FargoRate - Rulesets, table types - Present and Future states.

[telinoz]

Over the years, I've become a big fan of FargoRate.
It has dealt with a lot of old issues with in-house handicaps, poor statistics applied to calculate them, a person's personal view or grudge.

To the best of my knowledge, the Present State of FargoRate looks at data from the following;

PRESENT STATE

WPA / BCA Specification tables
7ft tables
9ft tables

WPA / BCA Rules
8-Ball
9-Ball
10-Ball
1 Pocket

One thing I would like to see, if possible is an expansion of this first with other Pool variants.

POSSIBLE FUTURE STATE

WPA / BCA Rules
14.1 Straight Pool

WEPF Tables (aka English Pool on here)
6ft table
7ft table

WEPF - Eightball rules, now that they have settled on International Rules - read more here: https://forums.azbilliards.com/thre...-international-rules-for-english-pool.547717/

WPA / Blackball
Blackball Rules
7ft Tables


>>>>

What this means is, we could have all pool players, rulesets, table types on FargoRate.
I would personally love to see this.

@mikepage - Can you shed any light on if any of this is possible?
Or if not, what the reasoning would be - and would you maybe have to split some ratings, because the games are too different?

 

[telinoz]

Snooker, this has always been the most stable Cuesport (maybe 3 cushion as well).
12ft tables, ball size, cloth, pocket templates - all very stable.

However, over the years I've lost count for how many handicap systems I've seen for Snooker.

I wonder if this is something else to consider down the road for FargoRate?

 

[Woodshaft]

ALL cuesport games have way too many variables to be represented by one, universal handicap.
This is why fargorate is pretty much meaningless. It tries to say that ALL game data should carry the same relevance/weight.
This is simply not true.
Many pool players are "specialists" of a certain game, on certain equipment, using certain rules.
Some have mastered bar table 8-ball, some only play 9-foot 10-ball, some only play one-pocket, etc.. for example.
These players cannot be ranked against each other in a standard way.
Fargorate, and ANY pool ranking system for that matter, definitely should be taken with a large grain of salt.

 

[telinoz]

ALL cuesport games have way too many variables to be represented by one, universal handicap.
This is why fargorate is pretty much meaningless. It tries to say that ALL game data should carry the same relevance/weight.
This is simply not true.
Many pool players are "specialists" of a certain game, on certain equipment, using certain rules.
Some have mastered bar table 8-ball, some only play 9-foot 10-ball, some only play one-pocket, etc.. for example.
These players cannot be ranked against each other in a standard way.
Fargorate, and ANY pool ranking system for that matter, definitely should be taken with a large grain of salt.

I am all for, splitting out cuesports - I am just after one system, login, ID to use across different tournaments.
If data analysis shows there needs to be different ratings per cuesport, so be it.

 

[Zerksies]

In chess you get a different rating for different games. I see no problem doing the same for pool

 

[eastcoast_chris]

I'd love to see what a single game database record actually looks like in Fargorate?

Is "Game Type" stored?
Or is it just win/loss and your ID and your opponents ID? Date? Etc?

I'm a developer with tons of database programming experience and would love to see the inner workings of the tables.

Not the data, just how the data is stored so you could envision how it could be used to extract meaningful results with different queries.

Mind sharing that @mikepage ?

 

[mikepage]

Over the years, I've become a big fan of FargoRate.
It has dealt with a lot of old issues with in-house handicaps, poor statistics applied to calculate them, a person's personal view or grudge.

To the best of my knowledge, the Present State of FargoRate looks at data from the following;

PRESENT STATE

WPA / BCA Specification tables
7ft tables
9ft tables

WPA / BCA Rules
8-Ball
9-Ball
10-Ball
1 Pocket

One thing I would like to see, if possible is an expansion of this first with other Pool variants.

POSSIBLE FUTURE STATE

WPA / BCA Rules
14.1 Straight Pool

A difficulty with including 14.1 in Fargo Ratings is, in part, that the size of the basic scoring unit--a point in straight pool vs a game in 9-ball--is far apart. Beating somebody 100-to-80 in straight pool might be equivalent to beating somebody 10-to-8 in 9-ball. If so, then we'd need to divide all 14.1 scores by 10 to get an apples-to-apples situation. Whether that divisor is 10 or 8 or 12 requires more analysis. We just haven't done it at this point.

WEPF Tables (aka English Pool on here)
6ft table
7ft table

WEPF - Eightball rules, now that they have settled on International Rules - read more here: https://forums.azbilliards.com/thre...-international-rules-for-english-pool.547717/

WPA / Blackball
Blackball Rules
7ft Tables

That would work fine. If you asked people if it matters whether you're playing with 2.25 inch balls or 2 inch balls, on a 10-foot or 9-foot table or a 7-foot or 6-foot table, whether you have napped cloth, whether the pocket facings are rounded, and what game/rules you're playing, they'd say of course it matters--and the way they're thinking about it, it does. For Fargo Ratings, though, it doesn't matter. Fargo Ratings would if anything be strengthened by adding in all blackball, snooker, English pool, etc

>>>>

What this means is, we could have all pool players, rulesets, table types on FargoRate.
I would personally love to see this.

@mikepage - Can you shed any light on if any of this is possible?
Or if not, what the reasoning would be - and would you maybe have to split some ratings, because the games are too different?

It is possible. For snooker, we would get more information from the detailed point scores than the frame totals.

 

[mikepage]

I'd love to see what a single game database record actually looks like in Fargorate?

Is "Game Type" stored?
Or is it just win/loss and your ID and your opponents ID? Date? Etc?
[...]

Yes game type is stored. So is table size, though not infrequently we don't have that information.

 

[mikepage]

In chess you get a different rating for different games. I see no problem doing the same for pool

It's actually a problem for chess. You may be interested to know you get better ratings for classical time control by including faster rapid/blitz games.