I like her fundamentals, especially the way she lets her shooting arm finish the stroke naturally, without tension. That's how I was taught: tension in the bridge hand, but no tension in the shooting arm.
Me too. It's really great to watch how effortless she looks.
You are a beast and a rock. I hope someday you post a book of all the stats you have collected or a website where they are all searchable.
And that was what his point was on his take on the whole thing...that women (by and large) don't have the competitive drive asv the men (by and large).
I just thought your scrabble analogy was in agreement with Russ's point towards pool..."IF the women did practice as much"...but they don't, even when put into the same boat as men (your scrabble take), so why?
Also, from what I understand, in China the advertising money is a good pay day...xiouting Pan and others have made a pretty penny advertising for pool, perfume, etc.....
This is a monetary advantage the men really don't have.
I could be wrong...I just remember Jay Helfert talking about money to be made by female players in China.
So the incentive to be great as a female pool player is there.
You are correct that the women have more opportunity to get sponsorship money in China for mainstream products. BUT sadly, only if they look pretty enough. The ones who don't fit the "beauty mold" have a harder time landing sponsorship.
Ok now lets tackle the don't practice as much concept. The Scrabble example was given because a study was done to figure out why women in Scrabble don't excel as much as men and that was the given reason. That doesn't mean that this same reason applies to any other sport where men and women compete on equal terms. In pool they simply don't compete on equal terms yet. There are many events where women are NOT allowed to play in even if they chose to renounce playing in any women's events. Even the US Open was only opened up to women in the past five years or so.
But let's stick with China and consider the following scenario. For the sake of argument let's say that there are 200 Chinese women who practice every day. But of them only the top 10 get the type of sponsorship that allows them to go around the world and compete. The rest are kind of "stuck" trying to break into the top ten and tournaments that they do play in are in China and not submitted to Fargo Ratings.
Contrast them with say 1000 dedicated men around the world who practice as hard as they can and who can compete as much as they are able to afford. Out of these 1000 men the top 100 male players by Fargo Rating will be rated.
What are the odds that the 10 women who have everything they need to reach the highest physical skill levels that they personally can would also make it into the top 100 of players worldwide? So that the top 100 players would consist of 90 men and 10 women?
Should we expect that those 10 women are all over 800 speed? Should we expect the same from the men?
Or is it possible that the ratings are so close that four or five of those women are in the top 100 and the rest are in the top 200? And also possible that IF the other 180 women were able to compete in ways linked to the rest of the world that they too would take up more space in the top 200 players?
The point I am making is that that you can pick any subgroup, say male players in Germany, the top 200 in Germany, and of those players only a handful are likely to be in the top 100 in the world. But that subgroup has no restrictions on travel and competitive opportunity other than money and time. They aren't subject to a hierarchy that requires them to first come up through a rigid system in order to be allowed to compete at the highest levels. They can go to any open tournament in the world and compete. They can go to any open qualifier to compete.
So in this hypothetical you have a handful of ultra-dedicated women against a ton of ultra-dedicated men. In that situation we can see based on the fact that 4% of the top 100 are Chinese women out of a pool of 200 possible candidates of whom only 10 are highly active outside of China I think it's a pretty good result. What might the result be if there were truly a 1000 women in China who were as dedicated as the 1000 men around the world and who also had the same unrestricted ability to compete where and when they wanted to?
To me, in pool, the only way we will ever see parity in results is when we have parity in numbers of competitors who have the same opportunities to learn and compete. Until then there will always be many variables that pollute the results. And because of that pollution it's not correct to say that women are inherently inferior to men which is why that they will never be close to a larger percentage of the elite players.
What Fargo Ratings do for us, however, is to show us exactly where people stand in relation to each other in an objective way that only takes performance into account and nothing else. It proves that there are women who CAN reach the elite level.
Go back and look at Jay's posting about Siming Chen 7 years ago. I haven't gone back to that thread but I would guess that there are more than a few people who were ready to put up their local shortstops/lower level pros against her with the idea that NO WOMAN could beat them.
Now with Fargo Ratings we have objective ratings that show us where any two rated players are in skill level relative to each other. Ratings that come with the ability to predict the likely outcome for any even where the outcome gets increasing accurate when the ratings disparity gets larger. Ok no surprise there but when we consider a 700 speed male player who plays at a semi-pro level vs. a 770 speed female the 700 has virtually no chance to win if both play to the ratings. But pre-fargo ratings, in the absence of any such connected performance data, there would be a LOT of speculation that the 700 was equal to any female alive.
So that's where we are. Yes from a performance standpoint women, a group, are still inferior to men as a group. This is easily seen in the ratings. But why that is has more to do with several variables that MUST be accounted for long before we start saying it's genetic.
