Dear fargorate

Drop The Rock

1652nd on AZ Money List
Silver Member
My bad.

I apologize for my ignorance and now have a better understanding of the system.

It isn't so much of a skill ranking and I get that now. For example I think Alex Pagulayan is one of a few players than can hang with Shane gambling, however that doesn't necessarily mean Alex has been torching everybody in the tournaments he has been playing in. Part of my bias also comes from One Pocket winners but that isn't factored, which is okay.

I guess I thought of the system as more of a talent ranker than what it actually is. If I have it right FargoRate really shows a pecking order in a tournament format as well as head to head win %.

So again, my apologies. I am opinionated, there is no doubt, however when I am wrong I promptly admit it and I'm usually not to stubborn to know when that is.

Regards,

Marshal
 
My bad.

I apologize for my ignorance and now have a better understanding of the system.

It isn't so much of a skill ranking and I get that now. For example I think Alex Pagulayan is one of a few players than can hang with Shane gambling, however that doesn't necessarily mean Alex has been torching everybody in the tournaments he has been playing in. Part of my bias also comes from One Pocket winners but that isn't factored, which is okay.

I guess I thought of the system as more of a talent ranker than what it actually is. If I have it right FargoRate really shows a pecking order in a tournament format as well as head to head win %.

So again, my apologies. I am opinionated, there is no doubt, however when I am wrong I promptly admit it and I'm usually not to stubborn to know when that is.

Regards,

Marshal

Good for you-you are willing to learn which is more than i can say for many around here and everywhere else as well.
 
My bad.

I apologize for my ignorance and now have a better understanding of the system. [...]

It's all good...

What we're doing is pretty much new to everybody, and chances are if you have a certain reaction or perception so do others. So we're happy to hear it and happy to address it.

We are confident what we are doing is both sound and meaningful. With that said though we have to be careful not to over-hype what Fargo Ratings have to say. As others have pointed out, they are an averaged rating of a player's performance.

If a player falls apart in the finals of any big tournament, we pretty much don't detect it. If a player can't perform against an unusually slow opponent, we more or less won't see it. If a player can't deal with jet lag, that partially gets washed out for us.

If a player just got divorced or is worried about a backer or can't deal with a streamed table, or can't handle early morning matches and on and on and on, we only see these things in a partial, averaged sort of way.

On the other hand, one of the benefits of having lots of data is we've been able to perform various tests of whether particular players perform better on 9-foot tables than 7-foot tables or rotation games versus 8-ball or against male opponents rather than female opponents, or against better players rather than weaker players. As a general conclusion, we can say many of these perceptions seem either to not be borne out by the data or seem to be smaller effects than people perceive.

When we as fans try to assess players skill, we have a tendency to ignore most of the play and focus instead on a small fraction of the games. So if little Ko ends up playing big Ko in the finals, many of us will internalize the result as having a big impact on our perception of which brother is the better player. When in fact there is not much information in a single match.

Why do we see WPA #301 Wojciech Szewczyk (POL) as a comparable and even superior player to WPA #1 Albin Ouschan? Think of it like this. Most of us would agree that the difference between players at a high level comes from subtle differences in a number of skills: subtle differences in the tendency to overrun position on tough shots, subtle differences in the ability to hit the right part of the ball when kicking safe, subtle differences in shotmaking, subtle differences in self awareness and knowing when and how to duck, and so forth. These are very hard to see directly. But collectively these manifest in the results of hundreds and thousands of games against opponents of known rating. So for the two above European players, there is a lot of information buried in Eurotour matches against-no-name opponents. In particular, if one of the above is more likely to beat the 670-speed no-name Eurotour opponents 9-3 or 9-4 rather than 9-5 or 9-6, that difference is BECAUSE of those subtle differences.

Though our "top 100" lists give the appearance of a RANKING, what we are really doing is RATING performance. We draw a distinction. In a ranking scheme, the ranker should pay attention to rating information, but also may want to reward other things, like participation in events or high finishes in select events and so forth.
 
Well worded explanation.

I liken it to baseball statistics - a hitter may have a great chance to get a hit in any given situation (like on a Tuesday night game after the 6th inning against a left handed reliever who is facing his 3rd batter) but, you have to go with the assumption that he is a .250 hitter if that is what the data from 130 games tell you.
 
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