This is completely false. The rule is *not* subjective. The enforcement of the rule is subjective only in so much as you can't know the person's intent for certain.
OK, the rule is cut and dried... and for exactly one person in the room, deciding whether or not to mark a safety is a no-brainer.
Unfortunately, that one person, the shooter, is not the guy keeping score.
So the scorekeepers are forced to resort to a
subjective intepretation of what they see.
If you ever saw a safety, and the shooter didn't announce it, but you marked it anyway,
you made a subjective interpretation.
Do you feel 'interpretation' doesn't happen, or shouldn't happen? Because
right here on the APA website, they openly admit it does.
23. A Defensive Shot is a shot where the shooter deliberately misses so as to pass his turn at the table to his opponent. [...] The shooter's "intent" is the determining factor in these situations. Sometimes intent can be a matter of opinion and judgment, but the scorekeeper's judgment must be accepted by the opposing player.
So whatever word you want to use ("subjective", "opinion", "judgment") the scorekeeper does have to make a guess about what he just saw.
He makes his best guess as to the shooter's intent, and marks accordingly.
Your subjective opinion is wrong. It is wrong because you are ignoring the rules. You have decided that you prefer your own rules instead. If you mark a safe in that situation, you are cheating. Nothing subjective about that.
KM, we have an honest disagreement.
There's no need to say I'm "cheating", that word makes me sound like a shitty human being who's trying to twist the rules to my advantage. I'm not. I'd mark the shot the same way whether it's my teammate or my opponent shooting. So it may help or hurt my team.
Since you consider intent king, it certainly is not my INTENT to gain an unfair advantage, or to ruin the handicapping system, or to unfairly 'ding' someone with a safety they didn't deserve.
We've been doing well in this thread keeping it civil, so please don't wreck that by calling me a cheater. It's rude and there's no reason for it.
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We actually mostly agree -
We agree intent determines whether a shot is a safe or not.
We agree the percentage of the shot is irrelevant, if you're playing a 2-way
Where we disagree is
in this one case whether the shooter's intent was to pocket a ball. Since neither of us is the shooter, both of us is forced to make a guess about his intent.
My guess would be "he had no intention of pocketing a ball", and I'd be very skeptical even if he told me otherwise.
Your guess is "he's playing a 2-way shot", apparently just because he said so.