Settled in 2006? Are you out of your mind? So glad you can judge women today by how women played 13 years ago
We are also talking about somebody who is just starting to gamble. I think she performed way above average for somebody who is new to gambling, especially with it being streamed for the world to see.
Jason
I love how Mike patiently explains over and over how they get the ratings and how the accurate the ratings are and how coupling works and STILL people think that their feelings on the matter are more valid than the math.
They STILL think that Siming Chen doesn't belong where she is rated. As if somehow Fargo cares about the gender of the player being rated and is somehow inflating that amount.
Here it is in a nutshell.
Imagine if Shane Van Boening was the same speed player that he is right now. Absolutely no difference. But the only difference is that he had never played anything but BCA leagues in South Dakota. And plenty of those players he plays with have played elsewhere so they are connected to everyone else. And SVB is ONLY connected through them.
What would his fargo rate be?
It would be 820 or very close to it.
It literally does not matter if a person plays MOSTLY or even fully with any group of players as long as that group of players is connected to the rest of the world's players.
Yes conventional wisdom says that a 10 speed player in podunk oklahoma is not likely to be a 10 speed player at Hard Times. But as many people found out who traveled to podunk Oklahoma and played Norman Hitchcock, sometimes the farmer in nowhere Oklahoma turns out to be a farmer with world class billiard skills.
Fargo just aggregates the game results regardless of tournament or match. The super simple assumption that actually works is that however it's possible that a person maintains a win loss record that equals what other people are able to maintain it means that both players have whatever skills are needed to maintain that level of performance. It doesn't care if that means that one 800 speed player plays mostly on fast tables with only 4.5 pockets and the other 800 speed player only plays on bartables with slow cloth.
This match came to be because a few people went with their feelings and those feelings told them that Fargo Ratings were so far off that not only was the woman overrated but that she was overrated by around 80 points. In other words they predicted that she would lose badly, not win closely. So now you have the anti-fargo crowd trying to dig into the secret sauce that Fargo uses and DECLARE that "A HA" see Fargo predicted a blow out on Siming's side and because she won closely then Fargo must be wrong....
Well Fargo did NOT predict a blow out. it predicted odds of 54.5% for Donnie to get to 17 and 45.5% for Siming to get to 21 as the closest to 50%. And as Mike has explained there is some variance in the rating, but has not disclosed how much, only to say that the more games a player has in the less variance there is. I.e. the more games in the MORE ACCURATE that the rating is. So that said, every single player here who gambles has heard the phrase outrun the nuts. It means that when one side has what appears to be the very best of it, then if the other player manages to win then he "outran the nuts". If that never happened then there would be very little action because most players THINK that they have the nuts when they match up and when a player thinks he is in a match where the weight is too much but he wins anyway then it only encourages people to keep playing, the guy who outran the nuts wants to play more and the person who got the nuts wants to play more if they they think they should not have lost. The race length that made it 50/50 were more likely closer to 21-17.5 and the actual scores were 21-20 and 21-19. Which means that Chen VERY SLIGHTLY underperformed and Mills very slightly overperformed using the Fargo predictions and that both of their performances were well within the range of variance allowed.
But the final scores could have ALSO been a blowout far outside the predicted outcome because in any given series of games either player can play well above or well below their average. For example if you JUST started the set at the point where Mills needed 8 games to win and Chen needed 2 then fargo would predict a 0% chance for Mills to win that race but Mills far outperformed in those next 9 games, winning 7 to Chen's 2. So IF you only took those 9 games as all you knew of these two players then your conclusion would be that Mills is the FAR STRONGER player by miles even if Chen won the "set' having only won 2 games. But if we zoom out and look at the whole set of 41 games and see that both players won 20 games and that Chen got across first with 21 then we could conclude that they are fairly even. And if we then zoom out even farther and look at all the games between then then the record is 57 games for Chen and 52 games for Mills and we see that they are not totally even. And then if we zoom out even farther and check their performance against others we find that the ratings bear out for both of them. That's the power of having the data at hand. Every backer knows it, every steer man knows it, every REAL gambler knows that the more ACCURATE information you have the better chance you have of making the right decision. It is EXACTLY why card counting teams are barred from casinos, they use real time accurate information to make their betting choices and bet higher when the odds are heavily in their favor.
So the fact is that we simply don't know what what exactly Fargo does to spit out a rating....and we know that it will NEVER be able to predict the outcome of every match perfectly. But we do know enough at this point to consider it to be reliable and where we don't agree then that's where people can step up and bet on their conviction. Fargo doesn't care because it simply predicts the outcome from the data it has and the real kicker is that the prediction changes after every single game played. That variance INSIDE of a set number of games is where the mystery and the rolls and nerves and the excitement are. We are not excited to be labeled with a number and told what we can achieve against someone else's number....we are excited to prove that we can play better than our average and raise our average and keep challenging those above us to prove to ourselves and everyone else that we know we can do more.
I personally want to see tournaments go to xxx-and ABOVE. Sorry you're not a 700 then you CANNOT play in a pro level event. Go practice some more. The only reason I am in the US Open in 2019 is because I won a 625 and under qualifier. I am literally taking the spot of someone who could have a legitimate chance to win the US Open. But since I don't have to be good to play in the US Open and since I won't spend $1000 on the entry fee I will go ahead and take the spot. But if I were running the tournament I would restrict it to 700 and up and hold qualifiers for players that speed and above. That way no scrubs like me get to play in the US Open UNLESS we are willing to put in the time and effort to reach a high enough skill level AND we were able to win a qualifier to get in. I would reserve spots for half the field of say 750 and above who can just pay to get in and the rest have to earn their spots.
And IF we ever went to a merit based tournament culture then I predict we would not only have better events but we would be producing players who are even better than the best we have seen to date.
As far as I am concerned Pat Fleming was the first to really quantify what pro speed and world class speed really is and Fargo Ratings is the first rating system we have that doesn't need to know EXACTLY how a person won to give us a reasonably accurate gauge of their skill level.
Thus it is really time to stop thinking of players in terms of their gender first and their skill level second and just think of people as pool players and accept that a player is a player is a player and a Fargo rating of 750 is the same in NYC as it is in Duncan OK. And let's start REALLY rewarding the players who achieve high ratings and give everyone incentive to get as good as they humanly can.
I don't want any little girl to think that she can be as good as Siming Chen. I want her to think that she can be can better than Shane Van Boeing and have no one standing in her way telling her that her gender prohibits it.
