Do Tournaments Really Show Who's the Best?

Oh yeah, one more thing. Alex Pagulayan told me that he acctualy already retired from pool game for a couple month, that's why his game is not good. But some day he gonna come back to the game.
 
Oh yeah, one more thing. Alex Pagulayan told me that he acctualy already retired from pool game for a couple month, that's why his game is not good. But some day he gonna come back to the game.

Hi, Sengkun. Good to have a person on site providing us some fun happenings. Keep posting. I love reading this kind of stuff! :)
 
Yeah, alex P. he came to our pool room to play some poker not pool money game. funny guy, always make people laugh. last night bebeng galego and gomez not find any opponent to play money game, so they show us some trick shot. Li he wen play with edgie geronimo 3 set. Edgie win 2 set. Race to 11.The score is 11-8. 9-11 and 8-0 (Li he wen give up). This geronimo kid is very good, no smoke, no alcohol. very disipline player. Some day he will be very very good.
 
Tournaments are a crap shoot nowadays. But there is always enough great players for some of them to rise to the top as the cream does.

Back in the day there used to be big bigger match ups to determine a better player.

In Jan1951 a few months before I was born, Mosconi and Crane played 14.1 going to 3000 points !

It was in 2 blocks of 1500. One Philly and one in KC. About a week at each location. Check it out and more at this fantastic website. TY Charlie Ursitti.

http://charlesursitti.com/?page_id=204

OH scroll down to page 12 in the viewer to see this event. Note that Mosconi's nickname says "Free Wheelin Willie"

Looks like round robins were the normal thing back then !
 
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Yeah, alex P. he came to our pool room to play some poker not pool money game. funny guy, always make people laugh. last night bebeng galego and gomez not find any opponent to play money game, so they show us some trick shot. Li he wen play with edgie geronimo 3 set. Edgie win 2 set. Race to 11.The score is 11-8. 9-11 and 8-0 (Li he wen give up). This geronimo kid is very good, no smoke, no alcohol. very disipline player. Some day he will be very very good.

Sounds like everyone is having a good time. There must be some great pool playing. That Alex is a funny guy. :D
 
SJM makes quite a compelling argument on this topic. Hopefully he will weigh in soon.
 
At the am. level I like the open at valley Forge, 800+ single elimination races to 5 , 2 out of three, its hard to luck ur way thru that

Head to head only proves who is between 2 players playing each other has nothing to do who is a better player, if u took 10 players one player might beat 8 of those players consistently while the other may only beat 3
but in a head to head the lesser player might win because of styles and other variables , that don't allow the better player to beat the lesser player consistently even tho against the field he is superior




onestroke
 
Yes and no. Pool is a crazy game and crazy stuff happens. In the
long run, the better player will rise to the top.
 
Hi all

No, I believe in a short race, anybody can beat anybody. as long as the person have a skill to run out the ball. I have a dream to have a competition Billiard like a NBA or Soccer game. The winner must be representative the best pool player in te world.

Right now in my pool room there a money game between Biado VS SVB, Biado lead 11-6 Race to 17. this is a second game for both of them. a couple day ago SVB beat Biado.

Ricky Yang is a good player also, in Indonesia, he is our no 1. I believe, SVB wouldn't dare to underestimate him. From my opinion, he and SVB is even.

Any updates on the Biado vs SVB match? Thanks.
 
A little off subject, is the guiness tour invite only? how do you go about viewing their schedule and gettin spots
 
Derby City Classic is 9-ball and a short race to 7, with between 250-400 players competing.

Still, Ralf Souquet has incredible results from such a tournament where luck is a big factor.

So, imo, tournaments can definitely show who's the best.

Ralf's results at DCC

2010: didn't enter
2009: 3rd
2008: 1st
2007: 17th
2006: 1st
2005: 38th
2004: 1st
2003: 3rd
2002: 4th
2001 and earlier: did not enter
 
Double Elimination tournaments should be traded in for Round Robin formatted tournaments.

The best players always come out on top with Round Robin tournaments.

Then what would be the point?? I think the unpredictable is about the only thing that makes tournaments fun to watch anyway.
When you have alternating breaks and shorter races (9 or even7) it brings out the mid and lower level players and they are the ones who really make the tournaments possible.
 
YES, tournaments show who the best player is, over the long term.

Who were the best players' of the 80's? Sigel, Strickland, Hall, Varner. Who won the most tournaments? These guys. Who were the most feared gambling? These guys.

Who were the best players of the 90's? Archer, Strickland, Busty, Reyes. Who won the most tournaments? THese guys. Who were the most feared gambling? These guys.

Who were the best players of the 2000's? Archer, Busty, Reyes, Souqet, Alex. Who won the most tournaments? These guys. Who were the most feared gambling? These guys (of course Souquet does not gamble).

The point is, the best players will always rise to the top, no matter if its gambling, tournaments, whatever. You just can't look at one isolated tournament or gambling match. You have to look over a period of time to see who is the best.
 
tap, tap, tap.

Scott Lee
www.poolknowledge.com

First off - why did you pose this post as a question when it is obvious
you only wanted to editorialize about your opinion comparing tournaments to gambling.

They short answer is, no they don't. But, who told you that was the
reason for tournaments in the first place.

To paraphase Lassiter<I believe>:
"Let 'em play for a month betting their own money"

IMHO - both types of competition have thier place.

Dale
 
First off - why did you pose this post as a question when it is obvious
you only wanted to editorialize about your opinion comparing tournaments to gambling.

They short answer is, no they don't. But, who told you that was the
reason for tournaments in the first place.

To paraphase Lassiter<I believe>:
"Let 'em play for a month betting their own money"

IMHO - both types of competition have thier place.

Dale

Well first off - there is nothing innapropriate about my wanting to "editorialize" . Thats what forums like this are for.
(that's a really hard word to say out loud try it...), all it really means is expressing one's opinion while discussing a topic of interest.
Second of all I posed this as a question because I wanted to know what people think about the current tournament structures and if they are prone to causing too many upsets. In fact I appreciated a lot of responses, as they were well thought out.
Thirdly the US Open tennis tourney is coming up at the end of the month. The organizers, sponsors and fans can feel pretty safe that at least one of the game's best players (Nadal or Federer) will be in the final.
NOT SO IN POOL. Now thats a fact.
 
... Thirdly the US Open tennis tourney is coming up at the end of the month. The organizers, sponsors and fans can feel pretty safe that at least one of the game's best players (Nadal or Federer) will be in the final.
NOT SO IN POOL. Now that's a fact.
So why is tennis generally much better at separating the wheat from the chaff? I think there are two factors:

Tennis matches last longer than pool matches for the current formats. Fortunately, the format is (nearly?) always single elimination, so that the tournaments do not take two weeks.

More importantly, the players at tennis are tested far more frequently. In a race to 9 at 9 ball, each player may have to shoot only a dozen shots that are real testers. At tennis, you might have that many tough shots by each player in a single game or two. If those numbers are about right, you would have to play 9 ball as a race to 100 or 200 to get the same wheat/chaff separation effectiveness.

It used to be that championships were decided by much longer challenge matches. In the case of straight pool, Mosconi won most of his championships as challenge matches. See this thread which summarizes some of the info on Charlie Ursitti's great site. As an example, in the next-to-last championship match Mosconi won, the score was Mosconi 6300, Jimmy Caras 3007. In between the 14.1 challenge matches, there were multi-player tournaments, but they were never open tournaments; all of the players had qualified somehow and it was rare to see as many as 12 players. The typical format was round-robin, which you can do with a limited number of players.

In England, the matches used to take a couple of weeks.

At 3-cushion billiards, the World Championship used to be decided by round-robin play with about 12 players and fairly long matches. The result was that Raymond Ceulemans nearly always won. I've heard that the change to a sets format and single elimination was to make the results more interesting/unpredictable.
 
One tournament will not necessarily show who is the best but then nor will one money match.

As far as the format of the tournaments go, I am sure that what the pros really care about is maximizing the amount of money available. This probably means short races etc where the majority of money comes from entry fees (to encourage the lesser players) but longer matches, seeding etc where most of the money is coming from sponsors (who want whatever the spectators want, which is to see the big names go through).
 
Hi all

Sorry for a late update about money game here. Carlo Biado 17 - SVB 11. so they tie 1-1. every Pro player already go home right now. only Victor arpileda dand edgie Geronimo stay in jakarta. :frown:.

For Alex Pagulayan, he told me soon he will come back to POOL game. But it's all depend his mood.
 
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