GENDER IN POOL ... Do Men Play Better Than Women? ... Recent Legal Trial

DeeDeeCues said:
Use those examples to explain decline with age, please. Tell me why those explain why Earl today couldn't compete with 1995 Earl.
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One could say age related mental decline, but Earl has always been nuts anyway.

The hormone decline with senescence involves cognitive and neurological function as much as physical.

In my medical opinion, most cases of TRT are improper, not really medically indicated, and just an excuse to take steroids. In effect, doping.
 
garczar said:
In Earl's case it FAR more mental than physical. When he started getting that 'the world is against me' mentality he went downhill fast.
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We could use Ronnie O as an example. He's still extraordinarily capable and has a better attitude than he used to, but he misses things he didn't twenty years ago.

I just don't understand how people are so quick to dismiss strength being a factor in pool.
 
DeeDeeCues said:
We could use Ronnie O as an example. He's still extraordinarily capable and has a better attitude than he used to, but he misses things he didn't twenty years ago.

I just don't understand how people are so quick to dismiss strength being a factor in pool.
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I don't think they dismiss it. They just don't want to dismiss the rest of it.

I often think of Jeanette Lee. Her scoliosis and surgeries. I think she sets a great example to show how the game, the sport, the art of pool far transcends things like physical strength or ability.

Athletics in general do. World class athletes are far more than physical specimens in general. In the cue sports, the truly excellent are a complete well trained machine, body and mind.

I don't think any of this is simple.

Over the years I have had the opportunity to work closely with a number of world class athletes that decided to go to medical school. I leverage their athletic trained mind to help them gain advantage. It works. In fact, sports psychology is exactly the same in application for teaching and training doctors. They are athletes.
 
sjm said:
This is a nice, well-reasoned and well-presented article, but I have one complaint.

The implication is that the difference between the male player and the female player boils down almost entirely to physical attributes and gender-related physical differences, and much of it does.

I have probably attended 100 WPBA events live over the past 50 years and probably over 200 major men's events. I have seen every female BCA Hall of Famer play live other than Ruth McGinnis and I have played pool against more than half of them, too. As somebody who has been around both men's and women's pro pool since 1976, I feel an enormous difference between women's and men's pro pool has been largely overlooked in the article and that is the difference in general shot conceptualization and decision making.

I believe that in pro pool, the gap in conceptualization and decision making between men and women is as great as the gap in shot execution. The decisions made by women in pattern play, defense, and all tactical areas are miles and miles and more miles below those of the men, and for that reason, I still do not believe that if they had exactly the same abilities as men to execute shots, women would play as well as men.

Hence, while all the noted differences between men and women noted in the article are valid, it falls well short of explaining the difference between the top men and the top women.

Maybe it is politically incorrect to say that women are much less logical in their conceptualization and decision-making skills than men at the pool table, but my roughly 50 years of live observation say it is so, and it is a huge part of the story if women are to be compared with men.
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you may be correct about the tactical differences- perhaps Dave left that out because that would be more difficult to prove via statistics- not every match has an accu stats like tabulation- the TPA or whatever they call it
 
westcoast said:
you may be correct about the tactical differences- perhaps Dave left that out because that would be more difficult to prove via statistics- not every match has an accu stats like tabulation- the TPA or whatever they call it
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Quantification is the difficult thing in all this. Even the biology isn't what the masses understand. Where the regulations and laws meet science and medicine is a problem. Some of what I see that is put on the shoulders of physicians pushes the scope of practice to be kind. People don't realize a doctor providing a letter on relative "comepeitiveness" isn't proper practice. Doctors who think it is are wrong.
 
sjm said:
or b) you can get to (or near) a women's world class level without elite conceptualization, as many have already proven, which makes such development seem less urgent.
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good point. probably applies to some "local hero" male players as well. if you are content at being a big fish in a small pond you can get away with just being a very good shotmaker.
 
boogieman said:
I believe most "men only" events no longer exist. They are just called open, and by that definition anyone can play, so it's a moot point.
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Fair enough. But my underlying point is that a transgendered woman very likely has a competitive edge over a biological woman whereas a transgendered man would most likely be at a disadvantage. I'm not going to say it's never happened, but I've never heard of a man taking estrogen as a performance enhancement. The same cannot be said for testosterone.
 
skogstokig said:
good point. probably applies to some "local hero" male players as well. if you are content at being a big fish in a small pond you can get away with just being a very good shotmaker.
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See??? This is why I enjoy good open discussion without arguing! This is a factor I had never considered because I've had a stabilizer bolt (rod is a far too generous term in my case) since birth.
 
sjm said:
This is a nice, well-reasoned and well-presented article, but I have one complaint.

The implication is that the difference between the male player and the female player boils down almost entirely to physical attributes and gender-related physical differences, and much of it does.

I have probably attended 100 WPBA events live over the past 50 years and probably over 200 major men's events. I have seen every female BCA Hall of Famer play live other than Ruth McGinnis and I have played pool against more than half of them, too. As somebody who has been around both men's and women's pro pool since 1976, I feel an enormous difference between women's and men's pro pool has been largely overlooked in the article and that is the difference in general shot conceptualization and decision making.

I believe that in pro pool, the gap in conceptualization and decision making between men and women is as great as the gap in shot execution. The decisions made by women in pattern play, defense, and all tactical areas are miles and miles and more miles below those of the men, and for that reason, I still do not believe that if they had exactly the same abilities as men to execute shots, women would play as well as men.

Hence, while all the noted differences between men and women noted in the article are valid, it falls well short of explaining the difference between the top men and the top women.

Maybe it is politically incorrect to say that women are much less logical in their conceptualization and decision-making skills than men at the pool table, but my roughly 50 years of live observation say it is so, and it is a huge part of the story if women are to be compared with men.
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Men are naturally more aggressive in their thinking due to that little hormone called testosterone. It affects how we see patterns, ball position and shot selection as well as execution.
Women are the nurturers, for want of a better word and they see things from a totally different perspective, thus affecting their approach to all of the above listed ways men tackle the game. Neither good nor bad, just is.
 
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sjm said:
This is a nice, well-reasoned and well-presented article, but I have one complaint.

The implication is that the difference between the male player and the female player boils down almost entirely to physical attributes and gender-related physical differences, and much of it does.

I have probably attended 100 WPBA events live over the past 50 years and probably over 200 major men's events. I have seen every female BCA Hall of Famer play live other than Ruth McGinnis and I have played pool against more than half of them, too. As somebody who has been around both men's and women's pro pool since 1976, I feel an enormous difference between women's and men's pro pool has been largely overlooked in the article and that is the difference in general shot conceptualization and decision making.

I believe that in pro pool, the gap in conceptualization and decision making between men and women is as great as the gap in shot execution. The decisions made by women in pattern play, defense, and all tactical areas are miles and miles and more miles below those of the men, and for that reason, I still do not believe that if they had exactly the same abilities as men to execute shots, women would play as well as men.

Hence, while all the noted differences between men and women noted in the article are valid, it falls well short of explaining the difference between the top men and the top women.

Maybe it is politically incorrect to say that women are much less logical in their conceptualization and decision-making skills than men at the pool table, but my roughly 50 years of live observation say it is so, and it is a huge part of the story if women are to be compared with men.
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Thank you Stu. FYI, I just added a quote of your well-written and insightful post to the bottom of my gender in pool resource page.
 
westcoast said:
you may be correct about the tactical differences- perhaps Dave left that out because that would be more difficult to prove via statistics- not every match has an accu stats like tabulation- the TPA or whatever they call it
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Well said. Dave's article is superb, but inclusion of this issue might have been difficult due to the absence of data on the matter.

PS Conceptualization and decision making pertain to every part of pool, not just tactical play.
 
Jimmy_Betmore said:
You kind of corrected yourself with your last sentence. The difference in conceptualization and and decision making is by and far a gender related difference. Men and women are physiologically and biologically different. And those physiological and biological differences play and build off of each other in each gender.

A single female raised with ninety nine males and as a male would always be, statistically speaking, below average in overall physical strength. Another one would be to take fifty males and fifty females and raise them identically. Again statistically speaking, the top twenty or so in strength would be male and the bottom twenty or so would be female with the middle eighty or so being mixed. (I'm just pulling those number out of my ass, but I hope anyone reading this knows what I mean.) There would be outliers of course. But an overall lower average strength plus the female's need to be with a baby for breast feeding, are two of the key biological traits that have led to traditional gender roles in human culture. And those traditional gender roles affect a human's ability to learn many of the background skills (decision making and conceptualization are just two of them) that are required to perform competitive actions at the absolute highest levels.

Take something like chess which on its surface takes no physical skill beyond moving a piece on a board. Male physiology and biology still play a key role. A male's much higher testosterone level, higher muscle mass, and overall stronger build reduces the speed at which mental fatigue sets in. So learning and playing chess at its highest level is typically easier for a male than a female. And that's not even getting into the fact that the average male will be introduced to the game and better competition earlier and more frequently than the average female due to traditional gender roles. But the above example I gave with fifty males and fifty females would most likely be less top heavy with males simply because it relies less on physical traits.

I'm going to wrap it up with this -and I wish I didn't have to say this- but what I've just said is by no means a knock on transgendered people or anyone for that matter. I'm for anyone and everyone living their best possible life. We are all human beings who deserve a chance to be happy and to pursue our dreams. And like ninety nine percent of things in life, this is a complicated matter that will evolve over time.
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Well stated, especially the last paragraph. I'm also all for letting individuals live their lives as they choose. Unfortunately for them, those choices sometimes limit what is possible for them.
 
Oze147 said:
As I think about it...the article provides data for men and women, but is there any fargo data for transgender?
I wonder how the avarage transgender performs compared to the avarage women or men fargo wise.
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That would be interesting to analyze, but there is no transgender identifier in FargoRate.
 
we can all make both educated and non educated guesses why women cant compete with men in most sports. that fact is they cant and that should be the determining factor.
hardly any sport do women and men equally finish in the results. and few team sports have approaching 50 percent women in them.
as can be seen as most sports allow women to compete with the men yet they cannot win when doing so.

they do a lot of other things equal or better than men though. that are not physical in nature.
 
I thought the article was excellent. It would have been nice to have some idea of how the subject player performs(ed) in open/men's competition for reference. I'm personally vehemently opposed to the trans thing totally and anyone who normalizes that behavior.
 
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