Sounds like a good change. Thanks for doing this.
BCA Nationals 8 Ball - Fargo Discrepancy
- Thread starter banditgrrr
- Start date
Sounds like a good change. Thanks for doing this.
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Fargo seems to be pretty accurate unless your Mike Page dealing with Stan Shuffett. Then if you don't like your score, (because Stan thought his was too low) you can just have Mike change it for you. I honestly find that whole scenario amusing!!! Really lends a lot of credibility into the system!!!
Good going Mike!!! Whole system is a joke!
Good going Mike!!! Whole system is a joke!
Look guys, I gave up contesting the accuracy of Fargo Ratings. They are what they are. I have two beefs. Both with BCAPL and its use of Fargo exclusively.
Surprisingly, my first beef is the inclusion of a players Fargo rating on the official score sheet. Don't care what my opponents is but.... how about the player from East Podunk with a Fargo of 575 who looks at the score sheet and sees his opponent is a 720. Do they or you really believe it has no effect on the weaker player? No different than seeing Mike Massey putting his cues together at your table two years ago. Doubt there is a player who attends any National event who doesn't know who Mike Massey is. Not was, IS! Better players play the table. Weaker players MAY play their opponents reputation instead. Please delete the numbers.
My second beef is what happens to a middle of the road player who loses at Nationals year after year without cashing in any bracket. How many years do they continue to play before giving up? BCAPL has lost enough players over the years. Yes, some will come back because it is a vacation. Some will come back because they got sooo close last year. And some will just give up. Does anyone even care about that player? How do they get a fair shake? Practice more? Play more? Take lessons? If you're young, they are some great suggestions. If your too old for serious practice to improve, what then?
Lyn
Surprisingly, my first beef is the inclusion of a players Fargo rating on the official score sheet. Don't care what my opponents is but.... how about the player from East Podunk with a Fargo of 575 who looks at the score sheet and sees his opponent is a 720. Do they or you really believe it has no effect on the weaker player? No different than seeing Mike Massey putting his cues together at your table two years ago. Doubt there is a player who attends any National event who doesn't know who Mike Massey is. Not was, IS! Better players play the table. Weaker players MAY play their opponents reputation instead. Please delete the numbers.
My second beef is what happens to a middle of the road player who loses at Nationals year after year without cashing in any bracket. How many years do they continue to play before giving up? BCAPL has lost enough players over the years. Yes, some will come back because it is a vacation. Some will come back because they got sooo close last year. And some will just give up. Does anyone even care about that player? How do they get a fair shake? Practice more? Play more? Take lessons? If you're young, they are some great suggestions. If your too old for serious practice to improve, what then?
Lyn
I don't see an issue with a player asking his rating to get raised. When I started playing league again after a few years off, my Fargo rating was 10-20 points under people I can beat 75% of the time. It is now creeping up towards the level it should be after a few sets played in league.
My son was even worse, his rating was based mostly on older matches and junior matches, so he was 30 or more points under what he should have been, and he was telling people that. His rating is now coming up to mine pretty fast after just a few sets.
If our ratings were adjusted manually to match what our skill was, we would not be playing the first few league sets at under our skill level.
What I don't like is the USAPL league "short race" format now, it benefits the lower player a lot more, not only in points but also not giving the better player time to overcome a few lucky rolls. I played an 8 ball match were I broke dry and the guy ran out the racks against me, I then started winning games but by the time I won my 3rd in a row, because of points he ended up winning our match. If we played the full set, I would have had a chance to overcome those dry breaks. We were pretty close in rating, but the short race gave him more of an advantage than just the ratings did.
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I'm all for using whatever rating system reduces the number of guys playing 1 or 2 divisions below their actual speed. Yes, it's going to take some time to compile the data to allow for more accurate ratings but that's a necessary evil. Every year I've been to Vegas I've seen dozens of guys playing in divisions that have no business in and their league operators are fully aware of their ability but would rather take home the hardware and bragging rights.
The learning curve for Fargo will be steep and there will be some mistakes until things get sorted out. I'm on the other end of the spectrum and haven't complained, I'm at 725 with a robustness of 87 and no starter rating and I haven't played a competitive game of pool in ages. Is that an accurate representation of my current ability, not really, but I can catch that gear from time to time so if I decide to play in an event I will just grin and bear it until it normalizes.
The learning curve for Fargo will be steep and there will be some mistakes until things get sorted out. I'm on the other end of the spectrum and haven't complained, I'm at 725 with a robustness of 87 and no starter rating and I haven't played a competitive game of pool in ages. Is that an accurate representation of my current ability, not really, but I can catch that gear from time to time so if I decide to play in an event I will just grin and bear it until it normalizes.
Looking up both players today...
Joe Pierce II is....... 690
Russell Cearley is...657
Safe to say, neither will be in the gold division this year.
My responses are who cares? If they quit because they can't improve or because they don't win as often as they feel they are entitled to win then who cares, that is their problem.
My other response is that they already get a fair shake. You can only feel that they aren't getting a fair shake if you believe people should be rewarded for things other than results, things like "trying hard", or having done it X number of years, etc.
I personally feel people should be rewarded based only on performance, whether it be at pool, or at their job, or most other things, so I am failing to see the problem you are. Your argument seems to be essentially the same one that people at all of our places of employment use: "well I have been here for 5 years now, and because of that I deserve the promotion, not the guy who has only been here 2 years even though he has better performance than me". Some people will never get promoted, because their performance just isn't there, and I am ok with that, just like I am ok with the fact that some people will never win their pool event at nationals because their performance just isn't there.
Or as usually happens, neither of them are entered in this years tournament. At least the singles events. Surprse, surprise.
Lyn
I don't know that you have realized it but your argument is essentially "I shouldn't have to play in a division with people who are better than me, at least not for an extended period of time anyway".
On the surface I thought your arguments to be self serving and without logic or merit, but upon reflection you have swayed me to your side. We should not have to play with people who are better than us and who have a better chance of winning than us. It's a travesty of justice just as you say.
Since having ourselves put into a division of weaker players is obviously not a solution, since then the players in that division are now having to play against a better player, which is exactly what we are trying to avoid, the solution is to just have a division for every single Fargo rating. Yes there will be hundreds of divisions, but it will be the most fair. If you are a 659, you only play against other 659's. Then there is a separate division for 660's, where only the 660's play against each other. Of course the 661's get their own division as well, and so on. Never again will anyone face the injustice of playing against someone better at BCAPL nationals.
The other possible solution is to only play in tournaments that are handicapped so that each person has the exact same statistical odds of winning as every other person and just let chance decide things instead of pool skill. BCAPL nationals could just switch to this format so that people no longer have to face the unfairness of better players having the advantage.
The only question now is, which of the two solutions do we go with?
Started to write a long reply. Not going to waste my time. You are obviously of greater intellect and playing ability than I. Congratulations on the depth of your reply!
Lyn
We do not CHANGE anybody's Fargo Rating, ever. Fargo Ratings are purely performance driven.
I don't see what playing ability has to do with being able to apply logic to a problem.
Look, you have made your point abundantly clear (over and over and over again). If you don't feel like you are one of the most dominant kids on the field, you want to take your ball and go home. You certainly have a right to that personal preference and feeling, whether anybody else feels it is mature or not. Nobody should be able to tell you that you should have to play anyway if you aren't one of the favorites and don't want to be playing because of it.
What you don't have a right to do however is to expect that everyone else should have to change everything around, to the detriment of many others, just to cater to your need to be the big dog on the field so that you are happy to play again.
If you can come up with a solution that lets you be one of the big dogs again and that is actually fair and reasonable and that doesn't totally screw lots of other people in the process, then people will be all ears. I gave you the two I could think of that come closest, and as you can see they still aren't very close at all and still screw many others in several ways.
The one thing you just don't seem to understand is this is not about ME. You seem fixated on that. Can still hold my own. On a bar box, no one has to beat me. This is about the hundreds of players who have no chance. Don't mean winning, just cashing. Your words are heartless. Fargo is just numbers. So are APA and TAP ratings. A compilation of numbers. Sophisticated but still numbers. Perhaps The Matrix is real!
Lyn
Well the fact of the matter is most of the dead money don't care and if you break down the levels you also split the money up in doing so , in retrospect it's nice to have a system but it's uses are handcuffed because the only way to make it more fair is to create more divisions with that comes chopped up money that makes it less appealing loss of players soon to follow, so you simply have to have a wide gap , which renders the use of a rating pretty much not much better than the previous system.
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So I will ask you again, what is the solution? Can you come up with anything better than the two ideas I named that won't have even bigger drawbacks than some of the people having little chance to cash in an event? Everything I can come up with that gives everybody a chance to cash comes with even bigger negatives and drawbacks. If there isn't a feasible solution, I'm not quite sure how it makes sense to continue to gripe about it. You just do things the best way overall, even if it isn't perfect, and accept that none the less it is still the best way and then you just go on about your business.
Not sure what you mean about Fargo just being numbers. Those numbers have a meaning, and a significance, and when there is enough data, an amazing accuracy. You seem to imply that they aren't accurate or useful, yet you have repeatedly been shown that they are (given enough data), and have offered no evidence showing that they aren't. Best I can tell the biggest problem people have with Fargo is precisely because of its accuracy, and the fact that this make it significantly more difficult for them to slip into a division they have no business being in.
I agree with most of your post, and it is what I was alluding to in part of post #270. The only real solution to Lyn's problem, outside of handicapping the event, is to have more divisions, which more people will hate even more than people hate that there are some people that have little or no chance to cash.
Where I disagree is that things are not better with FargoRate. FargoRate does a much, much better job of ensuring that people get into the proper division, and it will be even better at that as it becomes aware of more people.
Oh sure!!! Say what you will!!! But how the heck did he go from a low 600 score up to the mid 700s without playing any more games? Same robustness - two different scores. One before he complained and one after! IT WAS DISCUSSED ON THIS FORUM. After he complained you gave him a completely different starter rating to push him into the 700s. I further found it interesting that you were using U.S. Open matches to calculate his score and Stan admitted that one of the players you were calculating his average from was a player he didn't even play. Think about that for a minute!!! I just went back and looked at the posts from that thread! I know what I am talking about!!! Just how accurate is Fargo anyways?
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"Starter Ratings" are not Fargo Ratings. The FargoRate optimization knows and cares nothing about them.
They are merely a mechanism to assign a sensible preliminary number to players who do not yet have a Fargo Rating.
Well then, why change it? If it means nothing, then why change his starter rating to raise his preliminary score? It's quite obvious this was done because of a personal bias! To change a perception of something that is not truly a reality. I am just saying that everyone needs to be treated equally. This system is no better than the old system where you could petition someone to change from a Master to an Advanced Player etc. You have shown that by your actions!
Also, what does it say about the Fargo validity when you gave him credit for playing an high 800s player that he states he never even played. Sounds like a mixed up mess. Whenever you go and check scores the database is so fickle you can't even look up most players. Looks like a cheaply put together mess rather than an accurate means of measuring player performance!
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