How is this for mentality of some pool players

pwd72s

recreational banger
Silver Member
I heard yesterday that a well known top level player of this area was banned from tournament play for purposely lowering his Fargo rating. Evidently he got caught because he bragged about doing it on facebook.

This is going to be tough on him because his main source of income is pool.

PNW players probably consider this old news...I first heard it yesterday.
 

Dan Harriman

One of the best in 14.1
Silver Member
eh not so much

If it is worth winning, somebody's gonna find it worth cheating.

Make payouts low and pocket the rest. That should resolve any concerns about the event.

Actually if there are ref's, no spots, and $ in escrow - cheating is not an issue. But under the handicap (league type system) you see the cheats come out to play.A sandbagger's foundation will always be built on sand.
 
Last edited:

book collector

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
If it is worth winning, somebody's gonna find it worth cheating.

Make payouts low and pocket the rest. That should resolve any concerns about the event.

We had a 3 dollar a game and a dime a hickey golf game in Columbus for about 40 years or more , same 5 or 6 guys always playing .
Two "hustlers " roflmao, came in and started playing partners in the game.
Collecting aluminum cans from behind bars would have been 10 times more profitable.
They did eventually cause the game to be a partners game .
Whereupon they crawled back under their rocks and were not seen again.
 

deanoc

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
pool brings out the worse in most of us

what really amazes me is how low down and outright cheap people can be

my experience has been that funsey players are less honest than the higher players

and certainly less sports
 

KMRUNOUT

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
I suppose if I went to fargo I could figure out what a 580 is but would you guys mind telling me what level that is and and the various levels equate to. All I play in is an APA here, and I thought that APA could if they wanted to could report to fargo is that correct or not?

Thanks



In my area, 580 is B+ level. Approximately a solid APA 8 or not so strong 9.

KMRUNOUT


Sent from my iPhone using AzBilliards Forums
 

simco

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
Sounds like pretty normal pool player behavior.Any handicap system brings
sandbaggers with it, it's automatic.
 

maha

from way back when
Silver Member
its real simple just have the tournament director decide who cannot get in because they are too good. so what if some get mad they cant play. it isnt an open tournament.
 

BRussell

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
I just had someone tell me that there are A and higher players that are entering Fargo ranked tournaments and dumping matches to lower players to drop their official rating so they can get into the event.

Sick.

I bet they’ll find it’s harder than they think to intentionally lower their Fargo rating much. If they lose games and matches, they’ll be out of the tournament quickly, so they won’t have many losing games in the system for their entry fee. If they’re a 590 and they want to get to 580, yeah sure, but they’re close anyway. But there’s no way a 650 is going to play in a couple tournaments and get down to 580.
 

garczar

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
Guess you've never played golf. This has been going on in golf forever. Once played in a tournament where a guy shot 82 on 1st day and went to 3-4 flight. Shot 67 second day. Organizers were so pissed they not only didn't pay him but ran him off and called every course within 200 miles to knock the guy. Sandbagger deluxe.
 

Poolplaya9

Tellin' it like it is...
Silver Member
I bet they’ll find it’s harder than they think to intentionally lower their Fargo rating much. If they lose games and matches, they’ll be out of the tournament quickly, so they won’t have many losing games in the system for their entry fee. If they’re a 590 and they want to get to 580, yeah sure, but they’re close anyway. But there’s no way a 650 is going to play in a couple tournaments and get down to 580.

You are right. Ratings systems where your win/loss ratio is a component for how it rates you are easier to sandbag because a 9-8 loss affects your rating exactly the same as a 9-0 loss does. A loss is a loss under those systems. To manipulate a rating system like those all you have to do is take a few losses on occasion, any losses, by any amount, even just barely and you can often take those losses in places where they don't otherwise matter much since so few are needed. Since all losses count the same and heavily affect your rating, it is pretty easy to cause large movements in your rating fairly quickly and without anyone being able to detect it just by barely losing a match on occasion here and there.

FargoRate on the other hand doesn't even consider your win/loss ratio at all and instead looks at how you performed in any particular match compared to how you were supposed to have performed against the type of opponent you had. In fact in FargoRate your rating will go up even when you lose matches if your performance level for that match was above your rating.

To significantly sandbag your FargoRate ratings would require one of two things. To move your rating a significant amount in a relatively short amount of time, like to get from a 650 to a 580 in a couple of months as in the example that was previously mentioned, you would have to massively under perform your ability quite a few times. You would need to lose a bunch of matches by say 9-0. Simply barely losing or barely under performing can't get you there, so your massive under performances and all your 9-0 losses are going to be super obvious to everybody around you if you tried to do this.

For those that already had a bunch of games in the system, that wouldn't even work because you just wouldn't be able to move your rating that much that fast. But even for people that only have a couple of hundred games in the system, what it would require would just be way too obvious to everyone around you and as a 650 there is no way you would be able to get away with playing like say 400 for a while losing a bunch of matches 9-0. Unless everybody around you is allowing you to do it, because it is going to have to be so ridiculously blatant and obvious that they are all going to know exactly what you are attempting to do, then it pretty much isn't going to be possible to sandbag your rating a significant amount quickly.

The other way to try to sandbag your FargoRate rating by a significant amount is to do it in a not so obvious way, making sure you don't under perform your true level too often or by too much. There are many problems with this though. One, you are never going to be able to lower your rating a significant amount by doing it this way anyway (because you would have to massively under perform very often to have any chance for big changes to your rating). Two, whatever amount you could potentially lower your rating this way is going to take a long time and a whole lot of events (because as you said you can only under perform a couple of times before you are out of the tournament so it is going to take a lot of tournament entry fees to get all the under performances you need). Three, that long period of time of under performing is going to mean you are not winning as much or maybe at all along the way, all while spending lots of entry fee money and time in the process.

Who is going to to invest all that time and all those entry fees, playing in all those events, missing out on at least some and maybe all of the money you would have been winning that whole time, when you aren't even going to be able to get your rating down more than minimally lower at best anyway? Not anybody that values money or time. As you kind of alluded to, FargoRate makes it to where it just isn't feasible to be able to sandbag your rating very much.
 
Last edited:
Top