stamina and persistence needed for a really long run are intangibles not easily explained by straight probability, and must be considered in conjunction with the talent factor when considering the matter of whether John's 626 will be topped.
 

kanzzo

hobby player
I think the numbers are close enough to get the ballpark. This way your expectations are reasonable. As I said, I had no idea before, how far away I am from my goal. Now I know. And with this calculation its obvous, that you will shoot some 400+ before you shoot 600 and you will shoot some 70+ before you get 100+.

You can put your numbers in and see if the goal is reachable. Like if you shoot 100 one in four times or better, you can probably go for new world record and achieve it in lifetime. If you shoot 100 one in 10 times you are still a damn good player but are expected about 400 years to break the record. So more like 10 lifetimes :)

Same for someone dreaming of shooting 100 balls one day…

Yes, there are some mental and other aspects to the game and if my goal is 100 it's possible that I will miss the breakball at 98 because of the pressure. But I would also be happy with shooting 98 and I would know how long probaly to wait before I get my next chance to shoot 100 again 
 

RobMan

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
This is really interesting. And of course there are lots of variables. Some years back, I created the attached chart detailing odds of getting to certain runs based upon shot percentage using the same basic logic and math as you used.

Of course, what is shot percentage? A spot shot? A straight in two footer? Not really sure, but I found this interesting. I know that my runs end a lot on misses. Could be because of bad position, etc. but still a miss. Thoughts?

cbd87ff45abc377b4ad9be78d414b8b9.jpg



Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
 

ChrisinNC

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
So to save me the math, if I can run a full 14 ball rack about every 3-4 innings, a 28 ball run about every 10-15 innings and a 42 ball run about every 40+ innings, but have virtually never had a 56+ ball run in the past five years. Do I have some kind of a mental block working here keeping me from having a higher run, or do I have any realistic chance at all of running 100 balls and if so, what are the odds?

Am I right in approximating, based on your theory, that I could achieve a 100 ball run roughly every 5000-6000 innings? So if I put in an average of 100 innings a week, does that mean I should achieve my 100 ball high run within a year or so, or will that just give myself a possible chance to run 100 balls within a year? Big difference!
 
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sjm

Older and Wiser
Silver Member
So to save me the math, if I can run a full 14 ball rack about every three innings, a 28 ball run about every 10-12 innings and a 42 ball run about every 30-35 innings, but have almost never had a 56+ ball run in the past five years, do I have any chance at all of running 100 balls and if so, what are the odds?

If it's assumed that you can run a rack from a starting break shot and inclusive of leaving a break shot at the end is 1/3, then your chance of running seven racks in a row is (1/3) to the seventh power. That comes to 1/2187, meaning you should run a 98 about once every 2187 innings from which you begin with a break shot, so a 100 ball run is just a slightly longer shot than that, perhaps one out of 2,500. Definitely possible.
 

CocoboloCowboy

Cowboys are my hero's
Silver Member
60+ year of banging, playing 14/1 infrequently. Never ever hit 100 yet. Could if I put my mind to it, but fun was more important then hard competition.
 

sjm

Older and Wiser
Silver Member
If it's assumed that you can run a rack from a starting break shot and inclusive of leaving a break shot at the end is 1/3, then your chance of running seven racks in a row is (1/3) to the seventh power. That comes to 1/2187, meaning you should run a 98 about once every 2187 innings from which you begin with a break shot, so a 100 ball run is just a slightly longer shot than that, perhaps one out of 2,500. Definitely possible.

By the way, if you can only succeed 1/4 of the time, it gets much tougher. Then, your chances are (1/4)^7, or about 1 in 16,384.
 

Bob Jewett

AZB Osmium Member
Staff member
Gold Member
Silver Member
... I think I found a way to calculate for every player, how far away he is from his first 100 or whatever high run goal at straight pool he has. ...
Your math looks more or less right to me, barring psychological factors that might come in, which of course are really hard to calculate.

Your number for John Schmidt is a little off. Under the conditions where he set the record of 626 he was about 25% to run 100 from an open position.

To determine a player's true run percentage, a good way is to plot a histogram of the runs in many innings and see what theoretical raw percentage best fits the data.

One large issue in doing the statistics is that the break shot and the shot after the break shot are missed more often than shots in the middle of the rack. In the case of John Schmidt, 25% of his misses during his four months of shooting were on break shots. 25% were on the shot after the break shot. His pocketing percentage was about 96% on those two shots and 99.3% on all other shots.
 

kanzzo

hobby player
I saw the stats once on all his attempts (how many 100+ runs, how many 200+ runs etc.) Couldn't find it yesterday. Can someone help me with the link?

My numbers were:
John is about 22-25% to run 100 from open position playing typical John style flying through the racks with 3 minutes per rack. But perhaps when after reaching 200 points and starting playing more Souquet style and needing 5-6 minutes per rack now his chance goes up to 33%.

Would be easy to test the theory with the stats of all his runs (that I couldn't find). In this theory he would need about 80 200+ runs and have around 27 300+ runs, and 9 400+ runs. Perhaps his actual numbers were a little worse but better than 8 400+ runs, 32 300+ runs and 128 200+ runs.
 

kanzzo

hobby player
So to save me the math, if I can run a full 14 ball rack about every 3-4 innings, a 28 ball run about every 10-15 innings and a 42 ball run about every 40+ innings, but have virtually never had a 56+ ball run in the past five years. Do I have some kind of a mental block working here keeping me from having a higher run, or do I have any realistic chance at all of running 100 balls and if so, what are the odds?

Am I right in approximating, based on your theory, that I could achieve a 100 ball run roughly every 5000-6000 innings? So if I put in an average of 100 innings a week, does that mean I should achieve my 100 ball high run within a year or so, or will that just give myself a possible chance to run 100 balls within a year? Big difference!

it means you should be running 56+ more often :D
to see if you are on a path to shoot 100 within a year you should with your stats run 60+ about every 140 innings. If you didn't shoot 56 past 5 years than your numbers are probably off. You would need to record your innings very accuratly. It's possible your average numbers are "a little worse". And it depends on the amount of concentrated training and attempts you put in.

With your stats before reaching 100 you should run around 86 about 3 times, 70+ about 9 times and 56+ about 27 times. So you don't need a year to find out, if my theory was miracously right - you will see on your innings if you are getting closer. If you get through the rack only one in five attempts, when before reaching 100 you should average 5 86, 25 70+ and 125 56+. If you shoot 56+ every 5 years than your 100 is probably 600 years away :D
 

kanzzo

hobby player
This is really interesting. And of course there are lots of variables. Some years back, I created the attached chart detailing odds of getting to certain runs based upon shot percentage using the same basic logic and math as you used.

Of course, what is shot percentage? A spot shot? A straight in two footer? Not really sure, but I found this interesting. I know that my runs end a lot on misses. Could be because of bad position, etc. but still a miss. Thoughts?

Difficulty of your shots depends on your playing style. If your patterns and position is great than you don't have to shoot hard shots. I had a Steve Mizerak match on tape where first difficult shot came after 72 balls. If you blast your rack open you will have easier shots to get through the rack (but perhaps miss breakball or scratch more often). You will get more often through the rack if pockets are bigger and your balls spread nicer. (I have an aramith and a cyclop ball set at home, my impression is: cyclop balls spread easier but have inside english skids more often -for whatever reasons that is).

But for this method your style and playing conditions don't matter. You just have to record your attempts very honestly. If you start your run with a breakball and miss this breakball, this inning obviously still counts. It gives you more precise numbers how often you miss breakballs. And than you just have to count out, how often you get to a fraction of your goal and you can find out how many attempts you need to reach the goal.

Say goal is 175 and you reach 50 every 28 attempts - than 28^3.5 (116160) is the number of attempts (ballpark) you will probably need. It doesn’t give you the exact week you will reach your number but you'll know if we are speaking of 5-10 weeks or more like 150-200 years.

On the other hand if you are regularly shooting 50 and are serious of reaching 175 within a year, you can calculate, how much you need to improve your game to reach it. Say you give yourself 40 attempts a day, 5 days a week for 50 weeks - these are 10 000 attempts in a year. 10.000^(1/3.5) is 14. Now you now that to reach your goal you need to improve you game to a ballpark of shooting 50 every 14 attempts. If you get the number down to 10 you reach the goal obviously much faster (only 3200 innings, only 4 months). Now you can work on ways to reach this smaller goal and putting the time in the bigger goal takes care of itself.
 

kanzzo

hobby player
You can put your numbers in and see if the goal is reachable. Like if you shoot 100 one in four times or better, you can probably go for new world record and achieve it in lifetime. If you shoot 100 one in 10 times you are still a damn good player but are expected about 400 years to break the record. So more like 10 lifetimes :)

also interesting: for one player shooting 100 with 10% chance from open position it takes 400 years for new world record. But for 400 people it would take a year. Say there is big chunk of money to be won and now 1000 chinese pool players try to break the record. Even when for every one of them (assuming the all shoot 100 every 10th attempt) chances are very low to reach the goal, someone will break the record within 6 months with very high probability.
 

stevekur1

The "COMMISH"
Silver Member
How far away are you from shooting your first 100 (or 200, or 630)?

I think I found a way to calculate for every player, how far away he is from his first 100 or whatever high run goal at straight pool he has.

Why someone should be interested?
I wanted to shoot 100 balls since I am playing pool but never knew, how far away I am from this goal. Analyzing the world record attempts from John Schmidt, that are free available at facebook and playing with the numbers I found a way to calculate this. With this method every player can find out, how far away he is from his high run goal :)

Like a player like me, who shoots regularly 42 to reach 100 or someone like Hohmann, Fejen or Harryman to reach 630.

The math goes like this:
if you play like Shmidt and can reach 100 on average every third attempt, than you need 3^2 (9) attempts to reach 200, 3^3 (27) attempts to reach 300 and so on…
((3^4) 81 for 400
243 for 500.

Lets say John Shmidt has to play slow to play this good (6 min per rack) and averages 7 racks per inning). Than one attempt would be 42 min, 8 min break between attempts and 9 attempts on average playing 8 hours. Playing 22 days a month makes 198 attempts. So he can expect to shoot on average every day 200+ and twice a month 400+. He should be able to reach 526 in 2,6 months.
But say he is able to play that good but it requires ton of mental energy and he chooses another path. For the first 200 points he plays faster and less concentrated and needs 4,5 tries on average to reach 100. Average attempt is now 64 balls but he plays much faster, 3,5 minutes per rack and an attempt takes on average 15 minutes.

Now the math would be:
4,5 attempts for 100
4,5^2 (20,25) for 200
(410 for 400, 8303 for 600)

so now he needs 20 attempts to get to 200 but can manage 30 attempts per day, so he will still shoot 200 once a day on average but would need 14 months on average to get to 600. (But if he can switch to a slower and better game after 200 points than 600 needs like 81 200+ attempts to start with. With the expectation of 9 400+ on this way. As far as I am informed, these numbers are not to far off.

And now every player just needs to put his numbers in to find out how far he is from his goal.

Say I get through the rack every 4 attempts and need on average 16 attempts to get to 30 points. Than for me getting to 60+ would need 16^2 attempts and 90+ 16^3 (4096) attempts. Playing 40 concentrated attempts per training session I am about 100 training sessions away from shooting my first 90.

And recording my attempts every session I can see, if my numbers are still accurate or worse/better when expected. To get 40+ schould need 16^1.3 (36,75). So if I average about one 40+ in my 40 innings training seesion, I am on a good way. I should be shooting 60+ about every 8-9 sessions and so on. And obviously I could search for ways to improve my game and get better stats for getting through the rack and reaching 30. If I work on my fundamentals and improve my pattern and this way improve my stats to get through the rack to 1 out of 3 instead of 1 out of 4. Than reaching 30 gets to every 10th inning and 60+ are expected every 100 attempts, so once every 2-3 training sessions. Now I am only 25 training sessions away from shooting my first 90+ .

Same math for someone with playing ability of Hohmann, Fejen or Harryman to reach 630. Just calculate how many attempts you need on average to reach 100 and how long an average attempt takes you. This (attempt) number ^6.3 will tell you, how far away you are from a new world record. :D

Hope someone finds this helpful.

Very interesting stats and info.

I can see you are quarentined too huh...lol

Steve
 

Dan White

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
I think it is very important in this analysis not to gloss over what it actually means to run a rack successfully. It does not mean simply clearing off 14 balls. You also have to get a break shot that leads into the next rack. Of course, this is the big thing in playing good straight pool. There's nothing to running off all the balls, it's doing it with a good break shot at the end that's the trick.
 

kanzzo

hobby player
I think it is very important in this analysis not to gloss over what it actually means to run a rack successfully. It does not mean simply clearing off 14 balls. You also have to get a break shot that leads into the next rack. Of course, this is the big thing in playing good straight pool. There's nothing to running off all the balls, it's doing it with a good break shot at the end that's the trick.

that's why analyzing 7 and 14 ball runs isn't that precize, but if you check your 60/46/32 runs your estimations for 100 get quite spot on. (This way you need a breakball and getting first tough ball after the breakball). Now if after 400 tries you have around 5 times 60+, 15 times 46+ and 45 times 32+ you know, that your estimation of getting through the rack with breakball is1/3 (or whatever a new number you get) and you can again estimate, how long you will need to get to 100
 

kanzzo

hobby player
Very interesting stats and info.

I can see you are quarentined too huh...lol

Steve

i downloaded all available record breaking attempts available on facebook site of Bull Shooters. I than cut it in runs (keeping all runs 70+ since I got only once over 70 in my life and 70 is already impressive for me). I ended up with 120 runs and 74hours of John Schmidt straight pool shooting 1140 racks :)

i could than analyze how his runs came to end and play a little around with the numbers i got :)

definitely some crazy quarantine project :)
 

Bob Jewett

AZB Osmium Member
Staff member
Gold Member
Silver Member
... But perhaps when after reaching 200 points and starting playing more Souquet style and needing 5-6 minutes per rack now his chance goes up to 33%....
Do you have any numbers to support the change in percentage versus length of run?
 

ChrisinNC

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
it means you should be running 56+ more often :D
to see if you are on a path to shoot 100 within a year you should with your stats run 60+ about every 140 innings. If you didn't shoot 56 past 5 years than your numbers are probably off. You would need to record your innings very accuratly. It's possible your average numbers are "a little worse". And it depends on the amount of concentrated training and attempts you put in.

With your stats before reaching 100 you should run around 86 about 3 times, 70+ about 9 times and 56+ about 27 times. So you don't need a year to find out, if my theory was miracously right - you will see on your innings if you are getting closer. If you get through the rack only one in five attempts, when before reaching 100 you should average 5 86, 25 70+ and 125 56+. If you shoot 56+ every 5 years than your 100 is probably 600 years away :D
I know, it's very strange. 5+ years ago I felt like I was on the verge, with some runs in the 60s and 70s and one run in the low 80s. Then I had shoulder replacement surgery and struggled getting back in to playing pool regularly for the next 12-18 months.

Since then, I've been able to play pain free even for long sessions for the first time in 10+ years. I feel like my shot making, cue ball control and pattern play is every bit as good if not better than it was then, but I've run no more than 56, and that only a couple of times. However, in a 3 hour practice session, always starting with a relatively high percentage break shot following a miss, in 20-25 total chances (innings) I generally average 8-10 balls per attempt, have 3-4 runs of 28 and a run of 42 maybe once every other session.

I think it must be more of a mental block at this point. My misses are generally unforced errors (missing an easy shot) or failure to control the cue ball to leave myself a high percentage shot after the beginning of rack break shot.
 
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kanzzo

hobby player
Do you have any numbers to support the change in percentage versus length of run?

Bob Jewett

I was hoping someone could help me providing the numbers to test my theory. I read an article once, where all his 200+ runs in his attempts to world record were listet. So I am happy, if someone can find these numbers (ask John if you know him better).

I have heard of Johns interview after the world record, where he said he is kinda freerolling (playing on autopilot) for 200 playing fast to save up mental energy and than switches to slower concentrated game. His average time for a rack is 3.5 minutes on his starting runs and 6.0-6.5 minutes for racks after 200.

I have only a small sample from the 23 days training at Bull Shooters:

I found 120 70+ runs
he pocketed 7582 balls in 120 innings (after I substracted first 70 balls from every run since i didn't analyze his smaller runs) - this made for 4.5 racks per inning

out of these 120 runs he had 12 200+ runs where
he ran 1181 balls (substracting 200 from every of these runs). So this time he is averaging 7 racks per inning playing much slower. These were the runs:

450
395
390
350
320
293
283
235
227
224
210
204

so my sample size is relatively small but he improved his average to 7 instead of 4.5 racks and managed 5 300+ and 1 400+ out of these 12 attempts (and the 390 and 395 weren't too far off of a 400 :)
 
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