I think Fargo is great, what you are saying your results are the same as Fargo's results for the matches? I thought you were doing your own calculations off something else.
Match probability calculator, given Fargo ratings
- Thread starter tomker
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I think Fargo is great, what you are saying your results are the same as Fargo's results for the matches? I thought you were doing your own calculations off something else.
Nope. Just figuring out match odds based on Fargo ratings. Fargo predicts the results of an individual rack, and a match is a series of individual racks.
It's a combinatorics problem, like, what are the odds that I can flip 4 heads before my opponent flips 6 heads, or whatever.
I'm sure this has been brought up, but what are Fargo's hot, med and mild match odds again?
It's built into the app on one of its pages. It's a quick way for a TD to get a handicapped line for tournament matches. Digital pool also pulls from it and assigns it automatically. The TD using digital pool, can at the start of the tournament decide to use Hot, Med, or Mild.
Hot is closest to 50/50 true odds, but will always favor the better player.
Med is less close to 50/50, favoring the better player.
Mild is furthest from 50/50, favoring the better player.
As iusedtoberich said, hot is the closest to even and mild gives the most advantage to the better player. No spot gives the advantage to the weaker player.
Here is a video that discusses handicaps including hot/med/mild:
Is there any way to get the calculator to work for high numbers? I'm trying to figure out the performance rating of the ghost on my home table vs me. 98-366 is my aggregate 9 ball ghost score for all of 2024. I'm a 572. It does not give results for high race to numbers.
The problem is that they way the calculator does the calculations, it has to do factorials up to the number of games which are huge. That doesn't work for more than about 100 games due to limitations in the standard arithmetic functions in common computers. There are other ways to calculate the probabilities that don't end up with such large numbers.
But if you have stats against a single opponent, it is easy to calculate the relative FR. Just stick the following into the google search window:
100*(log(366/98)/log(2))+572
to find that your ghost is a 762,
Yes, and you'll notice the ratio of games won between any two players is just the ratio of their TRANSFORMED ratings.
A transformed rating is 2^(rating/100). So,
800 ----> 256
762 ----> 196.7
700 ----> 128
600 ----> 64
572 ----> 52.7
500 ----> 32
400 ----> 16
300 ----> 8
200 ----> 4
100 ----> 2
0 ----> 1
-100 ---> 0.5
We could have chosen to use these transformed ratings as the actual ratings. Then people would have gotten used to and internalized the numbers on the right. That would have been fine and the convenient feature would be the ratio of ratings is the ratio of expected games. Instead we use the numbers on the left because we judge as a MORE convenient feature that a rating DIFFERENCE means the same thing anywhere.
Fargo is a Town in North Dakota, if it pretend to be a Handicapping System for all of Pool. It is like every other system flaws with errors.
Believe it or not some players play strictly One Pocket, how does Fargo Rate them on as Bar Box in 8 Ball, totally incorrect.
Dump the Rating Systems, they do not work for all games, they are like the Old AZ Rating System imperfect.
Most Rating or Handicap System are use to keep better players out of Tournament, and bring in Recreational Player who spend more money on Beer, Booze, & Bar Food. That is how it works in Arizona under old AZ Rating System, and Fargo.
Better player are rewarded for playing well with fewer tournament they are welcome to play at.
JMHO
Believe it or not some players play strictly One Pocket, how does Fargo Rate them on as Bar Box in 8 Ball, totally incorrect.
Dump the Rating Systems, they do not work for all games, they are like the Old AZ Rating System imperfect.
Most Rating or Handicap System are use to keep better players out of Tournament, and bring in Recreational Player who spend more money on Beer, Booze, & Bar Food. That is how it works in Arizona under old AZ Rating System, and Fargo.
Better player are rewarded for playing well with fewer tournament they are welcome to play at.
JMHO
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My ghost is a 762. To find his true rating on my table, would we need a player that breaks even with him over the long haul, and make the ghost the same rating?
Or, if a 740 played on my table and crushed the ghost for a year straight, could we use the 740's score combined with my score to extrapolate what the ghost would be?
Or, if a 740 played on my table and crushed the ghost for a year straight, could we use the 740's score combined with my score to extrapolate what the ghost would be?
Other than on here NOBODY obsesses over this FR minutia. They show up, play and their scores get fed in to Fargo hq. I've never heard ONE person talking about how algorithms(most players don't know or care wtf that is) and other sundry shit are used to figure their FR. Lastly, this is the first time i've ever heard of someone calculating their ghost's speed. Gotta ask, why? You play the ghost and you either beat it or not. Who cares what the ghosts 'rating' is? This is some truly nerdy stuff. 
Who pissed in your cornflakes?Other than on here NOBODY obsesses over this FR minutia. They show up, play and their scores get fed in to Fargo hq. I've never heard ONE person talking about how algorithms(most players don't know or care wtf that is) and other sundry shit are used to figure their FR. Lastly, this is the first time i've ever heard of someone calculating their ghost's speed. Gotta ask, why? You play the ghost and you either beat it or not. Who cares what the ghosts 'rating' is? This is some truly nerdy stuff.
ha ha.
We've had conversations for years on here what speed the ghost is on standard equipment 9' tables. I think the consensus range was maybe mid 600's to low 700's. Would just be interesting to put an actual number to it.
Badpenguin
Well-known member
Maybe you should get out of Oklahoma more often.Other than on here NOBODY obsesses over this FR minutia. They show up, play and their scores get fed in to Fargo hq. I've never heard ONE person talking about how algorithms(most players don't know or care wtf that is) and other sundry shit are used to figure their FR. Lastly, this is the first time i've ever heard of someone calculating their ghost's speed. Gotta ask, why? You play the ghost and you either beat it or not. Who cares what the ghosts 'rating' is? This is some truly nerdy stuff.
No, I think just his rating relative to you is enough. The strength of the ghost will vary on different tables because your runout percentages change from table to table. I guess we could conclude that your table is a 762 in that sense. It would be interesting if you could get data for other established players on your table against the ghost.
Given this, why are you 30 posts into a thread topic titled,Other than on here NOBODY obsesses over this FR minutia. They show up, play and their scores get fed in to Fargo hq. I've never heard ONE person talking about how algorithms(most players don't know or care wtf that is) and other sundry shit are used to figure their FR. Lastly, this is the first time i've ever heard of someone calculating their ghost's speed. Gotta ask, why? You play the ghost and you either beat it or not. Who cares what the ghosts 'rating' is? This is some truly nerdy stuff.
Match probability calculator, given Fargo ratings
It's a fact that they are not accurate for any match length.
Fargo ratings are ugly approximations based on tiny sample sizes.
You’re winning about 21.1% which is about the win rate when playing a player 190 points higher than you so your ghost is about a 762.
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It's pretty interesting that somebody thought about what the ghost Fargo rating would be. However there's one thing with playing the ghost, is that it automatically wins if you miss. If we look at this from a real world logical way, even the best players on the planet do not have a guaranteed win every rack even with ball in hand. So wouldn't the ghost be assigned a Fargo rating greater than the best player on the planet at the time?
It's almost like the math idea that there are some infinities that are larger than other infinities. No matter who the ghost plays it is still a perfect player. Eventually there could be a number large enough where even top players could falter against playing the ghost.
But that "if you miss" is a conditional probability. What matters instead is the chance the ghost beats you this game evaluated BEFORE you shoot. And that is just the chance that you fail to run out.
So every task that you can imagine trying on a pool table has, in effect, a Fargo Rating.
--spot shot
--run the last 3 from ball-in-hand on a 9-foot table
--run the last 5 from ball in hand on a 7-foot table
--ball-in-hand on a 9-foot table
In each case the rating of the task--your opponent-- is the same as the rating of the player that succeeds half the time.
So you're saying that the ghost Fargo level, even though it never misses or makes a mistake, can be not much more than a B or A player if a C player plays it and gets a few games on it before losing? That thinking breaks my internal logic LOL. I think that's the place where Fargo ratings break down where the TPA scale works better. Because a player could have a perfect TPA rating but still lose against another player that doesn't give him a chance. So even though the ghost may have lost 10 to 2 against SVB it can still maintain a perfect 1000 TPA because when it was at the table it never missed or made an error. But in Fargo ratings, the ghost rating of a perfect player, is at the whims of the opponent, in technical terms.