Accu-stats Newsletter, first issue

Bob Jewett

Bob Jewett

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In the early 1980s, Accu-stats had not yet started taping matches. The original intent was to provide newsletters with statistics about nine ball matches, and amazing newsletters they were. The statistics for each match were taken live by people who were often trained on-site. A few year in, Pat Fleming found it more efficient to video tape matches and take the stats at home after the tournament. Some people wanted to buy copies of the tapes, and then more people wanted to buy the tapes, and soon it became clear that video rather than text was the more profitable medium.

I have scanned in the first issue of the newsletter and put it up as item 48 on http://www.sfbilliards.com/misc.htm It's a little large -- 3MB for 12 pages -- but I was not willing to correct the OCR for the many tables of data, which would have reduced the size to a few hundred kB. You can do a search for text since the OCRed text is hidden under the scanned image you see.
 
Bob Jewett said:
In the early 1980s, Accu-stats had not yet started taping matches. The original intent was to provide newsletters with statistics about nine ball matches, and amazing newsletters they were. The statistics for each match were taken live by people who were often trained on-site. A few year in, Pat Fleming found it more efficient to video tape matches and take the stats at home after the tournament. Some people wanted to buy copies of the tapes, and then more people wanted to buy the tapes, and soon it became clear that video rather than text was the more profitable medium.

I have scanned in the first issue of the newsletter and put it up as item 48 on http://www.sfbilliards.com/misc.htm It's a little large -- 3MB for 12 pages -- but I was not willing to correct the OCR for the many tables of data, which would have reduced the size to a few hundred kB. You can do a search for text since the OCRed text is hidden under the scanned image you see.
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Awesome!

I wonder if I can still get a shirt with that coupon?
 
That is great stuff...!!

I had forgotten how great those newsletters were.

And I'm not positive that the video tapes are as all-encompassing as these newsletters. The visual may still be in front of you, but I like that the newsletter shows you the whole tour.

Thanks Bob! Rep for you...
 
Really enjoyed that.
Did you notice that the prize money wasn't actually that shabby back then?
And I didn't realize that Jay Swanson was that good a player.
 
fan-tum said:
... Did you notice that the prize money wasn't actually that shabby back then? ...
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There has been roughly a factor of 2 inflation since 1984, so Earl had earned $114,000 in 9 events. But 10th place (Nick Varner) had won only about $21k 2008 dollars. Looking at the 2007 money list:

http://www.azbilliards.com/thepros/2000thepros.cfm?year=2007

the money is in fact a lot better now, with 20th place getting about $48,000.
 
Very cool, fun just looking at the player names in there. So few foreign players back then.
 
I printed out the newsletter and had a chance to analyze it at lunch and one thing struck me right away...

When you watch Accu-Stat videos and DVDs the commentators are constantly referring to "world class speed" as roughly .850.

If you notice on the list of TPA in the newsletter, only 10 of the top 50 players have TPAs above .850.

Those 10 read like a Who's Who, but there are some players like Nick Varner (.835), Keith McCready (.831) and Jimmy Mataya (.814) that are well below what would today be considered "world class."

Has the TPA changed, or have expectations just gotten higher?

I firmly believe there are more top flight players now than there ever have been, but I wonder if the top players are really that much better.

At any rate, it is fun to look at those 1984 numbers.
 
McKinneyMiner said:
I printed out the newsletter and had a chance to analyze it at lunch and one thing struck me right away...

When you watch Accu-Stat videos and DVDs the commentators are constantly referring to "world class speed" as roughly .850.

If you notice on the list of TPA in the newsletter, only 10 of the top 50 players have TPAs above .850.

Those 10 read like a Who's Who, but there are some players like Nick Varner (.835), Keith McCready (.831) and Jimmy Mataya (.814) that are well below what would today be considered "world class."

Has the TPA changed, or have expectations just gotten higher?
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I believe that the benchmark TPA of .850 or higher as world class speed is unchanged... and that most of us think about it in terms of an individual performance as in the TPA one player shot in one match... not an average TPA for a player for the whole year.

Mike Sigel's TPA of .885 for a total of 510 games played between January and November of 1984 is UNGODLY!!
 
McKinneyMiner said:
When you watch Accu-Stat videos and DVDs the commentators are constantly referring to "world class speed" as roughly .850.

If you notice on the list of TPA in the newsletter, only 10 of the top 50 players have TPAs above .850.

Has the TPA changed, or have expectations just gotten higher?
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The TPA has changed, though I think your point remains valid.

Somewhere around the early to mid 1990's, Pat decided that if a player missed a shot that was easier than a "spot shot," that player would be charged for TWO errors. In the 1980's, this rule was not in effect--all misses were one error. I've got a couple of 1992-era A-S matches where not only is the TPA shown, but a breakdown of every error that occurred. I've watched carefully and seen how, back then, easy misses and hard misses were treated the same.

If easy misses count as two errors, the average number of errors in a match goes up, and TPAs go down. So since that rule was put in place, .850 *would* be world-class. I suspect that in the early days of Accu-Stats, world-class would have been more like .815.

Technical postscript: The two-error rule was meant to show that, if you sank the last ball but missed the next one, then one of two things happened. You either got bad position (error #1) and left yourself a tough shot, which you missed (error #2) or you got good position and botched an easy shot. Pat told me over the phone once that he made easy misses equal two errors because, in essence, hard misses come from two errors also. (An exception is when you kick at a ball and make it--no one expects you to get position there, so failure to give yourself an easy shot is not a position error.) He talked to me over the phone because I'd called him to complain about the rule change. I'd been tracking my TPA in matches for a year or so by then, and his rule change invalidated a year's worth of my data! :(
 
cigardave said:
Mike Sigel's TPA of .885 for a total of 510 games played between January and November of 1984 is UNGODLY!!
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I would definitely agree with that... And I know Mike was playing in pretty much every tournament, so that is even more impressive.

Some of the others in the Top 10 were part time players and might not have had such high TPA if their sample was bigger.

It does make me wonder, however, if on average today's pro is better than 1984's pro.
 
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Still_Learning said:
I suspect that in the early days of Accu-Stats, world-class would have been more like .815.
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Now that makes Sigel's .885 and Hopkins' .882 some real salty numbers!

I wonder what the top TPAs today would look like.

My guess is a steady performer along the lines of Ralf Souquet is probably in the .880s somewhere.
 
McKinneyMiner said:
Now that makes Sigel's .885 and Hopkins' .882 some real salty numbers!

I wonder what the top TPAs today would look like.

My guess is a steady performer along the lines of Ralf Souquet is probably in the .880s somewhere.
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Those are incredible numbers, and I guess comparing TPA's is the closest we can come to having an objective basis for comparing players of 25 years ago to players of today. I would be surprised if anybody today had a TPA over nearly an entire year that high.
 
I'm so brain-dead today

Still_Learning said:
If easy misses count as two errors, the average number of errors in a match goes up, and TPAs go down. So since that rule was put in place, .850 *would* be world-class. I suspect that in the early days of Accu-Stats, world-class would have been more like .815.
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I'm so brain-dead today. World-class would be HIGHER than .850 if all misses counted as only one error.

To the person who asked if today's pros are better...possibly. I looked at 100 matches that Accu-Stats had available, and saw that the average TPA for 200 players (in 100 matches) was .847. But that's using the double-error-for-easy-misses system. It looks like in 1985, the average TPA was about the same, but that was when all misses were only one error. So: if the average pro today shoots .847, then to me, that's more impressive than a similar TPA 23 years ago, when a slightly more forgiving scoring system was used.
 
Still_Learning said:
I'm so brain-dead today. World-class would be HIGHER than .850 if all misses counted as only one error.

To the person who asked if today's pros are better...possibly. I looked at 100 matches that Accu-Stats had available, and saw that the average TPA for 200 players (in 100 matches) was .847. But that's using the double-error-for-easy-misses system. It looks like in 1985, the average TPA was about the same, but that was when all misses were only one error. So: if the average pro today shoots .847, then to me, that's more impressive than a similar TPA 23 years ago, when a slightly more forgiving scoring system was used.
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I don't think the average pro today shoots an .847 average, and I doubt that 'easy misses' are common enough to lower the average TPA by 35 points.
 
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