Elo style ratings for pool

R

Ron Moore

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
Has anyone attempted an Elo-style rating system for tournament play?

In games with races you could rate by the game to get the sample size up high enough. So A beats B 9-7 would be treated as player A winning 9 of 16 matches vs. B's rating. Is the variance in tournament play too great for these types of ratings to provide meaningful results?

Just how predictable are tournament brackets anyway?
 
Ron Moore said:
Has anyone attempted an Elo-style rating system for tournament play?

In games with races you could rate by the game to get the sample size up high enough. So A beats B 9-7 would be treated as player A winning 9 of 16 matches vs. B's rating. Is the variance in tournament play too great for these types of ratings to provide meaningful results?

Just how predictable are tournament brackets anyway?
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Mike Page has worked all of that out. I think you can find his system based on Elo's system at fargobilliards.com.
 
Elo works perfect in Chess so no reason why it can't work in pool. I guess the number of competitors must be similar between the two games?
 
BFrench501 said:
Elo works perfect in Chess so no reason why it can't work in pool. I guess the number of competitors must be similar between the two games?
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With a little more effort, which is what Mike Page has provided, it is possible to use an Elo-based system to give partial or full handicaps in matches at pool. That is usually not done at chess and is probably more difficult unless it is by giving a number of games in a long match.
 
Serious chess doesn't - or didn't when I was playing, anyway - concern itself with "handicaps". Handicaps in casual play are (or were) generally handled by adjusting the time each player has for a game. The primary function of ELO systems in chess is to aid in pairing players of more-or-less similar ability in (generally) Swiss-system tournaments, which aren't really feasible in pool.

Mike Page's Fargo rating system for pool (which is an ELO-like system) provides an excellent objective basis for handicapping. It would be nice if it was widely adopted.

In the absence of such a system, there was a "line tournament" format described here some years ago by "Tom in Cincy" that seems to work very well for fairly small numbers of players. The description is here, with a bit more info describing the format's success with larger numbers of players here. This has many of the virtues of a Swiss-system tournament, but has much less bookkeeping and is considerably more suited to pool.
 
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