Has anyone seen any software that will tell you the relative difficulty level of various pool shots? For instance, drop an object and cue ball on a 'CueTable-like' table and indicate the pocket you're shooting at. The software will then determine the difficulty of the shot considering the cut angle, distances, etc.
Software for shot difficulty?
- Thread starter slach
- Start date
SphinxnihpS
Banned
Every shot you think of as hard will be.
Neil said:
exactly. we are all good at different shots.
the only viable way of doing it would be to configure the program by say rating yourself on a scale of one to ten on different aspects and attributes of your game. long shots with spin at power, long shots with spin shot softly, thin cut shots made centre ball, thin cuts with inside english, etc etc etc.
then when it's set up it could give you a reading which would apply specific to your game.
this all isn't feasible however, because its impossible to analyse our games in the scientific mathematical way needed for a program like this.
shot difficulty equations
I know this information won't be useful to most people; but in case somebody wants to develop such software, now they know where to look.
Regards,
Dave
I don't have software, but I have all of the math needed for the software all worked out (with some examples) in TP 3.4 through TP 3.8 here:slach said:
I know this information won't be useful to most people; but in case somebody wants to develop such software, now they know where to look.
Regards,
Dave
It's not that hard to figure out the difficulty yourself if you make a few simplifying assumptions. Measure the distance from the cue ball to the object ball in diamonds. Measure the distance from the object ball to the pocket in diamonds. Multiply those two numbers together. If you want to include a factor for the cut angle, multiply by the secant (1/cosine) of the cut angle. That gives you the relative difficulty of the shot. This tells you the relative margin of error or the precision needed to make the shot. If the cue ball is a diamond from the object ball and the object ball is a diamond from the pocket, and the shot is straight in, the shot is a 1.slach said:
Example: you are shooting a spot shot.. The object ball is on the foot spot, the cue ball is behind the line, and the cut angle is about 30 degrees. The object ball is 2.8 diamonds from the pocket, the cue ball is 4.5 diamonds from the object ball and the secant of 30 degrees is 1.15. The product of those three numbers is 14.5. This means that you need to be aligned with about 15 times better accuracy to make the spot shot compared to the simple straight in above.
More details are in the April 1994 article at: http://www.sfbilliards.com/articles/1994-04.pdf and Dr. Dave has an article or two related to shot difficulty.
If you really want to, you can include lots of other factors such as changing pocket size versus the approach angle, but the simple product of distances formula gets you most of the way there. Of course lots of other, unquantifiable factors can enter, such as the fact that you don't make long shots when you are betting your rent money.
The referenced article points out how little error is allowed in placement of your hands at the instant of contact. In the spot shot example, your front (bridge) hand must be at the correct spot within +- 1/30th of an inch, more or less, or you won't make the shot.
shot difficulty articles
Happy estimating,
Dave
If people are interested, the articles are November '04 through January '05 here:Bob Jewett said:
Happy estimating,
Dave
This would be like poker software for pool. Good luck trying to bring a laptop to your matches.
worriedbeef said:
Back when I had a pocket PC, I made something just like this. I intended it to be used while practicing and not during competition. It worked like this:
You loaded a picture of the shot and gave the shot a name and cut direction if applicable.
You could then tell the PPC how many times you were going to try it and how many times you made it.
It would record the date and trials and provide you with the stats over time in many different formats, %'s, graphs, etc.....
It would also create basic practice routines based on which shots you had the most trouble with.
I had a lot of other features in mind for it, but I got a blackberry to replace the PPC. If I want to start using it again I'll have to either port it to java ME
or maybe create a website with ASP.NET that I can access through my BB's web browser. I also made similar things to keep track of games against the ghost, fargo, and equal offense. Hmmm, maybe if I get bored at work tomorrow.....
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Depiste the nay-sayers, I think this is a good idea. Many shots are currently classified with a difficulty level (A, B, C, D, etc.) In fact, many pool books describe shots with varying degrees of difficulty based on the shot itself and shape needed. In particular, whether one player can execute an "A" difficulty shot easily does not reduce how hard the shot is objectively. For example, a straight in shot may be an "E" shot, and a 89 degree cut an "A" shot. It wouldn't matter if you could make the "A" shot 10 out of 10 times, it is still an "A" shot.slach said:
In real time (on a pool table) recognition machinery is not advanced enough to do this on the fly. For a static program (running on a computer and using a Wei Diagram), it would still be fairly hard to implement - especially since you have classified the universe of shots. Also, the shape needed would have to be weighted - for example, a stop shot would be easier than a 3 rail follow shot with left english.
So, the short answer is, there is already some objective basis for classifying the difficulty of shots, but programming this and allowing for shape would be pretty labor intensive.
Neil said:
I respectfully disagree with this. Objectively, shots can be categorized using any scale you want (1-10, A-G, Red-Green) - regardless of ability. In this regard, once you categorize a shot, the skill level of the shooter affects success rate, and has no bearing on the difficulty of the shot.
-td
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