In the recent Puerto Rico team event, did any woman face off against a man during the singles matches?
Men vs Women
- Thread starter Cornerman
- Start date
It's still called a marriage at that point? Sounds more like a training dummy.
A lot of people have mentioned competitiveness and strength. Men do have an advantage in those aspects...
But the biggest reason, and I haven't seen anybody else mention this (though I didn't read through the whole thread) is hand-eye coordination. Pool is a sport where strength is not a big advantage, but technique/form or hand-eye certainly is. I'm sure there are many studies you can look up if you want. The first google result is: "Men have stronger connections between brain areas for motor and spatial skills. That means males tend to do a better job at tasks that need hand-eye coordination and understanding where objects are in space, such as throwing a ball or hammering a nail."
I would compare hitting a shot in pool to throwing a baseball, throwing a dart, swinging a golf club, I'm sure there are many other examples of things that are more to do with technique than strength. If you pick random people in the street that have never tried these sports before, on average the men would perform much better than the women.
But the biggest reason, and I haven't seen anybody else mention this (though I didn't read through the whole thread) is hand-eye coordination. Pool is a sport where strength is not a big advantage, but technique/form or hand-eye certainly is. I'm sure there are many studies you can look up if you want. The first google result is: "Men have stronger connections between brain areas for motor and spatial skills. That means males tend to do a better job at tasks that need hand-eye coordination and understanding where objects are in space, such as throwing a ball or hammering a nail."
I would compare hitting a shot in pool to throwing a baseball, throwing a dart, swinging a golf club, I'm sure there are many other examples of things that are more to do with technique than strength. If you pick random people in the street that have never tried these sports before, on average the men would perform much better than the women.
It would be real hard to watch any of the current world top 3 Fargo rated women players play right now, none of which to my knowledge are trans gender, and claim that they have any physiological disadvantage playing this game over the top men players.
That they have been able to attain this high a level of play just in the past 10 years through their own hard work / practice / coaching / etc is pretty strong evidence that there is not much, if any of an advantage for male players over female players in this game.
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It's obvious in some sports, but not obvious in others, like ours. We really don't know for sure exactly what causes the differential. But what we do know is when a transgender wins multiple events against women players who play strong, then we have to pay attention. It's not luck, and it's most likely not that he practices more than everyone else in those tournaments. I suspect it's the effect of years worth of hormones, even before the change. Hormones can affect everything in your body, including your mind.
Hesitation. Misdirection.
The arguments offered against that is to the effect that "no one can react that fast"
However, my guess is that a lot of times when a person has the yips (in any endeavor) they have already built that maddeningly unpredictable effect into the mental image of random strokes. It happens semi- or un- consciously before the event.
But perhaps you missed my point that if we are talking pure physics with a robot, there is no argument.
I pointed out why people often "think" the character of the stroke affects the outcome. It does. But then velocity (speed, direction) is not consistent. And there absolutely is the factor that acceleration does depend on duration of the force. To wit, phenolic tip vs mushy tip. Or possibly, the control a shooter programmed into the stroke "long" before the moment of impact.
Here's the physical experiment:
Set up a robot (or spring) with accurate ball placement and control
1.) shoot some multiple of shots with the only control on the cue being the spring extension and the ball mass.
2.) now put a limiting device (a hard stop)on the butt of the cue, so that when it is triggered, the tip can only extend to a precise known point. Place the cue ball accurately only 1/100 of an inch into this stop zone. See how far or with what velocity it travels compared to 1.) The tip for the experiment shall be a common leather cue tip. Soft would favor my argument but even a "hard" tip is probably compressible enough to make the point.
My contention is that this can occur with muscle power, too; though the neuro-event happens well before the moment of impact. The cue ball is struck with full velocity of the cue. The cueball itself accelerates to a given velocity dependent on duration of the force. Duration of the force is controlled by the restraining device. IOW, F = ma. However, V(final) = V(o) + at (CB initially being at rest; Final velocity = acceleration x time)
smt
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Ghost of OBC
Well-known member
Gestational testosterone has very significant and measurable effects on vision development. Men effectively have a higher refresh rate and a greater resolution, women have more refined wavelength detection. The result is men seeing in higher resolution and women rendering colors more realistically. I'm sure an evolutionary biologist could tell us why, but in a game so vision dependent, that has to make a significant difference in population-level performance.
InsertCleverNameHere
Well-known member
absolutely spot on from what I’ve learned over the years and also in my personal life experience as well
Black-Balled said:
Imo, the main difference is far fewer women are silly enough to devote themselves to knocking pool balls to develop fully.
this same argument is made about
the lack of women chess players-
why would a person devote themselves
to a very difficult game with fierce
competition for almost no money
Imo, the main difference is far fewer women are silly enough to devote themselves to knocking pool balls to develop fully.
this same argument is made about
the lack of women chess players-
why would a person devote themselves
to a very difficult game with fierce
competition for almost no money
Yes, from what I've read men's brains have developed stronger connections between areas of the brain that are used for motor and spatial skills, so that men are more adept at tasks that require hand-eye coordination. At the elite levels of pool these differences will be multiplied, such that not only will the elite level men players be better than the elite level women players, but there will also be more of them.
Depends on what you mean by "weakness".
From an evolutionary perspective, male humans have been the hunters for the vast majority of our evolutionary period, so it stands to reason that pattern recognition and spatial awareness would be better "in general" in males, as compared to females. As nearly every sport/game requires either pattern recognition, spatial awareness, or both, even in sports/games with less of a physical component, it is not surprising that men dominate.
An interesting point of contention though, is the fact that men are evolutionarily built to "want" to compete more (as females of almost all species will migrate to male mates who prove their genetic fitness, often through combat with other males..), as as such, more men tend to compete at ANY sport/game, which skews the overall performance greatly.
The fact that the top women come ANYWHERE CLOSE to top males is actually a compliment to the fairer sex, as they are being pulled from a significantly smaller talent pool to start with.
I myself believe that men/women exist on a "scale" of feminine/masculine genetic traits, with some men being much more empathic than others, and with some women being much more competitive than others. I think in a lot of cases, women with more traditionally "masculine" physical traits, will have traits that are complimentary to competition, such as increased hand-eye coordination, competitive urge, spatial awareness, etc. I always thought Jean Balukas, while not an unattractive woman at all, had somewhat masculine facial features. Very pronounced cheekbones, etc.
tomatoshooter
Well-known member
Yet they want to get paid the same.
Here is the idea. Let's make the hypothesis that the unknown distributions of talent (potential) for men and women look like this. That is, in a universe where equal numbers of men and women play and train and there are no social factors, the distribution of skill for men and women are shifted by half a standard deviation, about 50 points. This is a combined result perhaps from differences in strength, focus, coordination...whatever.
We don't have these distributions. But we do have information that might relate to the shapes of the tails of these distributions, the circled region. If our hypothesis is right and the top men and women are sampling from the tails of these distributions, then we should notice the fraction of women falling as we go from 2 to 2.5 to 3 to 3.5 here because we hyphothesise the women's distribution falls off faster.
That's not what we see. Of the top 100 established ratings 3 are women. Of the top 1000, 43 are women. The ratio stays pretty constant throughout the tail. That's a problem for our hypothesis, and a better hypothesis is the players are selected from distributions that are not shifted.
Look at hypothetical data it will mislead many people.
Not all billiard training programs produce the same outcomes.
Not all players need to use the same skills to place well.
The problem with your study is the deviation is unknown. Its like studying the age of cancer patients, you can study it but it makes more sense to look at qualitative data instead of quantitative data. Women have breast cancer in high rates, that is a cluster.
In billiards the cluster is formed by who is connected to a specific pool room or organization. If Jasmin Ouschan was given 30 students to train in female billiards, how many would achieve an increase in performance versus achieve pro level standards? A question like this is better for the forum users. Your study of the general population of pool players ignores the factors that got the players there.
If there is more money to spend on women for playing, there would be more players. A positive correlation is within anybody's grasp for a statistical argument. Hypothesis testing is a classic lecture that is not well explained.
Its a great ad for fargo, but the math is lacking in logic.
So based on your theory, what's the difference between those women who have this outstanding potential who would beat everyone, including transgenders, but aren't playing, and the women who are currently playing? Physical? Mental?
I understand the idea. But we have different counts. On the FargoRate app, I see one female in the top 100 of the world.
Also, you've done the same things that you did in the video. You've presented a limited subset of the data. You have that data. What are the actual curves you see, from left tail to right tail? And, why the partial response to a few points that were raised? Finally, comparing one person vs three vs whatever isn't the strongest argument (in either direction) due to confidence intervals, as I'm sure you know.
It still sounds like someone trying to come to a conclusion, rather than objectively analyzing the topic.
If a female dik-dik becomes a dude are they now a 'dik-dik-dik'? Curious minds want to know.
snookered_again
Well-known member
my personal take on the matter is that any separation of men or women is unnecessary . I take the viewpoint that you are a better player or not and the way your prove that is by having a fair game. sex and sexual preferences or orientation have absolutely nothing to do with it. If a lady has practiced enough to beat a man then all the credit to her. There is definitely a chauvinistic attitude though and some may be that men just like to play with men because when there is a mix they cant' tell the same jokes, they might not be as relaxed, many go play pool for a relief of the male/female related drama they experience at home and need to unwind that way. They want a night out with the boys!, fine.
Is the concept of a men's club bad, not necessarily.. It can be a bit like how a group of ladies gets together for a quilting event and talk about their husbands and have that one on one time with other ladies. That doesn't mean a man can't do quilting. You just will find that more quilters are female than male.
on the subject of impact upon break, yes the speed of the ball is everything but does spin come into play? I think it does, some want the cue ball to launch and land on other balls as an example. Its not only impact speed but I feel there is some technique to spreading the balls. some have more experience in this than me because I play more snooker and the break , of course, is a completely different strategy.
I think there are basically two different types of energy involved. the speed and impact of the ball PLUS the spin. the way Im seeing it is the energy transfer from the cue ball is differnt depending on spin, on a basic shot of two balls, the spin affects how energy is transferred.
if you do a thin cut shot with spin , depending on the direction of spin the energy is definitely transfered differently depending on sidespin, you can affect the distance that both balls will go by the effect of spin changing the surface speed at impact.
if the break is in a fairly straight line then there is no cut action upon the cue ball so maybe its a bit of a different situation, Vertically all the balls are in the same plane. food for thought i guess, some may be able to think more thoughrougly on that and explain better than I am able to.
in a sentence I'd say that "the ball spread has more to do than simply impact speed." I believe there is techniqe involved as well as break speed.
I would not say I'm the most experienced person, or that I'd be the best here to be able to fully explain the best technique. Of course there is the added skill of actually pocketing more balls on break as well as ball spread.
Is the concept of a men's club bad, not necessarily.. It can be a bit like how a group of ladies gets together for a quilting event and talk about their husbands and have that one on one time with other ladies. That doesn't mean a man can't do quilting. You just will find that more quilters are female than male.
on the subject of impact upon break, yes the speed of the ball is everything but does spin come into play? I think it does, some want the cue ball to launch and land on other balls as an example. Its not only impact speed but I feel there is some technique to spreading the balls. some have more experience in this than me because I play more snooker and the break , of course, is a completely different strategy.
I think there are basically two different types of energy involved. the speed and impact of the ball PLUS the spin. the way Im seeing it is the energy transfer from the cue ball is differnt depending on spin, on a basic shot of two balls, the spin affects how energy is transferred.
if you do a thin cut shot with spin , depending on the direction of spin the energy is definitely transfered differently depending on sidespin, you can affect the distance that both balls will go by the effect of spin changing the surface speed at impact.
if the break is in a fairly straight line then there is no cut action upon the cue ball so maybe its a bit of a different situation, Vertically all the balls are in the same plane. food for thought i guess, some may be able to think more thoughrougly on that and explain better than I am able to.
in a sentence I'd say that "the ball spread has more to do than simply impact speed." I believe there is techniqe involved as well as break speed.
I would not say I'm the most experienced person, or that I'd be the best here to be able to fully explain the best technique. Of course there is the added skill of actually pocketing more balls on break as well as ball spread.
No offense but your personal take is way too long. A BIG % oz AZ folks just,to quote Dionne Warwick, 'walk on by' a post this long. I got thru a third and bailed. Just sayin
snookered_again
Well-known member
That's OK, no harm in only reading only the short posts if that is your preference. No offense taken.