The unestablished fargo player

[misterpoole]

.You have to play a session in bca before you can play in these regionals. You cant get 'off the boat' and play these tourneys. Also only playing in 'your basement' and just 'the ghost' is not going to mean squat in tournament play. Its not real world conditions. Try it.

 

[sixpack]

Sounds very familiar to me...lol.

Seriously, I met a Philippino at a local bait shop a few years ago and we started fishing together. Well... lol ... we fished together for at least 6 month (every weekend). Damn could he catch fish when I couldn't even buy one. He grew up helping his dad operate a small fishing business in the Philippines.

Guess what he did as a side job as a child to help make his family extra money? LOL....you guessed it, worked in a billiards room. His passion was 3C and snooker but he said it was easier to make money at pocket billiards so he chose it because he said "it's so easy".... lol.

I didn't even know he knew how to play pool. We were sitting on the river bank and an old friend walked up and started to chat. The old friend ask me if I still hit em and I laughed and said "not touched a cue in 25 years"..... my old friend walked after saying we should play sometimes.

Lol..... hang on: Johhny (Philippino friend), I can't spell his real name...lol... anyways, he ask me about the guy and if he gambled. I said I had no idea but he use to and 5hat he better not play him cause he use to hustle around.

Little did I know..... ok, Johnny said "we should go pool room sometime". Lol... I thought.... why not, I'll show him what I know.

OMG.......OMG....OMG...... the first time I he picked up a stick in front of me it was BNR...BNR....BNR.....etc...etc....

I eventually said "let's play snooker"......uh oh......even worse.....

The freaking guy is a beast and only plays ONE day a week for a couple hours.

Within a couple months I have a 9' diamond pro-am, a new cue and I'm running drills like no tomorrow.

Johnny handed my a55 to me without even trying.

After I thought I was in stroke I called him and ask if he would like to play some. He said sure and ask if a cousin (visiting from homeland) could come with him....I said yep.

You guessed it. They took turns beating the everlasting hell out of me.

Having said all that, keep in mind I can beat the 10 ball ghost in races to 11, 15 and ever now and then can snap off a race to 25, so.... I ain't even close to a chump.

Dont do any good against them though.

So, yeah, as you know there are some CRAZY strong players out there from all over the world that are more-or-less UNKOWN on the US pool scene.

Great story! Vilmos started showing up in Sacramento under a different name and just gambling with people and playing in tourneys. He was sussed out pretty quick (because he had been in the US before) but he could have been undercover longer if he really wanted to.

 

[jrctherake]

.You have to play a session in bca before you can play in these regionals. You cant get 'off the boat' and play these tourneys. Also only playing in 'your basement' and just 'the ghost' is not going to mean squat in tournament play. Its not real world conditions. Try it.

If your talking to me.... I do "try it". I play with EVERY SINGLE pro that's "willing" to play cheap sets of "anything pool" from as "cheap as possible" to around $200 a set.

You mentioned "tournament" play. I've been around and I guarantee you, I know what's up.

You say tournament play is it..... lol.... I say matching up against a top tier pro with no spot for a couple hundred a set will bring the dog out of you MUCH....MUCH faster than tournaments. If not....well, I would love to see your tournament play.

You must be a very dangerous man on the slate.

 

[mikepage]

While this idea makes the most sense in regards to this discussion, CSI has already made way too many divisions. There were 952 players (by my count from CTSondemand website) and 7 divisions at the Western BCA Championships. Theres no money in winning any of these anymore. [...]

This is not a CSI event. CSI has no say in how it is run. Regarding the $$ issue, this is from last year. But I think it is pretty impressive given each division has a pretty narrow range of rating

https://www.facebook.com/fargorate/videos/1780495382002795/

This is being turned into a Fargorate issue (not the person I quoted but in general) when it’s a CSI failure. Fargorate works & will continue to work but if you let people in who aren’t established you’re begging for trouble. And, using 1 game samples from league begs for sandbagging. Whilst the LMS website is absolutely awesome it’s a mistake (IMO) to use 1 game samples in Fargorate. If I BNR on SVB is that anymore impressive than against a 450? And vice verse?

I think you should understand that the ONLY thing FargoRate puts in is 1-game samples. That game where is you break and run on Shane is the same if it is the only game you play that day or if it is game 11 of a race-to-13 match where you lost 13-3. It has nor more and no less influence.

 

[jojopiff]

This is not a CSI event. CSI has no say in how it is run. Regarding the $$ issue, this is from last year. But I think it is pretty impressive given each division has a pretty narrow range of rating

https://www.facebook.com/fargorate/videos/1780495382002795/



I think you should understand that the ONLY thing FargoRate puts in is 1-game samples. That game where is you break and run on Shane is the same if it is the only game you play that day or if it is game 11 of a race-to-13 match where you lost 13-3. It has nor more and no less influence.

Evidently I stand corrected on everything. I ASSumed that the “CSI 2019 BCA Western 8ball Championships” were put on by CSI. I will be unimpressed at the money for 7 divisions & 950 players. I’m obviously in the minority there if the entries are up, so that personal opinion.

I guess I’m confused at the 1 game point. If I play beat an 800 Fargo player in a 1 game sample & I beat a 450 Fargo player in a 1 game sample that’s worth the same? It can’t be so I’m sure I’m not understanding.

 

[mikepage]

Evidently I stand corrected on everything. I ASSumed that the “CSI 2019 BCA Western 8ball Championships” were put on by CSI. I will be unimpressed at the money for 7 divisions & 950 players. I’m obviously in the minority there if the entries are up, so that personal opinion.

I don't know where that quote comes from. Western BCA is a regional organization that supports pool in the Pacific Northwest. They choose to sanction their leagues with CSI. So you might call them an independent affiliate of CSI and the BCA Pool League. But this is Western BCA's event.

I guess I’m confused at the 1 game point. If I play beat an 800 Fargo player in a 1 game sample & I beat a 450 Fargo player in a 1 game sample that’s worth the same? It can’t be so I’m sure I’m not understanding.

We don't really have the concept of the worth of a single game, but yes. Your record might have 15 games against 800s of which you've won 2 and another 15 games against 450s of which you've won 8. These games could have been played one at a time or in clumps. It doesn't matter.

 

[jrctherake]

Evidently I stand corrected on everything. I ASSumed that the “CSI 2019 BCA Western 8ball Championships” were put on by CSI. I will be unimpressed at the money for 7 divisions & 950 players. I’m obviously in the minority there if the entries are up, so that personal opinion.

I guess I’m confused at the 1 game point. If I play beat an 800 Fargo player in a 1 game sample & I beat a 450 Fargo player in a 1 game sample that’s worth the same? It can’t be so I’m sure I’m not understanding.

I'm with you on how the system does/doesn't work. I'm hoping, as he claims... it will improve with more time and info.

As for the payouts. Lol.... I'm actually really, really not impressed, not in the least.

The numbers prove, IMO, that the majority of the entrants are hoping to "break even" on their trip because unless you live extremely close your expenses to tournament would be close to what most of the payouts for first place pays unless I'm missing something.

In the end, I'm just glad they have those tournaments. I wish them all the luck in the world. Hell, I may end up going to the next one and donating to some lucky SOB....

 

[Sunshine57]

I think you should be a little more circumspect here.

Let's take a look. Here are the divisions

Bronze2: 270-388
Bronze 1 389-441
Silver 2 442-482
Silver 1 483-518
Gold 519-563
Platinum 564 - 620
Elite - over 620

Distributed amongst these divisions are 930 players, of which 641 have established Fargo Rating and 289 don't. So let's say for those who don't have an established rating you do your best guess. In some cases you'll be high and in other cases you'll be low but you hope to get it about right on average.

Let's say you DO --get it about right on average, that is. What would you expect?

You would expect that if you looked at ALL the matches across the board where one player was established and the other wasn't, you'd see about half--close to 50%--won by the established player and about half won by the unestablished player.

Here there were 724 established/unestablished matches, and 354 (49%) were won by the established player. Exactly half would be 362, just a few more. This is a result you might expect if you flipped a coin 724 times. So the big picture is things are good. Things are about right on average.

30% of the players are unestablished. At first glance you might think this means 30% of the division winners might come from the unestablished group. Here that would be 2 out of the 7 divisions, when this year it was actually 4 out of the 7 divisions won by an unestablished player. This is pretty small numbers for identifying a statistical problem. This is what your "against all odds" comment references.

But let's think this situation through a bit more. Let's say you have a division that goes from 475 to 525. Your established players in this group average 500. Your unestablished players in this group--those with guessed ratings-- average 500 in actual skill as well. That's what the 50/50 match win statistic tells us. But wait! There is more slop --more variance-- in the guessed ratings than there is in the actual ratings. As a result, there is BOTH more likely to be an unestablished player with skill notably below the range and notably above the range. For this reason you might actually expect more than a statistically proportional number to be division winners.

This is all true even if there is no hanky panky/funny business.

What about sandbagging?

Detecting this before the fact is sometimes easy and sometimes not easy. After the fact is a different story. Now that these division winners are known, we can simply look at their game history. Did they just finish a league season where their performance was notably below prior tournament performance? Do they have suspiciously poor match scores in some small weekly tournament?

We see nothing--no evidence of funny business. One unestablished division winner had a preliminary rating based just on 130 tournament games played in Western BCA 7-8 years ago. Sure it would be good if he had recent league games in (don't know why his division is not using LMS). But there is nothing suspicious.

Another unestablished division winner had a 425 starter rating and 8 weeks or so of recent league data. And week after week those league games were bringing his rating up. This not what you expect to see for someone trying to protect a low starter rating for the purpose of entering a tournament.

There may be some things WBCA could do to protect the field a little. Move unestablished players who fall in the top third of a division up a division is one example. But there really is nothing broken here. Chicken Little can settle down...

I have to ask, what about unestablished players in a Fair Match division using the “Hot” chart? At the Texas State Championship today I had to play a 5/3 race against someone with a robustness of 34. She won 3-0. I haven’t had a chance to actually count but roughly 40% of the field is unestablished. 1-2 players only have starter ratings and one player has a robustness of 2. I can’t imagine this was the intent of the Fair Match charts/feature. Especially not the “hot” chart, right? Using the Fair Match charts for unestablished players seems counterintuitive at the very least.

 

[alstl]

It was me. I ordered a mission impossible disguise kit off ebay for $9.99 plus shipping and used a fake name. I was a bit worried someone would recognize my stance and stroke from last year.

 

[robsnotes4u]

Uncommon

You are so right! Meanwhile my team is unable to compete in some BCA tournaments because the cap for Fargo ratings is 2900 for the team, which prevents a 5-man team of players rated around 600 from competing. So, doing the math, we'd have to sub in a player rated around 500 or less in order to play as a team. But it's not common to have a 490 or 510 player playing on a team with 600+ rated players.

I played on a few teams using FargoRate in Fargo, and we have people of various levels on each team I played on. Our high on one team, which we won the league was in the 720s and our low was in the 370s.

It was competitive as the teams were close in total ranking. If you look at the actual data versus your perception you will find that FargoRate is amazing

 

[robsnotes4u]

We bragged about our ratings

I don't know where you play but in my neck-of-the-woods if it wasn't for FargoRate and leagues there would be little or zero play. Almost all the tournaments are now FR events with big turn-outs and good payouts. I agree there are some flies in the ointment but overall FR is the best system yet.

We bragged about our ratings! Most of us used it to see if we were improving. we matched up after league and used it for gambling. One of the biggest things was it made the weekly 8 ball tournament fun. Imagine playing people in a tournament and you had to win 8 to their 2. Pressure!

I miss those days, and my game has slipped, because I am no longer in that atmosphere

 

[Jude Rosenstock]

I have to ask, what about unestablished players in a Fair Match division using the “Hot” chart? At the Texas State Championship today I had to play a 5/3 race against someone with a robustness of 34. She won 3-0. I haven’t had a chance to actually count but roughly 40% of the field is unestablished. 1-2 players only have starter ratings and one player has a robustness of 2. I can’t imagine this was the intent of the Fair Match charts/feature. Especially not the “hot” chart, right? Using the Fair Match charts for unestablished players seems counterintuitive at the very least.

What are the statistical differences in the hot/medium/mild charts? Also. I think uneatablished players shouldn’t be in *any* fairmatch tournament until they’re established.

 

[dogginda9]

Around my area no one reports scores to Fargo that I know of. Most of the people I've talked to just have the starter rating that reflects what the BCA had them ranked at nationally. Unfortunately some of those rankings are based on how you played in the past, not present. Also, quite a few players got lowered by Bill Stock at the BCA before he retired. Then with no scores being reported, it is impossible to get an accurate rating and get your robustness up. I'm sure a lot of areas have the same situation without much of a resolution.

 

[KMRUNOUT]

What are the statistical differences in the hot/medium/mild charts? Also. I think uneatablished players shouldn’t be in *any* fairmatch tournament until they’re established.

You can find that answer on the fairmatch site. Just go to the match odds section. Pick a match up. Say 600 vs 500. Try the R7 chart. You will see the races for hot medium and mild. Now take those races to the match odds section. The odds are different for different matchups, but fall within a somewhat narrow range.

In my example of a 600 vs a 500, the races are 9-5, 8-5, and 8-6 respectively.

The 600 is a favorite in all. 55.2%, 63.2%, and 75.9% respectively.

An 800 vs a 650 is 10-4, 9-4, and 9-5.

That's 54.7%, 61.4%, and 76.5%

Pretty close.

Hope this helps,

KMRUNOUT