Okay, so instead of confusing people (like me and maybe the OP), why does the system allow a player to have a rating after just 2 games in the Fargo Rate system? I understand the "Robustness" part now. It was just confusing to me.
I will try to put it in simple terms. FargoRate calculates a rating for everybody in the FargoRate database regardless of how many games you have in the system (database). You can be in the database with only one game (if the match was only one game), or you can be in there with thousands of games, but a large number of people in the database started with one match. As FargoRate becomes aware of more of your qualifying matches, they get added to the database and your number of games in the database goes up from there. Your number of games in the system is called your "robustness".
On the FargoRate site, and on this site many times, Mike Page has explained that a FargoRate rating is not considered to be fairly accurate until you have 200 games in the system, which he has termed an "established" rating. Before then there just isn't enough information from your play to make a real accurate assessment. Of course the fewer the games you have in the system, the less accurate it is, and the closer you get to having 200 games, the more accurate it is. In fact, it keeps getting more accurate over time, even past 200 games, but 200 is considered to be already pretty accurate, however 20 games, or only 2 games, would be considered extremely unreliable, while 190 is just about reliable now.
It is not much different than if you see a match (or hear the results of a match) from a player that is new to you, you can kind of start to tell something about their skills, but not accurately yet from just one match because maybe they had a bad match that day, or maybe they shot way over their head that day, or their opponent had an off day, etc. But after you have seen that person play many matches, they are no longer new to you and you have a lot of data with which to formulate your opinion about their actual skill level based on lots of matches. Except FargoRate isn't using opinion and subjective judgment like you would be, it is using only actual results from actual matches (not just who won, but by what scores) to remove all subjectivity and then comparing everybody against everybody else in what is called "global optimization".
Now Mike Page (the inventor of FargoRate) could turn off or hide the ratings for people until they reach 200 games, but why would he? Anybody with half a brain can see that if you only have 2 games in the system your rating isn't reliable yet. Also Mike has been clear on his site as well as on the forums that a rating is not to be considered as being fairly reliable until a person has 200 games in the system, and the further you are from having 200 games in the system yet, the more inaccurate it is likely to be. There are some benefits and uses for being able to see the ratings on someone before they reach 200 games in the system so he allows them to be seen knowing that everyone (who has half a brain or that bothered to visit the site to check how it worked) would know that they aren't completely reliable until he has enough match information (200 games) to make them pretty reliable.
And to address those screaming "everybody can give their opinion whenever they want blah blah"... There is nothing wrong with having or giving your opinion except when you know little or nothing about what you are giving the opinion on (in which case you are an idiot), or when your opinion is just flat wrong because it conflicts with provable fact (in which case you are stupid).
